Stuff You Should Know - Selects: Child Labor: Not Funny

Episode Date: July 12, 2025

Child labor is no laughing matter. Even though we've taken care of it in the USA (mostly), it's still an issue around the globe. Listen to this classic episode and learn!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Just like great shoes, great books take you places. Through unforgettable love stories and into conversations with characters you'll never forget. I think any good romance, it gives me this feeling of like butterflies. I'm Danielle Robay, and this is Bookmarked by Reese's Book Club, the new podcast from Hello Sunshine and iHeart Podcasts, where we dive into the stories

that shape us, on the page and off. Each week, I'm joined by authors, celebs, book talk stars, and more for conversations that will make you laugh, cry, and add way too many books to your TBR pile. Listen to Bookmarked by Reese's Book Club on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey everybody, this is Josh, and for this week's Select, I've chosen our August 2021 episode on child labor. It's one of those rare episodes that contains a mention of an episode that we should do that we actually did, the Newsy Strike.

So it's significant for that reason. And it is a fairly bleak episode, as you might guess, but it also goes to show how far we've come. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant and Jerry's out there hovering around in the digital weird audio ether. And this is stuff you should know. This is gonna be a good, uplifting, fun one,

a bouncy, light one. I think so. And it's hot off the presses from our, my daughter just wrote this episode for us. Yeah, yeah. In record time too, I was impressed. You didn't pay her, did you? No, but it's funny. I went to look up you know talked before about the end of the fact that I started working when I was 13 at a barbecue restaurant and

Minimum wage when I started working was three dollars and 35 cents an hour Wowie how far we've come They've doubled it here that past, whatever, 40 years. Isn't that nuts, dude? Yeah, and we'll get to that, but I have a list of kind of where we ended up with minimum wage along the years. But yeah, JJ's Barbecue, $3.35 an hour, baby. Wow, that's pretty great. My first job was even younger than that. I was like nine or ten when I was a paperboy.

Yeah, I mean, I couldn't have made more than, because I was only, it's not like I was working every night. I was working weekends. I probably made like less than $50 a week. But I mean, you're 13. What were you spending it on? 13 and like a good clean Christian kid weren't spending that on anything Archie comics it buys a lot of Archie comics. Yeah, it does Yes, it does. Although they have a lot of variations so you could easily spend $50 a week on Archie comics Oh back then though. Those things were cheap. I was living high on the hog but so 13 so it sounds like a man It's so our buddy Dave helped us out with this one, Dave Ruse. And he makes a really good point that you and I sitting around talking about, you know, you made 50 bucks a week, I was a paperboy.

Like, whatever stresses and troubles that we ran into post, you know, 1970 something, as far as our first jobs go when we were younger, that does not qualify as child labor. That's not really what we're talking about here today. something as far as our first jobs go when we were younger, that does not qualify as child labor. That's not really what we're talking about here today. It's called a kid having a job. Exactly. It's called the, you just stop your griping right now

because there are actual kids out there who are like real deal child laborers who work in like dangerous conditions for little to no pay, who don't get to play, who may not socialize with other kids their age, they may live and work in a mining camp with nothing but adults and grownups. Like, they would kill for, you know, a JJ's barbecue job, basically. Yeah, and this is a good time to be talking about that in particular because this is, 2021 is the international year for the elimination of child labor. And as you'll see throughout

this episode, we've made a lot of strides here in the U.S. But like you said, it's not that way everywhere, and it should be. And I should say, it's probably a little off the mark to say that a child laborer would kill for a better job. They would probably kill to just not have to work at all in general and just to get to be a kid. And I think ultimately for people who are activists against child labor, that's the goal. It's to not like get better working conditions for six-year-olds.

It's to like just make six-year-olds not have to work any longer. And we'll talk about how to solve that, how that international year for the elimination of child labor aims to do that. They have some pretty pragmatic ideas. And so hopefully this episode will have a nice bow on the end, but we're gonna have to slog through some misery to get there, Chuck. Take it away. There's no better place to slog through misery than the founding of this country. Way back in the old days when the New World was new and settlers came over and they very much believed in, why did I think this was Ed?

You said this is Dave? Yeah, I'm almost positive it was Dave. I thought it was Ed? You said this is Dave? Yeah, I'm almost positive it was Dave. I thought it was Ed. It reads like a Dave to me, but oh man, if it's Ed, I'm sorry. Sorry to both of you. Well, sure.

We need to get those guys together one day. I think the universe should collapse. Or maybe we should keep them far apart. Yeah, exactly. They might turn against us. Yeah, so they believe very much that the idol's hands were the devil's workshop, that old saying. And, you know, this is one of those that was kind of hard for me to, you know, let's just lop off,

you know, developing nations today, which is clearly awful. I found myself as an adult more and more with the cultural relativism thinking, like, obviously, five-year-olds shouldn't be working in factories. But when I read about, like, 12 and 13-year-olds working hard back then, I was kind of like, it's not great, but that's just kind of how it was at the time. If you had parents that were farmers, you're not going to, you know, be just hanging out until your sweet 16th birthday having a good time. You're going to be working from a pretty young age. And I found myself more and more thinking like,

you know, in certain situations, that wasn't the worst thing. But then you get to the industrial revolutions and you know, that's when things really got bad. But kind of early on, that's really what we were talking about was a lot of kids working on the farms, a lot of boys working on the farms, a lot of boys working on the farm,

girls working in the house alongside their sisters and mom. And you know, this kind of started when they were about 13 years old. They were sort of expected to either go work and get a job and work full-time or to become an apprentice, an unpaid apprentice, to work for food and board and training. And I think also in addition to that Protestant work ethic of like just completely in the fabric of America that was just coming out in you, it's also this idea of like, what else are you gonna do?

