6 ms·

Lewis Hine’s early 20th-century “photo stories”

99 points by cratermoon 3y ago

dmbche 3y ago
Amazing work! Suprising to hear that he had to heart that the US had to embrace immigration as part of it's identity while there were large xenophobic sentiments. Nothing new under the sun! To this day, I'm still appalled that child labor laws don't apply to international goods - it's a little nuts that we say we're against it, but we allow the sale of good made from it still. It'd be neat to force manufacturers to prove no child labor to export to no child labor countries. Anyhoot
- WillPostForFood 3y ago
  Importation of goods made with child or slave labor has been illegal for ~100 years. It is just extremely difficult to track and prosecute. If I buy a product on Taobao, what would the proof of no child labor be? What about the components? Like the battery might be made by adults, but where did the lithium come from? You'd need a paper trial going back to natural resource extraction to keep it clean. Maybe keep it simple and put heavy tariffs on countries that don't police their own child/slave labor.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    > countries that don't police their own child/slave labor. Which appears to be something the US should do, too.
  - dmbche 3y ago
    Thank you for the insight!
- jfidbfidvdid 3y ago
  > To this day, I'm still appalled that child labor laws don't apply to international goods doesn't apply to us goods either. did everyone already forgot the meat packing plant (top 50 largest company in the world ot something) caught using children to clean the plant at night? no photographer would get into those plants today though.
  - jhbadger 3y ago
    On the other hand we live in an era where most people have a camera on them (their phone) in all waking moments, one that doesn't need film or developing, making it far easier for whistleblowers to make conditions known than in the past.
- PheonixPharts 3y ago
  It's worth pointing out that child labor is on the rise again in the United States [0]. From the article: > The number of minors employed in violation of child-labor laws last year was up thirty-seven per cent from the previous year, according to the Department of Labor, and up two hundred and eighty-three per cent from 2015. (These are violations caught by government, so they likely represent a fraction of the real number.) 0. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/06/12/child-labor-is-on-the-rise https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/06/12/child-labor-is...
cassac 3y ago
One thing I often wonder is if the US could have pulled off WW2 without these kids having this experience. They would have been at their prime at the time and would have had the grit and know how to get stuff done that maybe the following or previous generations wouldn’t have. I’m not condoning it in any way, just something I ponder.
- dexwiz 3y ago
  I think this is an impossible question to answer, but proposing it implicitly condones child labor as a component of the "return to greatness" that so many on the right desire.
  - cassac 3y ago
    I do think that the time period and what the kids were doing were an important part of it. Being at the late stage of the industrial age and early stage of the machine age made them familiar with exactly what the US would need and used to the sacrifices and hard work it would require. I don’t think you could in good faith compare it to modern day meat packing or farm labor though I agree many would like to make them the same.
    - ROTMetro 3y ago
      How did my grandfather bringing in the harvest, bailing hay, maintaining the farm machines translate into skills of storming the beaches in the Pacific, calling in the flamethrower to burn soldiers out, and finally MP work making sure US Marines used the correct sex workers in occupied Japan? Ocean experience = 0 Having to initiate burning other humans alive experience = 0 Finally, keeping occupier Marines inline and only going to the 'approved' comfort houses (this really made my devout Catholic grandfather who enlisted to 'fight the good fight' sick to see which is ironically why he got stuck in the position) and arresting them when they didn't experience = 0 Maybe world travel, visits to the ocean, mandatory brothel visits, and boating would have helped him do better. Maybe we should send all children on foreign exchange years to seaside towns with brothels, and create mandatory local youth yacht clubs on the off chance they need to be shipped out interact with foreigners versus make them work in factories. About as strong as argument as kids working enabled victory. This argument would have pissed my grandfather off to no end. Don't justify child labor in their name or off the back of their deeds.
stefantalpalaru 3y ago
[dead]
xyst 3y ago
The US may have reformed child labor laws state side but the US still has a problem with child labor. It's just outsourced to countries with none to lax laws on their labor force. Even today the US is seeing a rise in child labor law violations: https://www.npr.org/2023/02/26/1157368469/child-labor-violations-increase-states-loosen-rules https://www.npr.org/2023/02/26/1157368469/child-labor-violat...
- rubyn00bie 3y ago
  I think the US has more of a problem now than it has in a long time: https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/data/charts/child-labor https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/data/charts/child-labor The number of minors in violation, has been steadily increasing.
  - ethanbond 3y ago
    Now that’s some creepy doublespeak: “minors in violation”
    - actionfromafar 3y ago
      It's not as much doublespeak as very technical lingo?
      - AlecSchueler 3y ago
        Isn't that what doublespeak is? There are a few readily available alternative formulations in everyday English which could be just as well employed here (no pun intended).
        KineticLensman 3y ago
        In it's original Orwellian meaning, doublespeak is language that disguises, changes or even reverses the meaning of words and statements.
hobo_in_library 3y ago
Unpopular opinion: Even as a kid, I thought child labor laws were weird. Perhaps this had to do with me growing up in a developing nation where child labor was normal and even openly visible on the streets. Young me thought: If a kid and their family is dirt poor, should the kids just sit home and starve instead of working to earn an income for themselves? What if the kid _wants_ to work? Are lemon-aid stands `child labor`? Is working in the family store/restaurant child labor? As an adult, child labor laws seem like a distraction from the real evil: The existence of environments where children feel compelled to perform child labor And that is very much a question about poverty. How do you make sure that poor families don't feel so poor that they feel the need to push their kids to work? Our public schools have been a huuuuuge step in this direction (despite all their flaws). Guaranteeing the poor and homeless some amount of food helps with this a lot too. Of course our current implementations are far from perfect. Poverty is still a big problem in many parts of the US. But I now digress. My main point: Child labor shouldn't be considered inherently bad. An environment where children FEEL COMPELLED to work as laborers IS bad, and we should focus on eliminating that
