Since West Virginia is “Almost Heaven,†it was not difficult for me to look up and ask Mother Jones what she thought about the bills under consideration in the West Virginia Legislature that would loosen restrictions on child labor.
She was extremely upset and adamantly opposed.
Mary Harris — later known to all as Mother Jones — arrived in the United States from Ireland with her immigrant family and became a schoolteacher. On seeing the young ages at which children were working, she soon became a strident insistent voice against child labor.
Not only that, she became an organizer for the United Mine Workers union. In fact, on Valentine’s Day 1913, she gave a rousing speech to striking miners on Paint Creek, addressed a mass meeting in Smithers, boarded a train to ÂÒÂ×ÄÚÉä, was arrested by the military authorities and was sent back by train to a military court in Pratt; there, she was confined.
In regard to child labor, she saw it was primarily made up of breaker boys in the coal mines, machine workers in the textile industry and cotton pickers in agriculture. It motivated her to lead thousands of children to President Theodore Roosevelt’s home in Oyster Bay, New York. Eventually, this resulted in the 1938 passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
This established a minimum wage for child labor and, perhaps more importantly, required children to be in school until age 16. The act stipulated that children ages 14 and 15 could not work during school hours, only outside of school hours. Further, they could work no more than three hours on a school day and no more than eight hours on a nonschool day. No more than a total of 18 hours was permitted during a week when school was in session. In any week when school was not in session, children were limited to no more than 40 hours of work.
Significantly, the law stipulated that, for any state that passed laws on this subject, the law that provided the greatest worker protection — whether federal or state — was the law that must apply in that state. This being true, if West Virginia laws provide less child worker protection than the federal labor laws, it is the federal law that prevails.
While the 1938 law was clearly written, enforcement has always been problematic — today probably more so, given the reduction in personnel.
Ten years ago, the U.S. Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division noted a National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health report that 160,000 American children suffer occupational injuries every year. About 54,800 of these injuries were severe enough to require emergency room treatment. Additionally, an increased number of consumer products purchased in the United States are produced elsewhere. Reports of child labor in other countries have become horrendous.
Mother Jones was everywhere. She went to so many different parts of the country that, among the robber barons — who dominated the economy — she was reputed to be “the most dangerous woman in America.†Asked about her address, she proclaimed: “My address is like my shoes; it is wherever I go.â€
As the West Virginia Legislature considers the issue of child labor, it is important that its members not permit what Mother Jones called “child slavery.†Rather, they must ensure that educational attainment is strengthened, not weakened.