It's not like you can sit around and play video games or watch TV or do almost anything else except just play outside. But Chuck, I went back and looked to see if it was always this way. And apparently in medieval England, you played basically until you hit puberty. And then you started to get put to work. When you hit puberty at four. Right.

More like 14, but like there was like a childhood and it seems to have been somewhat wiped out by that Protestant work ethic that the Puritans brought over. Or at the very least, it was set back a little more, you know, age-wise where you started working maybe a little sooner than you would have had you been in medieval England at the time. Right. I guess I'm just trying to draw a line between life in the 1640s and then life in 1938 when we eventually did something about it in the U.S. Yeah, no, totally. And there is an enormous distinction between that because it was

it was like widespread, but it just it seemed like they were mostly working with their families. And it was just kind of the way that things were. That was how life was. But it was- Yeah, they're trying to keep your family alive. It's not like, they were trying to just all survive, basically. Right, and that's actually the reason why it's still around in other parts of the world today.

It's not even necessarily like a work ethic where children should work because idle hands are the devil's playthings like the Puritans thought. Instead it's like, this is an extra worker we can have go out and make money to keep the rest of the family alive. We just don't have a choice in not doing that.

And that's what drives it still today. Right. When the industrial revolution came around and we're talking about basically cotton factories in a big, big way, there were a lot of little kids working there, and people like George Washington and Alexander Hamilton thought that was awesome. They did. And, like, we're going to be skewered for even suggesting that Hamilton said this, but he did. He said that women and children in America would be quote, rendered more useful by manufacturing establishments than they otherwise would be. And I think what he was saying is like, I'm not even going to paraphrase what he was

saying. I think you can understand it on its face. Yeah. He's saying, you know, they're not doing much use for us, these kids. And he's mainly talking about kids here who would otherwise be idle. This isn't Lin-Manuel Miranda saying this. We all love him. No, he didn't say this in a charming rap. No, this is the real Alexander Hamilton.

And again, it was just a different time. But even way back then, in the early 1800s, not everyone thought this was a great thing. There was a future mayor of Boston named Josiah Quincy. Great name. Diamond Joe Quimby. Who toured a cotton factory, a cotton spinning factory, and they had four-year-olds working there, all the way to 10, maybe 10, 12 hours a day for

anywhere from 12 to 25 cents a day, not an hour. Right. And he said, compassion calls us to pity these little creatures, plying in a contracted room among flyers and cogs at an age when nature requires for them air, space, and sports, there was a dull dejection and the countenance of all of them. And, you know, we'll get to some of these photos of some of these kids later on. When you look at them, they look like beaten-down miniature adults.

Yeah. Yeah, they really do. They look like us. Exactly. They look ready to retire. They look unhappy. They look, yeah, just beaten down, but they're miniature and they're kids, they're children. And it's really upsetting to see that photograph of that. I'm sure it's even more upsetting to see it in real life.

And that's actually how a lot of this, a lot of changes came through is just people being exposed to seeing that and kind of being shocked, having their conscience shocked. But as potentially like bad as it was for the children of colonial America who were forced to work, it got way, way worse when the second Industrial Revolution kicked off, the one powered by steam and steel and railroads. And little hands. And unbridled capitalism. When you inject unbridled capitalism into an economy that allows for child labor, you can imagine that things are going to get much, much worse for the children before it finally gets better. That's right. And things did get worse. When all of a sudden you have a robust steel industry and coal mining industry, you have railroads that need this stuff in a big, big way. And

they partially kind of ran out of workers and partially just saw what was right underneath their noses, which is these kids who at this point they had long known that they could work and farm and work hard. So they said, you know what, a lot of these families in rural America, farming dried up a bit, so they moved to the city. A lot of it was immigrant labor, as millions of people came into the country from Europe fleeting their poverty, famine-stricken countries. And no matter where they came from, it was all under the thumb of the robber barons, which was,

I can't remember when we did it, feels like a few, two or three years ago, but pretty good podcast on the robber barons. Yeah, and we also talked about them in our book. We talked about keeping up with the Joneses. They played a big role in that too. But yeah, so like these, the robber barons got rich They played a big role in that too. But yeah, so like these, the Robert Barons got rich through innovation, through consolidation, through some pretty clever stuff. A lot of them invented new techniques or processes or procedures.