- sixo 3y ago
  I don't think it's so unpopular to be suspicious of a blanket law against child labor, but the point about compulsion is critical. Our progressive laws are a compromise that is massively good in the net-that's the nature of the modern world. It may be there's a better arrangement, but it has to avoid the pain, we can't go back to it now. If children can work, poor children will. This recent essay is a good case FOR: https://letter.palladiummag.com/p/school-is-not-enough https://letter.palladiummag.com/p/school-is-not-enough But, it's the kind of thing that cannot be flipped like a switch--it has to, as you say, be part of an effective project of economic justice, which we're very far from. In lieu of that, the challenge is, can we continue to prevent child labor while compensating for its downsides? Pain is information. Child labor laws trade a widespread and severe pain for a somewhat narrower and vaguer one, but we can respond to that too (a kind of gradient descent).
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- 3y ago
civilitty 3y ago
In this ever-twisted hall of mirrors we've the gall to call civilization, the thinly veiled hypocrisy of so-called child labor laws acts like a deranged preacher barking sermons of protection and virtue. Stripping our young, like maniacal dental hygienists, of the grit and grime that birthed resilience in a bygone era - a baptism by fire that carved character out of raw-boned desperation and grueling sweat. These laws, my friend, they make coddled hostages of our offspring, clinging to the comforts of sanitized childhood, devoid of the hearty crucible of work's demands. The system is a diabolical puppeteer, offering up a sanitized, sterile version of life - all the while whispering, 'it's for your own good, kiddo.' But when these tender-footed children emerge, blink into the harsh light of adulthood, bereft of the hardened steel that labor forges, we have only ourselves and our sickened, overprotective system to blame.
- movedx 3y ago
  Is this a quote of someone else, or did you go out of your way to make this as convoluted as possible?
- vkou 3y ago
  You're making an exceptional argument for universal civil service conscription.
- jackmott42 3y ago
  [flagged]
- giraffe_lady 3y ago
  Cute. Except again and again we see (and research confirms) that the most resourceful, resilient adults are those who are not forced to display emotional or physical fortitude in childhood. Otherwise you'd expect to see former child soldiers and adult children of drug addicts reaching the highest pinnacles of achievement.
- edmundsauto 3y ago
  People used to think that trauma makes us stronger. What it does is permanently scar those who do not have the support or resilience to develop healthy coping mechanisms. There is, of course, a line - i don’t think working at McDonald’s when you are 17 is trauma. But working physical labor when you are 12 is.
xvector 3y ago
The factory farming industry seems to have caught onto this. It's illegal to take a picture inside any factory farm.
robomartin 3y ago
I wish someone would force the US to confront the human trafficking nightmare that the southern border has become. Years ago (15?) I looked into this and the numbers were between 20K and 40K people per year. This data is available from multiple reputable national and international organizations. This isn’t ideological, the size of the problem and the misery it creates are matters of verifiable facts anyone can dig up. Today the problem is massively worse. 100K/year? 200K? Nobody knows with certainty because our government, for some unspeakable reason, seems to think the human misery is worth the political gains. Anyone who is willing to do some honest digging can get a good picture if the tragedy that has unfolded.
- davidw 3y ago
  The easiest way to take business away from nasty, abusive, expensive traffickers is to make immigration cheap, easy and legal, rather than...whatever this is: https://twitter.com/David_J_Bier/status/1668576125809745922 https://twitter.com/David_J_Bier/status/1668576125809745922
  - anigbrowl 3y ago
    But how are we to maintain an exploitable underclass without a Kafkaesque system of ambiguous and often contradictory rules? It's hard to keep the plebs in line without an underclass to which all sin can be ascribed by default.
- anigbrowl 3y ago
  our government, for some unspeakable reason Basically the Republican party (specifically, the House GOP caucus led by Newt Gingrich) created the current system in 1996 with the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA), because the right wing of their base was mad about the immigration amnesty that took place during the Reagan administration (a compromise with Congress). They've refused to countenance any sort of compromise since then, insisting on a total border shutdown. The Democratic party is nominally opposed to this, but its reform proposals have been limited to tinkering around the edges (eg DACA) because when you get down to it, they're terrified of the far right and less aggressive about pursuing their legislative goals. They like to say they're for comprehensive immigration reform, but I'm not aware of any bills they've introduced that spell out specific policies, again because they're terrified of being attacked by the far right.
anigbrowl 3y ago
Luckily laws passed since then in many jurisdictions prevent unauthorized access to places like ag/food processing facilities, so employers can rest easy knowing that would-be photojournalists will be deterred with criminal penalties. https://www.epi.org/publication/child-labor-laws-under-attack/ https://www.epi.org/publication/child-labor-laws-under-attac...
Hanschri 3y ago
Vox made a video about these photographs in 2019. For those who are interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddiOJLuu2mo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddiOJLuu2mo
pcrh 3y ago
It's certainly weird seeing commentators in this thread implicitly supporting child labor. Note that the kids shown in the OP are mostly under 12 yrs old. This isn't teenagers doing a newspaper round, or bussing tables at the local burger job at weekends; they were working for 8-12 hours a day in industrial environments rather than going to school. There's simply no way that that kind of child labor provides any benefit to the child, unless they were literally starving, in which case one is faced with a different larger problem.
- t0bia_s 3y ago
  Believe or not, going to school is not common in all countries. Sometimes kids do not have ability to go to school so they stay with parents (if they have any) and work with them. Or just do anything to survive. Taking it away from them without alternative how survive would make it even worse. I'm not supporting child labor, just trying to see it from their perspective.

