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    Is Child Labor Abolished?

  1. A TELEGRAM from Nicholas Murray Butler, president of Columbia University, was received on March 31 by the New York State Senate Judiciary Committee which is conducting hearings on the child-labor amendment. President Butler, like many other estimable persons, is opposed to the amendment, not because he believes children ought to work for hire, but because he fears undue "control" by Congress of "persons under eighteen"--whom Mr. Butler refuses to admit are children. One sentiment in his telegram of protest is worth quoting: "We have the word of the President of the United States, who three times publicly repeated that child labor is no longer to be found in this country. Let it lie in the graveyard where public opinion buried it many years ago."

  2. President Butler of course is a busy man, and perhaps he does not get around much. It is possible that he forgets, first, that President Roosevelt's remarks about the abolition of child labor referred to the NIRA, under which it was practically abolished in coded industries; and, second, that Mr. Roosevelt has at least "three times publicly repeated" that he is in favor of the adoption of the child-labor amendment. A few figures from the Children's Bureau in Washington which apply to conditions since the NIRA was declared unconstitutional may help to unsettle Mr. Butler from his Olympian calm. Figures from 129 cities in 29 states for the seven-month period after the NIRA expired show an increase of 58 per cent in the number of employment certificates issued to children fourteen and fifteen years of age. In New York State the National Child Labor Committee finds that for the last four months of 1935 issuance of work permits rose 400 per cent over the corresponding period for 1934. The figures themselves are interesting: Certificates for fourteen-year-olds rose from 266 to 570; for fifteen-year-olds, from 1,139 to 4,659. During the same months permits for sixteen-year-olds declined from 8,730 to 8, 424. The jobs are now being given to younger "persons" who presumably work for lower wages than either their older brothers and sisters or their fathers and mothers, who are consequently in large part unemployed.

  3. There are many persons to whom statistics are always cold and unenlightening. Perhaps President Butler is one of these. For them the National Child Labor Committee presents in its bulletin each month some case histories which paint a more graphic picture. A few of them are as follows:

    The girl at the machine. At fifteen, Mary had left school and was working in a drapery factory in New York City, eight hours a day and forty hours a week for $5.

    Where sixty minutes make a nickel. "The most you can make in an hour is a nickel," says Florence, speaking of putting strings of woolen on cards. Florence is only twelve, but she . . . works on the cards of woolen strings every night until midnight.

    Of forty children working on a single onion farm in Michigan in the summer of 1935, sixteen were thirteen years of age or younger. One of the boys drove them out to the farm every day and back again... The boy driver had neither driver's nor chauffeur's license. Another of the boys "doubled" with a job in a local store on Saturday nights in addition to his sixty-hour week in the onion fields.

    Shortly before Christmas an investigator for the National Child Labor Committee found Ellen, a youngster of ten and a half years, working on lampshades in her tenement home in New York.... She said she had been doing this work since she was seven years old, and that even her little sister, only four and half, sometimes helped. On Friday and Saturday nights, Ellen said, she worked until midnight; but on other nights only until 10 or 10:30.

  4. It is not to be expected that President Butler will be impressed by this evidence that child labor is all too unhappily not abolished in this country. Nor will it impress other opponents of the amendment whose objections are not honestly legalistic, as are his, but all too practical. It is true that in New York State, at least, local laws prohibiting the labor of children are in effect--though perhaps not always enforced. But in many other states, particularly in the South, there are no such laws. And as a result manufacturers who are on the look-out for cheap labor--and the cheapest labor is that of children--move their mills and factories to localities where they will not be interfered with. This is the shameful background for the fight against adoption of a federal restriction.

  5. The fight has now been going on for twelve years. Before 1933 only six states had ratified; in 1933, under the impetus of the NRA, fourteen were added; the total now is twenty-four, out of a necessary thirty-six. At this rate ratification may take years longer. But at the recent Albany hearing 90 per cent of the argument and the applause was on the side of adoption. For the first time, it is believed by those close to the movement, there is a chance not only for the amendment to be reported out of committee but for its passage in the Senate. While there is this much life and hope, all possible pressure should be: exerted on the New York legislators. Favorable action in New York would go far to hearten and instruct other states in which a vote will be taken either this year or next.