So like they definitely were doing something. They were being productive, but they also got to be filthy rich off of the backs of immigrant labor, child labor that they directly exploited. And it was basically like there was just nobody looking out for anybody else at this time. It was just such a period of such enormous economic insurgence that there weren't anybody or there wasn't anybody who was sitting there saying like,

whoa, whoa, whoa, everybody, we need to stop and really think about this and do this in a much more directed, smarter, healthier way for our society. It was like, just go, go, let's see where this takes us. And a lot of people got trampled underfoot and that definitely included children laborers or child laborers. That's right. And I think that's a good time for a break. Yay? Yay. That's two yays. Any nays? Mm-mm. So we'll be back and we'll talk a little bit about what some of these jobs might have been in the late 19th century for these kids right after this. In our new podcast, Everybody's Business, we talk about the business news that concerns

everybody. From Bloomberg Business Week, I'm Stacey Bannock-Smith. And I'm Max Chafkin. Each week we unpack what is happening on Main Street and Wall Street, all the streets. WrestleMania has taken over the US economy. Poetry that executives write on LinkedIn. A little actual magic in our underrated story of the week. The single greatest marketing campaign

the music business has ever seen. I decided to ask people how they felt about the penny going away. Listen to Everybody's Business wherever you get your podcasts. I wonder how many gallons of coffee everyone who has listened to this show since the beginning has heard me drink. I didn't even hear you drinking. Oh, you didn't? When I said, I had a mouthful of cafe. Oh, interesting. I have no shirt on.

That's awesome, man. You just top mine. You said, no, that's not true. I think you should have left it mysterious, Chuck, because there were a few people out there who were about to email and say, I was offended that Chuck said he wasn't wearing a shirt. Yeah, no, I put it on right before he recorded. I had it off. It's a little hot. I felt like I needed to dress up, put the t-shirt back on.

Are you wearing one of those tuxedo shirt, t-shirt? I am. Have you ever had one of those? Did you ever have one? No, I didn't. No, I didn't either. You didn't, you didn't wear them with your rainbow suspenders?

No, that stuff was a little too cutesy even for me. Gotcha. Okay. What about the one that looks like, I would wear it. Okay. What about one that looks like I would wear it? Okay, what about one that looks like a like a ripped like chest and abdomen have you ever worn a t-shirt like that? No, those are fun though. Mm-hmm I think for certain people they're fun. They're also like really good at boosting your ego quietly Sure, there's nothing like me looking in a mirror at my beer belly covered in spray painted abs. It really works. The brain is so dumb that it falls for it every time I can attest.

All right. So we were going to talk about what some of these jobs might be, and it kind of really depended on where you were living. If you lived in the city or if you lived in a company town where they had these factories You were gonna be working in factories flipped out in the rural areas. You can be working on farms Most Americans still lived on farms at the time. So yeah, sure most child labor took place on farms But if you were on that farm, you're gonna be picking cotton and tobacco You're gonna be picking a lot of stuff and doing all the sort of stuff that goes on after the picking, which is-

Stemming, DCing. Yeah, all that stuff, shucking. That stuff I did when I was a kid, we had a big, big garden, and my mom took us to the cannery, and it was awful. I hated it. She took you to the cannery, like for a sightseeing trip or for work?

To can. So there was a cannery that your mom went to. You guys had so much stuff you had to go to a second location to can it? There was a cannery in DeKalb County, a sort of industrial cannery for the people. Okay. And we would take green beans and corn and we made preserves and all kinds of stuff and they had like, you know, you could can your own junk there. Sounds like a socialist utopia.

And yeah, and we would, you know, put Sharpie like beans on the can, and Sharpie put it in the pantry. Huh, that's really interesting. It was really interesting. I had no idea that there was a cannery in DeKalb County. Yeah, not too far from where I live now actually. It's like 15 minutes away probably.

Do you shutter every time you pass it? I do a little actually. I don't pass it much, but it's over near the dog pound where you can go adopt a dog. And so I think we adopted Nico there. And I drove by the cannery and just like, ugh. Yeah, I'll bet. It was hot.

Well, you were lucky you weren't five or six and left there to work all day every day, aren't you? Yes, for almost no money. Yeah, pennies for a bucket of whatever you shucked or shelled or did whatever, peeled. Yeah, working at a cannery would probably not have been very fun. There were also furnace stoking jobs available, whether you wanted them or not.

What else, Chuck? Well, kids did work in canneries. They also worked in textile mills. They had bobbin boys and bobbin girls. This one doesn't sound so bad to me, but I'm sure I'm missing something that makes it atrocious. Well, I mean, they would climb up on the machine and remove the bobbins, the full bobbins, and replace them with empty ones. So I don't think that was like the worst job in the world, but when you're doing that for 10 or 12 hours a day and you're six, it's probably a bit of a buzzkill.

Yeah, yeah. I have a problem inherently with child labor in general. Yeah, I know what you mean. Not like having a job like you or I had first job, they got no problem with that. But any kind of child labor, even if it is kind of cush comparatively. No, I agree. That one wasn't terrible. It may have been dangerous though. I don't know how high those bobbins were. Yeah, there's no way it wasn't dangerous. It had to have been dangerous. We're talking about the 19th century in industry. It was dangerous in some way. There was no OSHA.