99 points by cratermoon 3y ago

Amazing work! Suprising to hear that he had to heart that the US had to embrace immigration as part of it's identity while there were large xenophobic sentiments. Nothing new under the sun! To this day, I'm still appalled that child labor laws don't apply to international goods - it's a little nuts that we say we're against it, but we allow the sale of good made from it still. It'd be neat to force manufacturers to prove no child labor to export to no child labor countries. Anyhoot

WillPostForFood 3y ago
Importation of goods made with child or slave labor has been illegal for ~100 years. It is just extremely difficult to track and prosecute. If I buy a product on Taobao, what would the proof of no child labor be? What about the components? Like the battery might be made by adults, but where did the lithium come from? You'd need a paper trial going back to natural resource extraction to keep it clean. Maybe keep it simple and put heavy tariffs on countries that don't police their own child/slave labor.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  > countries that don't police their own child/slave labor. Which appears to be something the US should do, too.
- dmbche 3y ago
  Thank you for the insight!
jfidbfidvdid 3y ago
> To this day, I'm still appalled that child labor laws don't apply to international goods doesn't apply to us goods either. did everyone already forgot the meat packing plant (top 50 largest company in the world ot something) caught using children to clean the plant at night? no photographer would get into those plants today though.
- jhbadger 3y ago
  On the other hand we live in an era where most people have a camera on them (their phone) in all waking moments, one that doesn't need film or developing, making it far easier for whistleblowers to make conditions known than in the past.
PheonixPharts 3y ago
It's worth pointing out that child labor is on the rise again in the United States [0]. From the article: > The number of minors employed in violation of child-labor laws last year was up thirty-seven per cent from the previous year, according to the Department of Labor, and up two hundred and eighty-three per cent from 2015. (These are violations caught by government, so they likely represent a fraction of the real number.) 0. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/06/12/child-labor-is-on-the-rise https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/06/12/child-labor-is...

cassac 3y ago

One thing I often wonder is if the US could have pulled off WW2 without these kids having this experience. They would have been at their prime at the time and would have had the grit and know how to get stuff done that maybe the following or previous generations wouldn’t have. I’m not condoning it in any way, just something I ponder.

