With a rapacious GOP shredding not just women’s/black/queer/poor people’s rights but now child labor laws – the number of kids as young as 10 working in America has soared 37% – we mark this weekend’s 120th anniversary of Mother Jones’ 1903 March of the Mill Children, wherein she led 100 “worn down, defeated waifs…sacrificed on the altar of profit” to ask Teddy Roosevelt to end their abuses “in the name of the aching hearts of these little ones.” God bless capitalism: He refused.
After over a hundred years of progression away from Charles Dickens’ “bitter world” and “dark, Satanic mills” – see Oliver Twist “dine on a slice of pudding for his twelve hour daily labor” – toward what seemed universal recognition that children deserve to have a childhood and profit margins be damned, child labor is now “making a comeback with a vengeance.” According to the International Labor Organization, upwards of 160 million children worldwide – roughly 1 in 10, about two-thirds boys – engage in child and forced labor, with nearly half working under hazardous conditions to produce goods from some 77 countries; in the world’s poorest countries, from India to Central America to sub-Saharan Africa, that ratio is 1 in 5. Experts report an increase of over 8 million kids working in the last four years, with numbers still rising, particularly among those 5 to 11 years old. Yes: 5 to 11 years old. An estimated 22,000 child laborers are killed at work each year. This marks an improvement from the 19th century’s Industrial Revolution era of Dickens’ orphan Twist – born in a workhouse, forced into labor at 9, soon apprenticed to an undertaker – when each day an average of 112 kids died and over 6,000 were injured. Still, not great.
Further | Hard Exploitative Times: To Hear the Wail Of the Children | Opinion (commondreams.org)