No. No one even knew what that was. If you did live in the city and did work around factories, you would do that. But there were also plenty of other jobs. You could deliver, like be essentially, they call them telegraph boys, sort of delivering, you know, emails basically by hand to people all over town. You could shine shoes, you could sell newspapers like you did. I didn't stand on the street corner. I was on a newsie, which we'll talk a little more about newsies in a second.

I was a delivery boy. And not a really great one either. I frequently overslept and it was not good at delivering papers. My mom and my oldest sister would have to do my route once in a while. Was this a bike deal? Yes.

Okay. And the thing is, is like, they also make you shake down the people for their delinquent subscriptions. So I was like a strong arm guy too for the Toledo Blade as well. I want my two dollars. Basically, that's exactly right. And that was right in my wheelhouse too.

I was like, this hits a little too close to home for me to laugh at this kid. I know what he's going through. I've had to put my foot in somebody's door before to get their two dollars. Didn't ask for a dime. I haven't seen that in a while. That was a good movie. Classic. If you lived in the mountains of Appalachia,

you might've been a breaker boy or a mule handler and breaker boys will get, I guess we can go ahead and tell everyone what that is. You would sit around and break apart lumps of coal into uniform pieces all day long. Yep. And break dance on your breaks. Yeah, breaker boys. But that was it. And they wouldn't let you wear gloves while you were a breaker boy too,

because they're like, no, no, you can't break these things as uniformly if you wear gloves, you stupid kid. So you have to basically absorb all of this coal dust into your skin, get all sorts of little cuts and calluses and all that by the time you're 6, 7, 8. And just do this. This is your life now. Welcome to Pennsylvania. Right. Then let's say you manage to escape all forms of formal jobs. Your parents, they didn't make you go to the factory. You did live in the city, so you didn't have to work on a farm. And you might think you just had it made in the shade.

Not so, because there was plenty of jobs that you could do right there from your cruddy little tenement apartment. Like weaving baskets or making paper flowers or hand rolling cigars and cigarettes all day long and selling them. Yeah, it was like, you know, your whole family worked on a farm or if you lived in a tenement, your whole family worked, you know, in what are called tenement industries. So, there was basically not a lot of escape. I get the impression that you basically had to have wealthy parents to not be forced

into child labor at the time. Yeah, and I might have mentioned this once before. My mom did a thing for a little while where we would make money doing like stuffing envelopes. Mm-hmm. Did you remember that stuff? I do. And I don't even remember what it was for. I guess they were for companies. Okay.

I want to say Easterseals had people do that too, but I'm sure they didn't pay. They're notoriously cheap. No, we got paid. So this would be like a company that would have like a packet they would send out that had like five things in it. I gotcha. And we would be responsible for getting all that stuff in huge boxes, assembling it all into the envelopes that they could mail, and we would get paid as a family to do that.

That's cute. That's super late 70s, early 80s. Like I can see your mom talking on the princess phone, making all the arrangements for them to ship that tour and getting the instructions, you know, and then hanging up in that 50 foot long cord just kind of coils up on its own quietly on the floor. Yeah, and I didn't mind that so much

because I made a little money and that's something I could do while I watch television. Yeah, totally. Which is the perfect job as we all know. Yeah, totally. Which is the perfect job, as we all know. Yeah, not exactly a high pressure job, it sounds like. I wouldn't even know if that qualifies as a tenement industry, to tell you the truth. No, not in the 1970s.

No. You had a lot of jobs, though, as a kid. Good for you. I always wanted my own money. Protestant work ethic shining through, like a city upon a hill. Should we talk newsies? Yeah, we should.

And I think also the newsie strike that we're gonna mention deserves its own episode at least short stuff. If not its own episode. Okay, so yeah, let's just not talk about newsies. No, no, I thought the same thing. And the more I got into the strike, I was like, this is just too much. We got to do something.

But the idea was that little boys would buy a stack of newspapers wholesale for about 50 cents per 100. Girls too. I saw girls that did it too. Oh, girls did it too. All right. And they sold them for a penny a piece. So they would make half a penny per paper,

selling in the big cities, especially New York City, of course. And then eventually in 1899, they did go on strike, and it was a big deal. It kind of ground, I mean, it didn't grind them to a complete halt, but it really disrupted their flow in getting newspapers into the hands of people. Dude, their sales over this two-week strike went down two-thirds.

Yeah. Like they brought Pulitzer, Pulitzer, and Hearst to their knees basically, these newsies did. And they got some concessions too. Yeah, and I think the deal was, is that morning subscribers were generally subscribers, or the morning paper was generally for subscribers, but it was that afternoon paper, that second edition that the newsies really raked it in on because most people

didn't subscribe to that. And so they really weren't selling any second editions hardly. And the one big concession they got, which was huge, was they got them to agree to full buybacks on unsold papers, which was huge, was they got them to agree to full buybacks on unsold papers, which was a really, really big deal. But it also really kind of goes to show you how much the newspaper barons believed newsies were scrappy enough that they wouldn't just sit around and be like, I don't have to sell these, you know, I don't have to worry about this.