dexwiz 3y ago
I think this is an impossible question to answer, but proposing it implicitly condones child labor as a component of the "return to greatness" that so many on the right desire.
- cassac 3y ago
  I do think that the time period and what the kids were doing were an important part of it. Being at the late stage of the industrial age and early stage of the machine age made them familiar with exactly what the US would need and used to the sacrifices and hard work it would require. I don’t think you could in good faith compare it to modern day meat packing or farm labor though I agree many would like to make them the same.
  - ROTMetro 3y ago
    How did my grandfather bringing in the harvest, bailing hay, maintaining the farm machines translate into skills of storming the beaches in the Pacific, calling in the flamethrower to burn soldiers out, and finally MP work making sure US Marines used the correct sex workers in occupied Japan? Ocean experience = 0 Having to initiate burning other humans alive experience = 0 Finally, keeping occupier Marines inline and only going to the 'approved' comfort houses (this really made my devout Catholic grandfather who enlisted to 'fight the good fight' sick to see which is ironically why he got stuck in the position) and arresting them when they didn't experience = 0 Maybe world travel, visits to the ocean, mandatory brothel visits, and boating would have helped him do better. Maybe we should send all children on foreign exchange years to seaside towns with brothels, and create mandatory local youth yacht clubs on the off chance they need to be shipped out interact with foreigners versus make them work in factories. About as strong as argument as kids working enabled victory. This argument would have pissed my grandfather off to no end. Don't justify child labor in their name or off the back of their deeds.

stefantalpalaru 3y ago

[dead]

xyst 3y ago

The US may have reformed child labor laws state side but the US still has a problem with child labor. It's just outsourced to countries with none to lax laws on their labor force. Even today the US is seeing a rise in child labor law violations: https://www.npr.org/2023/02/26/1157368469/child-labor-violations-increase-states-loosen-rules https://www.npr.org/2023/02/26/1157368469/child-labor-violat...

rubyn00bie 3y ago
I think the US has more of a problem now than it has in a long time: https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/data/charts/child-labor https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/data/charts/child-labor The number of minors in violation, has been steadily increasing.
- ethanbond 3y ago
  Now that’s some creepy doublespeak: “minors in violation”
  - actionfromafar 3y ago
    It's not as much doublespeak as very technical lingo?
    - AlecSchueler 3y ago
      Isn't that what doublespeak is? There are a few readily available alternative formulations in everyday English which could be just as well employed here (no pun intended).
      - KineticLensman 3y ago
        In it's original Orwellian meaning, doublespeak is language that disguises, changes or even reverses the meaning of words and statements.

hobo_in_library 3y ago

Unpopular opinion: Even as a kid, I thought child labor laws were weird. Perhaps this had to do with me growing up in a developing nation where child labor was normal and even openly visible on the streets. Young me thought: If a kid and their family is dirt poor, should the kids just sit home and starve instead of working to earn an income for themselves? What if the kid _wants_ to work? Are lemon-aid stands `child labor`? Is working in the family store/restaurant child labor? As an adult, child labor laws seem like a distraction from the real evil: The existence of environments where children feel compelled to perform child labor And that is very much a question about poverty. How do you make sure that poor families don't feel so poor that they feel the need to push their kids to work? Our public schools have been a huuuuuge step in this direction (despite all their flaws). Guaranteeing the poor and homeless some amount of food helps with this a lot too. Of course our current implementations are far from perfect. Poverty is still a big problem in many parts of the US. But I now digress. My main point: Child labor shouldn't be considered inherently bad. An environment where children FEEL COMPELLED to work as laborers IS bad, and we should focus on eliminating that

sixo 3y ago
I don't think it's so unpopular to be suspicious of a blanket law against child labor, but the point about compulsion is critical. Our progressive laws are a compromise that is massively good in the net-that's the nature of the modern world. It may be there's a better arrangement, but it has to avoid the pain, we can't go back to it now. If children can work, poor children will. This recent essay is a good case FOR: https://letter.palladiummag.com/p/school-is-not-enough https://letter.palladiummag.com/p/school-is-not-enough But, it's the kind of thing that cannot be flipped like a switch--it has to, as you say, be part of an effective project of economic justice, which we're very far from. In lieu of that, the challenge is, can we continue to prevent child labor while compensating for its downsides? Pain is information. Child labor laws trade a widespread and severe pain for a somewhat narrower and vaguer one, but we can respond to that too (a kind of gradient descent).
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
3y ago

civilitty 3y ago

In this ever-twisted hall of mirrors we've the gall to call civilization, the thinly veiled hypocrisy of so-called child labor laws acts like a deranged preacher barking sermons of protection and virtue. Stripping our young, like maniacal dental hygienists, of the grit and grime that birthed resilience in a bygone era - a baptism by fire that carved character out of raw-boned desperation and grueling sweat. These laws, my friend, they make coddled hostages of our offspring, clinging to the comforts of sanitized childhood, devoid of the hearty crucible of work's demands. The system is a diabolical puppeteer, offering up a sanitized, sterile version of life - all the while whispering, 'it's for your own good, kiddo.' But when these tender-footed children emerge, blink into the harsh light of adulthood, bereft of the hardened steel that labor forges, we have only ourselves and our sickened, overprotective system to blame.

