Notwithstanding all moderation and the exceptions allowed, two of the commissioners still recorded themselves as considering it “unjust and impracticable to attempt any uniform laws regulating labor in all the states,” and a third concurring with these adds that, “the conditions to be dealt with will work themselves out better under local self-government than under any iron-clad rule adopted by or suggested from a central power.”[[33]]
The protestors are from the Southern states and their protest seems peculiarly pertinent at this time, when the prevailing conditions of child labor in these states are attracting so much attention. Not to digress into a discussion that would lead us too far afield, let it suffice to sum up the evident facts of the situation in a single paragraph.[[34]]
Whatever their previous condition of freedom, barbarism or poverty, there are to-day, in the cotton mills of the South, large numbers of little children, some under ten years of age, who can be and are employed sometimes eleven and more hours a day, sometimes eleven hours of the night. Indeed conditions parallel the times of Shaftesbury in England! Attempts to pass bills that can hardly be deemed extravagant in the protection demanded, and even compulsory education measures, have been opposed and frustrated. The reasons given for such resistance of legal interference may be summarized about as follows, at least in Alabama, which has been the field of a recent encounter: That the bill presented by the Alabama Child Labor Committee[[35]] is “outside interference” and “only the entering wedge”; that “Georgia (facing the more difficult task in) having double the number of spindles, should act first”; that against the expressed desires of mill officers, parents insist upon the employment of their children or “take their families to other mills where no objection is made” (and this the law would make impossible);[[36]] that the prodigiously early development of this particular class of Southern children together with “the length and heat of the day” which “are prime factors respecting the hours that may be appropriated to labor”[[37]] make it inadvisable to limit the hours of labor of children to ten out of a possible twenty-four, or to require that they should sleep and not work at night. We cannot say that the movement for uniform legislation or even for labor legislation “under local self-government” is unopposed.
The recommendations of the Commission also include the following:
“Further regulations, especially in the line of bringing states which now have no factory acts up to a higher standard, is earnestly recommended.
“In states which have many factories the well-known factory act of Massachusetts or New York, based upon the English act which served as a model to all such, is recommended for adoption.
“The sweat-shop law also, which is now practically identical in the important states of New York, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and Ohio, is recommended for general adoption.
“A simple and liberal law regulating the payment of labor should be adopted in all the states, providing that laborers shall be paid, for all labor performed, in cash or cash orders, without discount, not in goods or due bills, and that no compulsion, direct or indirect, shall be used to make them purchase supplies at any particular store.”[[38]]
The report refers also to other statutes which reinforce certain common law doctrines, such as those concerning intimidation, strikes, boycotts and black-listing, to those protecting the political rights and legal rights in suit of labor and to the recognition accorded to trade unions in provisions for incorporation and protection of labels, making however no special recommendation concerning them to the states.[[39]]
We see, therefore, that beyond the elementary regulation of child labor and hours of labor for minors, the Commission would have the states establish a standard of good sanitation and of safe conditions in factories everywhere, and above this, especially suggests a scientific and well-tested law for adoption in states having large manufactures. The restriction of hours is always looked upon chiefly as a health measure, but it is certain that the general bodily vigor of the worker has been more markedly affected by modern improvements in ventilation, lighting and sanitation than by any of the shorter day statutes. Factory acts assist materially in forcing this advance and have received a due recognition of their usefulness. In recommending the universal passage of a sweat-shop act, the Commission endorses the old saying, that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. As a matter of fact, such laws have been passed, and in an incredibly short time (since 1892, when New York passed the first of this series), in those states in which the evil is important. Attempts to extirpate the evil in these states threaten to drive it into neighboring sections. Connecticut, for example, lying between Massachusetts and New York, in both of which quarters the anti-sweat-shop war is being vigorously pushed, has enacted a similar statute simply as a protective measure.