You know, they'll be bought back anyway. I don't have to work to sell them. Well, but buyback just means they give them back the money they paid for them. It's not like they would make any money. They would just, in fact, incentivize them, I think, to take out more papers and sell more papers because they knew they wouldn't be stuck with them. Yeah, totally. We'll probably edit that part out. So, one of the things you mentioned was making cigars, like in your family's one-room apartment in, say, New York or something like that, right?

Yeah. That was apparently really bad in that not only did you work long hours for very little pain, cramped working conditions with your family on top of everything else, you would frequently come down with nicotine poisoning as a little kid because you're rolling cured, sometimes you're handling uncured tobacco, and you're ingesting lots of nicotine through your skin

at the time, like, you know, in a single day. And so you might be nauseated, you might be dizzy, you might turn green. It can get worse than that too. You actually can suffer respiratory distress as well. And apparently this is a big problem still with child laborers in Zimbabwe. Because I think about 20 years ago, that country doubled down on their tobacco production and now it's like one of the biggest of the biggest exports of Zimbabwe. But it's also a very poor country.

So they use child labor a lot. And so children are still to this day being exposed to tobacco and they're handling tobacco, they're rolling stuff, they're rolling cigars, they're sorting it. Kids in tobacco should not be in the same room together basically. Yeah, you know, it never occurred to me that,

I guess it would be a transdermal ingestion, right? Yeah, totally. But sure, I mean, you put tobacco on bee stings and all kinds of things, so of course it's gonna get into their skin. Yeah, and having gotten myself sick on tobacco a time or two in my life, I can tell you it is not pleasant.

And to do it against your will just because you're handling it for your job that you don't even want is, that sounds torturous actually. Yeah, I love that story. Should you retell it for people who haven't heard it? Are you talking about eighth grade in the tree fort? Is that when you smoked a whole pack of cigarettes and got sick? It was more like a pack and a half. Okay.

It was right after I first started smoking. That's unbelievable. I was like, I really like how this makes me feel. Let's see how 30 of these things make me feel. And I was seeing them reading comic books up in the tree fort in the woods that my friends and I had built. And I just went too far, man. I felt so bad.

Oh man, that is rough. Like I felt like I looked green. It was bad news. That's one of those moments where you really wish you could have video footage. Kind of. Of what that looked like. I kind of hope when I die it's a little bit like defending your life so they can show,

I'll be like, show me that one. We can go over the other stuff, but I really want to see that clip. Yeah, Rip Torn will be there. The upshot of this though is do not ever start smoking. I deeply regret ever having started smoking. As a kid, as an adult. It doesn't matter.

Like, just don't ever start smoking and do yourself a real favor. You did a great job quitting though, and you never looked back. Nope, I didn't. Good job. It was surprisingly easy. Because I was worried. Hold on, one more thing. I think if there are people out there who are considering smoking right now

and are worried about the time they're going to have, one of my big worries was that I was going to spend every day of the rest of my life Wishing for a cigarette and that's just not how it goes They're like you you spend a week two weeks if it's really bad Maybe three weeks really longing for a cigarette and then it starts to get easier and easier and then eventually you're grossed out By the thought of cigarettes and people smoking cigarettes around you, and you don't ever want to see one again. So if that's what's keeping you from quitting, don't let it because that's not how it is. I like that. Good PSA.

Thanks, man. Thanks. I think before we break, maybe we'll just go over some of these final stats here. Basically, the peak, and then about 1900, by 18 1890, one out of every five kids under 16 was working. 1.7 million kids under 16 was 6% of the total workforce in the 1900 census. And that's just kids who were registered to work in these factories. Like that does not include these kids rolling cigars in their house or the kids on the family farm. So it

was much, much higher than that. Yeah, because I think two-thirds of kids in general, in the country, worked in agriculture. So yeah, if they were not counting agriculture, they missed out on a lot of kids in that number. And that's still a staggering number in and of itself, 1.7 million. Yeah, and if you're wondering back then what effect this had on education, just a snapshot from Philadelphia in 1900, 15% of 13-year-old boys had left school to work. And I think half of 15-year-old boys were not in school anymore because they were working.

Or like a significant portion because they were naughty. Right. Yeah, and they just didn't want to do anything. But get this, this is the staggering one to me. 17-year-old boys, only 10% of them were still in school in 1900 in Philadelphia. That does not bode well for the future of a An economy and I think that actually is one reason why public education became so much more compulsory and one reason why people came around to anti child labor laws is the idea that No, there's a lot more that they could be doing than just working in a factory almost literally their entire lives.

Like, we can do better and we can build a better society and a better economy if we invest in their education instead of robbing them of it. All right. I guess we'll take a break and talk about when that started in earnest. And it wasn't just then when you mentioned it. In our new podcast, Everybody's Business, we talk about the business news that concerns everybody. From Bloomberg Businessweek, I'm Stacey Bannock-Smith. And I'm Max Chavkin.

