Protective Legislation

Protective legislation designed to shield children, women, and males in hazardous occupations was the most dramatic and controversial form of state intervention. By the end of the Civil War, the nation's rising urban middle class had created the "economically worthless child." ²¹ Middle-class fathers began insuring their own lives and setting up other financial arrangements such as trusts and endowments designed to protect children who no longer had to labor on the farm. However, the same process of industrialization that freed the middle-class child increased the value of the labor of working-class children, whose families depended on their wages.

The idea that child labor was a preventable evil took hold in the mid- nineteenth century. Connecticut in 1842 had a rudimentary wage and hour law for children, and New Jersey in 1851 passed the first comprehensive statute that prohibited children under ten from working and set limits of ten hours a day and sixty hours a week for older children. By 1900 some twenty-eight states, most of them in industrialized areas of the North and Midwest, had some kind of legal protection for child workers. Organized labor supported these measures, but more out of expediency than altruism. Labor leaders appreciated that child labor undercut the wage structure of adult male workers and impaired organizing efforts.

Even in the major industrialized states, regulations covering children were vague and enforcement was lax. Child labor laws typically only protected children in manufacturing and mining, and often contained so many exceptions and loopholes that they were ineffective. For example, children could obtain poverty permits that allowed them to work if their earnings were necessary for self-support or to assist their widowed mothers or disabled fathers. Compulsory education laws in most states did more than child labor acts to keep children out of the mills and factories. There were never enough inspectors to enforce the laws. New Jersey in 1900 had a force of four child labor inspectors to oversee more than seven thousand manufacturing establishments.

The special recognition accorded by the law to working children opened the door for regulation of the hours women worked. All-male legislatures relied on cultural stereotypes to guide public policy. Legislators believed that the "inferior" physical condition of women meant that they could not endure the rigors of the industrial work place for periods as long as men and that, because women were the "mothers of the race," their right to contract could be limited based on the state's interest in maintaining the women's reproductive abilities. Massachusetts in 1874 set the legal workday for women "in any manufacturing establishment" at ten hours, and sixty hours a week. ²² Illinois in 1893 went even further, passing model legislation prohibiting women in factories and workshops from laboring more than eight hours in any one day and forty-eight hours in a week. These same legislators, however, never presumed to invoke their powers to ensure that women could enter professional and managerial positions.

Advances made on behalf of children and women also spilled over into the male work force, especially in the West. Delegates to state constitutional conventions often directed the people's representatives to protect workers in hazardous occupations. The Colorado Constitution of 1876 and the Idaho document of 1889, for example, provided specific protections for miners. The Utah Constitution of 1895 ordered the legislature

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to prohibit women and children from working in the mines and required the legislature to "pass laws to provide for the health and safety of the employees in factories, smelters, and mines." ²³ The legislature a year later passed an eight-hour law for workers in smelters and mines. The New York legislature in 1888 required that street- railway workers could not work more than twelve hours at a stretch, and in 1892 a ceiling was placed on the hours that could be worked by all railroad employees. Taken together this legislation reflected a basic assumption: long hours of labor were, as a whole, dangerous in an industrial society for employees, fellow servants, and the public.

There were limits to state intervention in the work place, even in the Progressive era. State legislatures, except where women workers were involved, ignored the most sensitive element of the capital-labor equation: minimum wages. The legislatures of New York, Indiana, and Nebraska established wage guidelines, but these applied only to workers on public projects. The Oregon legislature adopted the most progressive approach, one that became a model for other states, creating in 1912 an Industrial. Welfare Commission to fix minimum wages and maximum hours for women and minors.

Date: 2015-01-29; view: 740