movedx 3y ago
Is this a quote of someone else, or did you go out of your way to make this as convoluted as possible?
vkou 3y ago
You're making an exceptional argument for universal civil service conscription.
jackmott42 3y ago
[flagged]
giraffe_lady 3y ago
Cute. Except again and again we see (and research confirms) that the most resourceful, resilient adults are those who are not forced to display emotional or physical fortitude in childhood. Otherwise you'd expect to see former child soldiers and adult children of drug addicts reaching the highest pinnacles of achievement.
edmundsauto 3y ago
People used to think that trauma makes us stronger. What it does is permanently scar those who do not have the support or resilience to develop healthy coping mechanisms. There is, of course, a line - i don’t think working at McDonald’s when you are 17 is trauma. But working physical labor when you are 12 is.

xvector 3y ago

The factory farming industry seems to have caught onto this. It's illegal to take a picture inside any factory farm.

robomartin 3y ago

I wish someone would force the US to confront the human trafficking nightmare that the southern border has become. Years ago (15?) I looked into this and the numbers were between 20K and 40K people per year. This data is available from multiple reputable national and international organizations. This isn’t ideological, the size of the problem and the misery it creates are matters of verifiable facts anyone can dig up. Today the problem is massively worse. 100K/year? 200K? Nobody knows with certainty because our government, for some unspeakable reason, seems to think the human misery is worth the political gains. Anyone who is willing to do some honest digging can get a good picture if the tragedy that has unfolded.

davidw 3y ago
The easiest way to take business away from nasty, abusive, expensive traffickers is to make immigration cheap, easy and legal, rather than...whatever this is: https://twitter.com/David_J_Bier/status/1668576125809745922 https://twitter.com/David_J_Bier/status/1668576125809745922
- anigbrowl 3y ago
  But how are we to maintain an exploitable underclass without a Kafkaesque system of ambiguous and often contradictory rules? It's hard to keep the plebs in line without an underclass to which all sin can be ascribed by default.
anigbrowl 3y ago
our government, for some unspeakable reason Basically the Republican party (specifically, the House GOP caucus led by Newt Gingrich) created the current system in 1996 with the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA), because the right wing of their base was mad about the immigration amnesty that took place during the Reagan administration (a compromise with Congress). They've refused to countenance any sort of compromise since then, insisting on a total border shutdown. The Democratic party is nominally opposed to this, but its reform proposals have been limited to tinkering around the edges (eg DACA) because when you get down to it, they're terrified of the far right and less aggressive about pursuing their legislative goals. They like to say they're for comprehensive immigration reform, but I'm not aware of any bills they've introduced that spell out specific policies, again because they're terrified of being attacked by the far right.

anigbrowl 3y ago

Luckily laws passed since then in many jurisdictions prevent unauthorized access to places like ag/food processing facilities, so employers can rest easy knowing that would-be photojournalists will be deterred with criminal penalties. https://www.epi.org/publication/child-labor-laws-under-attack/ https://www.epi.org/publication/child-labor-laws-under-attac...

Hanschri 3y ago

Vox made a video about these photographs in 2019. For those who are interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddiOJLuu2mo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddiOJLuu2mo

pcrh 3y ago

It's certainly weird seeing commentators in this thread implicitly supporting child labor. Note that the kids shown in the OP are mostly under 12 yrs old. This isn't teenagers doing a newspaper round, or bussing tables at the local burger job at weekends; they were working for 8-12 hours a day in industrial environments rather than going to school. There's simply no way that that kind of child labor provides any benefit to the child, unless they were literally starving, in which case one is faced with a different larger problem.

t0bia_s 3y ago
Believe or not, going to school is not common in all countries. Sometimes kids do not have ability to go to school so they stay with parents (if they have any) and work with them. Or just do anything to survive. Taking it away from them without alternative how survive would make it even worse. I'm not supporting child labor, just trying to see it from their perspective.