Each week we unpack what is happening on Main Street and Wall Street, all the streets. WrestleMania has taken over the US economy. Poetry that executives write on LinkedIn. A little actual magic in our underrated story of the week. The single greatest marketing campaign the music business has ever seen. I decided to ask people how they felt about the penny going away. Listen to everybody's business wherever you get your podcasts. So Chuck, it turns out that there were, so the progressive era is one of my favorite eras,

or I should say the people from the progressive era are some of my favorite people, like Frances Perkins. Although she was a second or third wave progressive reformer, but she was inspired by some of these earlier ones who were working on things like fair wages, like a minimum wage, minimum or maximum work days or working hours. And then they also train their sights on things like ending child labor, or at the very least,

really restricting the amount of work a kid could do, especially in regards to them being in school, too. The idea was to put school first, and then if the kid had the wherewithal or their parents really needed the money or something like that, they could let them work in addition to school, but the school needed to come first. And this is really radical. I mean, it seems radical. We had kids rolling cigars in their one room apartment

in New York their whole lives. And now all of a sudden some people are coming up and be like, no, no, no, kids should be in school and then maybe working, preferably not working. So how do we make that happen? Yeah, it was a very big deal. And most of these, or a lot of them were women, people like Jane Addams and Julia Lathrop and Lillian Ward, anti-poverty measures. And this is stuff that, you know, they would also go on to champion women's rights and women's rights in the workforce and women's rights to vote. So, the

whole progressive movement was kind of tied up in all these, you know, radical ideas about, you know, being fair and good, decent human beings. Right, yeah. Radical stuff. So, here's the problem is you've got these robber barons and these factory owners and these industrialists who are like, wait a minute, we got a good deal going because we don't have to pay these kids much.

They're probably not going to unionize. Like the Newsy's thing was definitely an anomaly. That didn't happen much. And he said they were like, we got a good thing going and so we're going to lobby against this as hard as we can. But surely they were unsuccessful, right? No, they were successful. They did. They blocked a lot of legislation early on for this kind of regulation. Federally, states, you know, it kind of depends on where it was, but states did establish child labor commissions, and some states had

some minimum ages, or maximum hours, and minimum wages. It was, they were sparse. I couldn't find what states passed it, but for the most part, there was a, probably, for the most part, though, there was a lot of pushback and enough pushback among the states, the residents of the states that not a lot got passed. So there was a progressive movement that started, say, in like the 1890s. And it had to, it basically, like any progressive movement, it ran full steam ahead, hit a huge

wall of industry, and then had to slowly just keep pushing and pushing and chugging and chugging and keeping at it for a few decades before it was successful. And one of the ways that it became successful, or the way that it kept pushing at it after it hit that wall of industry, is a group called the National Child Labor Committee formed. And I think they formed back in 1904. And they were basically, they became a lobbying group to lobby against the lobbying against child labor laws that ended child labor. Yeah. And they had a pretty smart way to get attention.

And that was in hiring a photographer named Lewis Hine to go around and sneakily document what was going on with his camera. He worked as a sociologist and a teacher, and then later became a photographer, or was also a photographer. And I think he himself was a kid who was working 12, 13-hour days. So he was like, let me start taking pictures of these kids. And maybe that, because that's worth a thousand words, they say. At least. And he took 5,000. So that means that he took 50,000 words.

No. 5,000? I'm just kidding. 500? No, I know. I'm just trying to undermine your confidence in your math. No, that was totally wrong. It was purposefully wrong though.

Let me just do that real quick. Do, do, do, carry the one. He took five million words. That's a lot of words. And if you go back, you've probably seen a bunch of these pictures. If you've seen pictures of very unhappy kids outside of a coal mine

or standing on the mountains of shucked oysters or standing around factory machines, little miniature adults, they were probably Lewis Hines' photos. Yeah. I mean, 5,000 photos all archived in the Library of Congress from what I understand. And he had like a really great eye to begin with. So like they're really great photographs in and of themselves. But you know, you don't have to sit there and like, you know, try to really

contemplate it. It just hits you immediately what you're looking at and how sad what you're looking at is. And so he and the National Child Labor Committee got these into newspapers. And like you said, he was very sneaky. He would pose as different things. One of them made sense to me, the industrial machinery photographer, okay? Yeah. Got that. But what excuse would a Bible salesman have for taking photographs of the kids at the

factory? I could not find that to save my life. I don't know. I mean, the only thing I could think is that got him in the door. And then maybe he was like, and I just love kids and can I take some pictures, but I don't know. This is a time before Stranger Danger, I guess. So they were like, sure. I mean, they're child laborers. I don't care about them. Yeah.

He also, he wore a special jacket where he had the buttons on the jacket aligned in known measurements. So if he went over and stood, like he would take a kid's picture and he would ask, they're documented like their names and their ages and stuff as best he could, but he would go stand next to them if he felt like he couldn't outright ask what their age was to kind of tip off that maybe he was not a Bible salesman. And if the kid went up to the second or third button,

he would know roughly how tall they were, or no, he would know how tall they were than roughly how old they were. Right. The other thing- Unless they were giants. Right, right, yeah, I'm sure, you know, he didn't get them all right, but you know,

you can't win them all. But the other thing that made that jacket special, Chuck, was that the lining was made of a t-shirt of a ripped chest and abdomen. It would make him feel really good about himself when he put that jacket on. That's good. Nice callback.

When did things finally change though? Well, they started to kind of change. Like these pictures shocked the conscience of the nation when they saw them, when they made them into newspapers and they were accompanied by muck-racking articles about how bad these conditions were, and shame on you America for turning a blind eye to this kind of thing.

