The child labor laws are variously entrusted for enforcement to the factory inspectors, school committee or board of education, commissioners of labor, or left to the care of the police.
Historical Development.
It may seem perhaps that such a sketch fails to show the underlying or directive principle of this legislation, but a detailed study of the laws adds confusion rather than enlightenment. Studnitz considered that he had seized upon the real causal force and summed up the situation in the statement that American labor legislation has been determined by the political and social strength of the laborers demanding it, rather than in accordance with the natural needs and varied conditions of industry within the states.[[30]]
Allowing this explanation at least as to the immediate agency, we must nevertheless recognize the fact that other forces are at work and that there are traceable tendencies of a natural growth even when arbitrary human action is so apparent. The most casual acquaintance with the history of labor legislation must convince us that the action of economic law has inevitably necessitated the legal regulation of labor; and this really in spite of human opposition and in the face of extreme doctrines of non-interference. Industrial labor unregulated has everywhere developed the same symptoms. Competition between producers tends to encourage all possible reductions of costs, to reduce wages, to increase the use of cheap child labor, to perpetuate long hours of labor, etc., and to range the interests of the employing class against those of the operative class. In the struggle which results from this antagonism the employer has the advantage of position to force his own terms of contract upon the laborer, for he has in his hands an accumulated capital which is equivalent in power to effective organization. Such conditions left to work themselves out have invariably acted to degrade the social status of labor, the heaviest pressure falling upon those who could least resist it. This was the experience of England first, then felt on the Continent and in this country in the New England states and other centres of manufacture, and to-day we are becoming aware of like tendencies in the cotton-goods industry of the South.
It was almost universally the evils attending child labor that evoked the first acts of regulation. But although abuses were very serious, legal remedies were most timidly applied. Even with the example of the successful issue of the English laws the New England legislatures contented themselves with the passage of most inadequate measures, measures that could hardly have been looked upon as anything more than unenforcible threats. We realize how complete a change of attitude toward this “intermeddling legislation” has been brought about during the course of the past sixty years when we compare a few of these old laws with those to-day in force. Contrast, for example, the detailed and exacting requirements of the present law concerning child labor in Massachusetts with the older Vermont statute, which is quite typical of the earlier order and “merely requires the selectmen of towns to inquire into the treatment of minors employed in manufacturing establishments; and if a minor’s education, morals, etc., are unreasonably neglected, or he is treated with improper severity or compelled to labor unreasonable hours, they may, if he has no parent or guardian, discharge him from such employment and bind him out as apprentice with the minor’s consent.” (Vt. 2518.)[[31]]
Early measures were certainly neither severe in the regulation imposed nor exact in defining the parties held to be responsible. They generally involved a question of volition, making “willful” transgression alone punishable, and thus unenforcible in the letter, were given into the hands of town officials who had neither the power nor the effective desire to investigate or to bring suit.
Such enactments stood for little more than a public recognition of abuses which they in no wise checked, but the increasing menace of the situation, the threat, not to be scorned, of a future sickly and illiterate labor population, forced the passage of more adequate measures and the resort to a better mechanism of enforcement than that of town officials and the general police. In such reforms Massachusetts took the lead, enacted and repealed several contradictory statutes, and finally by the slow process of continued amendment evolved the present really enforcible law.
We feel in studying the halting stages of this development not only that there was a pardonable ignorance of ways and means in attacking a new problem, but also the influence of a more or less skeptical public opinion concerning this policy of interference which reflected itself in hedging clauses that weakened and sometimes vitiated what would otherwise have been good measures.
In spite of many drawbacks to advance, however, there was no retrograde motion, but a continued development of strictness and detail in exactions, of clearer definition and placement of responsibility and of more adequate provision for inspection. As these laws gradually demonstrated their practical usefulness and convinced the public of benefit instead of harm, the former attitude of timidity gave place to a decided peremptoriness, the former indiscriminate omnibus ad quos hae litteræ pervenerint to placed responsibility.
Meantime the way was opened for more wide-reaching regulations concerning hours of labor, workroom conditions, etc., and a broader conception of the province of such legislation and of that which might be considered proper subject of legal interference. Whereas the first attempts to protect even little children from conditions that imperiled their health and life were bitterly opposed in England upon grounds of national policy, to-day we find statutes that regulate not only child labor, hours of labor, factory constructions and the use of machinery, but also others that stipulate times and manner of wage payment, and forbid fines in dealings with adult male employees. And this has come to pass in America where “freedom of contract” is the constitutional right of every individual citizen.