Industrial Violence and the Legal Origins of Child Labor

Abstract

Industrial Violence and the Legal Origins of Child Labor challenges existing understandings of child labor by tracing how law altered the meanings of work for young people in the United States between the Revolution and the Great Depression. Rather than locating these shifts in statutory reform or economic development, it finds the origin in litigations that occurred in the wake of industrial accidents incurred by young workers. Drawing on archival case records from the Appalachian South between the 1880s and the 1920s, the book argues that young workers and their families envisioned an industrial childhood that rested on negotiating safe workplaces, a vision at odds with child labor reform. Local court battles over industrial violence confronted working people with a legal language of childhood incapacity and slowly moved them to accept the lexicon of child labor. In this way, the law fashioned the broad social relations of modern industrial childhood.

https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2017/article/history-of-child-labor-in-the-united-states-part-1.htm

“…In the mill, as in most other factory industrial settings at the time, work appropriate for children was clearly differentiated from work seen as appropriate for adults. 86 Although mill supervisors oversaw the children who performed these child-appropriate tasks, they were often reluctant to discipline the children. In many ways, the mill was seen as an extension of the family unit.…”

“…The child was unlikely to interface with the operation of heavy machinery on a large scale, unlike in 12 factory settings. 95 Children on farms provided a beneficial source of manual labor; as one farmer remarked, "Every boy born into a farm family was worth a thousand dollars." 96 If their labors were not needed on their family's farm, children could usually find employment as a hired hand on a neighboring farm.…”

Violence and War in Agrarian Perspective

“…Rather, fundamentally vicious forms of labour control (through convict labour, for example) persisted in modernizing sectors of the economy (Lichtenstein 1996). And industrial violence in rural areas in the late nineteenth century – in the form of timber machine or textile loom injuries to workers – was intense enough to form the focus for far‐reaching legal and social changes, such as the shaping of ideas of and laws to protect against ‘child labour’ (Schmidt 2010).…”

Creating the Reasonable Child: Risk, Responsibility, and the Attractive Nuisance Doctrine

“…The story of whether and when children bore their own risk of industrial injury is more complicated. As James Schmidt () has shown in the workplace context, for most of the nineteenth century child laborers were held to the same standards as adults and treated as responsible, risk‐bearing individuals. Pro‐employer doctrines like assumption of risk and contributory negligence barred children's injury claims just as they barred claims by adult workers.…”