But it wasn't like an instantaneous switch was thrown, it still took decades. I think the first proposal for anti-child labor legislation came in 1906. Senator Albert Beveridge of Indiana was the first to propose it. Got taken up in 1916 by the Keating Act that was actually passed, but the Supreme Court shut it down. And then there was some more legislation that there was a constitutional amendment actually that got passed but wasn't ratified by the states. And then it wasn't until the Great Depression and the New Deal that it finally

got passed. And I think if it were just the New Deal, it wouldn't have gotten passed. But the Great Depression changed things socially enough that it opened the door for an end to child labor in America. Yeah. Like, ironically, I think massive unemployment with so many adults out of work, they couldn't turn around and just hire kids to do these jobs for lower wages. It was, I mean, even at a time when a bad look didn't really matter as much as it does today, they even knew that that was a really bad look and that they probably couldn't do something like that. So eventually the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, thank you, Francis Perkins, our old buddy, among others. This finally set a national minimum wage for the very first time, maximum

number of hours for workers and then child labor limitations, notably that if you are under 16, you cannot work in manufacturing and you cannot work in coal mining at all because they're just too dangerous. Another couple of things it did, it established overtime, time and a half. So, if you went over 40 hours a week, you could only work up to 44, but you could work four hours at time and a half. And that very first minimum wage was 25 cents an hour. Man.

1939, it went up to 30. 45, it went up to 40. In 1956, it finally reached a dollar. Ka-ching. And it didn't crack $6 until 2008. I know dude, it's just shameful. Isn't that nuts? We definitely need to do a minimum wage episode two because it's just not as cut and dried as,

yeah, just raise the minimum wage. Like there's just, like there's a lot to it and I really want to do one on that. Yeah, I hadn't really kept up with it because before I got salary jobs, I worked as a waiter for 15 or 20 years or something. So, or as a PA on movie sets and TV sets, and that's not an hourly thing either. So like I hadn't had an hourly rate job since college.

So I didn't really know, you know, kind of how it changed over the years. I did not know it was 2008 when they cracked $6. That's really low. It really is. It's very, it's just not okay. And it's still at 7-something right now. It's not even 8 yet. I think it's 775? No, it's 725 actually. I think it, yeah, that's the national minimum wage, right?

Yeah. Again, some of the states are raising stuff slowly, but surely but that's the federal ones No, but this is Alabama doesn't have a minimum wage. Is that right? Is that possible? Yeah, that's possible man That's not to look into that that's on the fly So yeah, we'll do a whole one on minimum wage for sure coming up but you said that the the Fair Labor Standards Act was passed in 1938, and it still basically governs child labor.

And one of the things that it does, Chuck, is it divides child labor into agricultural and non-agricultural jobs. And with non-agricultural jobs, there's like a pretty decent amount of protections, like kids can't work in hazardous stuff until they're 18, things like blasting, mining, forest firefighting, that kind of stuff.

That if you're under 16, you can only work a maximum of three hours a day during the school year. There's some exemptions. Did you see the thing about home-based wreath making? Yeah, so you cannot, non-agriculturally, you cannot work if you're under 14 at all. Like, I could not have worked as a busboy at 13, supposedly, but I still did. Unless that was passed since then, because this thing's been ratified a million times. Or, not ratified, but amended.

But yeah, if you're a child actor, you can work if you're under 14, obviously. If you're a newsie, you can still deliver newspapers if you're under 14. And home-based wreath-makers. Dude. It's weird. It is weird, and not only is it home-based wreath-making

is exempted from child labor laws in the United States, it has to be a specific kind of wreath. It has to be mostly evergreen wreaths. Wow. So if you're making wreaths and it has to be at home, if you're having your kid make wreaths at home and they're not mostly evergreen, that's illegal. And if they're making things out of evergreen that are not wreaths, like say garland, that's illegal. Specifically homemade wreaths that are mostly evergreen.

It's really, really interesting. It's one of the most bizarre facts we've ever talked about on this episode. Yeah. Yeah, I'm gonna keep that one in my pocket. Totally. But agricultural though, they have like very little protection, like almost shamefully little protections.

Yeah. If you're 16 years old and you live on your family farm, they can work you. There's no limit on how many hours they can work you. You can work jobs that the Department of Labor considers hazardous. I think 14-year-olds also can work unlimited hours if it's outside the school day. And then kids as young as 12, I think actually 12 and younger, can work with parental consent. Yeah. Like basically unlimited hours or at least up to 72 hours and that's during the school year as well. And as a result of this, 55% of child farm workers graduate from high school here in the 2020-ish. Yeah, in the United States we're talking about,

and 100,000 of them are injured on the job every year, child farm laborers. Yeah, so they're trying to get all this changed. Yeah, they're basically saying like, look, just take these things that we apply to non-agricultural jobs and apply it to agricultural problem solved. And that would solve a lot of problems.

I'm sure it would create a lot of problems that you and I are unaware of, not being farm folk, but it would solve a lot of the child labor problems that child labor activists have issues with. It would do nothing for the much more rampant problems that are endemic around the world with child labor, where a lot of it resembles basically how America was with child labor during the Gilded Age. Yeah, 158 million kids are estimated to be the victims of child labor around the world. The good news is that's down 30% from 20 years ago.

But the bad news is that's a lot of kids. And I think 71% of those are in agriculture, harvesting, fishing, herding, stuff like that. But there are a lot of kids around the world that still work in coal mines. Yeah. That's too narrow for an adult. It's too dangerous. You go in there and do it instead. And they'll work at Wildcat gold mines, so they're having to separate gold with mercury. So they're getting mercury poisoning at a young age, which really messes with you developmentally.

On tobacco farms in places like Zimbabwe. Not only are they having to get nicotine poisoning, they're also being poisoned by toxic pesticides that are used on the crops and stuff too. So these kids are working in deplorable working conditions. And there's just some really basic stuff that needs to change that would just free the children of the world, the world around, from what is essentially like indentured servitude right now. Yeah, and there's four kind of basic things that the ILO says we can do around the country.

And like you said at the very beginning, they're very pragmatic, they all make sense. And they would really make a difference. And the first is expand access to education, get kids in school and get rid of fees to be in school and put them, if they're in a school situation, they're way less likely to join the workforce. That's what our friends at COED do. They're like helping get kids off of family farms and into schools by removing any barriers

between them and school. Yep, it's all through education. It's a great, great organization. Yep. What else? And that's, by the way, the cooperative, I always say that word wrong, cooperative for education.

Yeah. Look them up, we've championed them for years. And we got a little fun thing coming up that we're doing with them that you guys might be interested in. So stay tuned for that. Yeah. Let me see, what's the next one?

Help families meet basic needs. This could be a universal basic income. It could be monthly stipend, but basically so families don't have to send their kids out to work to provide at the most basic level. Yeah, and a way that you can help that is through Kiva by lending, making microloans to people so that they can, they have the capital to grow from initially.

Yeah. There's also, like, if you make sure that adults are getting better wages and pay and their rights are protected, it makes their children less likely to be forced into the workplace to begin with. Cause it's not, again, there's not like adults the world round saying, you know, our kids need to be working cause they're lazy.

Like their kids need to be working because the adults aren't getting paid enough. And if you make sure that you're, you know, if you're a Western company and you make sure that you're paying everybody a fair wage, there's a good chance that you can eradicate child labor from your supply chain. Yeah.

And then the last thing is just enforcement. They can put all the laws that they want on the books, but unless someone's gonna actually work on enforcement, then it really doesn't matter much. So that's really sort of the last step is funding for enforcement. Yeah. And Germany actually just passed a law recently that demands that its companies examine due due diligence and examine their supply chains to see if there's child labor involved and

to do something about it. It doesn't have like as much teeth as Human Rights Watch was saying that they wish it had, but it's a good first step and hopefully the way that, you know, progressive nations will start moving. That's right. Two things, big shout out, I can't remember his name, but the young listener who was mowing the lawn for his dad and wrote in to request this episode.

I think he prompted this episode. So hats off to you, young sir. I hope you can kick up your heels for a little while. And then also, this was indeed a Dave Rue's joint. So thanks again to Dave for this one. Right? That's right. Since Chuck said that's right, everybody,

it means it's time for Listener Mail. I'm going to call this, I think it's just thanks. Hey guys, writing in from Louisville, Kentucky, do you say how much I love the show? Even though Josh said the KFCM Center was in Lexington. I'll never live that down. Your correction put a smile on my face, knowing that there are other stuff you should know fans near me. I work in long-term care and use your podcast in many different ways.

I help people with cognitive impairments set up their tablets and such for enrichment, socialization and stimulation. And one of the first activities I show them is how to access entertainment with educational podcasts. Everyone can find something they want to learn about on Stuff You Should Know. I also help people find ways of remembering new information and use your short stuff episodes for those with shorter attention spans. And finally, my own enjoyment is a factor. I listen to many different podcasts during my drive to and from work, but only stuff you should know has the ability to get me into a different head

space. I attribute that to Josh and Chuck. None of these topics would be nearly as interesting without you guys. I've cried and laughed, sometimes sometimes both all in all of your episodes even the really mathy ones I feel you on that one Chuck and Josh Yeah, oh, that was a dig wouldn't a dig You mass guy No, no, but I like to think I am Okay, sorry about that. The episode on snake handling is a personal favorite.

I appreciate it. I love the show and everyone that works on it. Thanks for keeping it going. I hope to see y'all in Kentucky. That is from Ellie. Well, thanks again, Ellie. And if you want to get in touch with us like Ellie did, you can write us an email. Send it off to stuffpodcasts at iHeartRadio.com.

Stuff you should know is a production of iHeart Radio. For more podcasts, my heart radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Just like great shoes, great books take you places, through unforgettable love stories and into conversations with characters you'll never forget. I think any good romance, it gives me this feeling of like butterflies. I'm Danielle Robay and this is Bookmarked by Reese's Book Club, the new podcast from Hello Sunshine and iHeart Podcasts where we dive into the stories that shape us, on the page and off. Each week I'm joined by authors,

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