Child labour

J. Franklin’s recent post brings to mind the idea of child labour. Of course, we all know the history of child labour: big, bad capitalists in the Industrial Revolution made children work in the mines etc., until wonderful, benevolent government stepped in to end this barbaric practice.

Wrong!

Child labour was a fact of life throughout human history. From the earliest hunter-gatherers through ancient or medieval farmers and Renaissance artisans, children would be expected to help their parents as soon as they were physically able, or to be apprenticed as soon as they were capable of taking instruction. When the Industrial Revolution began, despite the new trend of rising wages, parents initially followed the time-honoured pattern of sending their children to work as well. This work was not all as demeaning and unpleasant as Dickens would have you believe, and ironically, Robert Hessen and Philip Gaskell in studies conducted in the late 1960s found that by far the most dangerous work and the worst conditions in the British early industrial child workforce were to be found not in private factories, but in state-run public enterprises under the control of parish (local government) officials.

As the Industrial Revolution progressed, falling prices and an increased demand for labour gradually raised real incomes. As parents found it less necessary to rely on the labour of their children the practice waned, and parents, in their usual drive to attain better things for their children, considered options such as education. By the time government got around to passing child labour and compulsory schooling laws, child labour was all but dead. If the government had stepped in to criminalize a widespread and necessary practice, people would have been in open revolt. After all, if a family depends upon the income of children for subsistence they would not stand for the forced loss of that income, just as people today would not stand for a compulsory 16-hour work week - it would impoverish everyone.

It was not the case that the Industrial Revoltion and capitalism created or supported child labour, in fact, it was the advent of capitalism and industrialization that made child labour unnecessary for the first time in human history.

Now we have come to pass compulsory schooling laws. But quite a few children, particularly in teenage years, do not want to go to school and either attend under duress, play truant or are extremely disruptive. The State effectively sabotages their own attendance laws by allowing schools to expel those students who want to leave so badly that they will disrupt the educational environment for everyone. One wonders why we need the law at all, since it effectively states that those who want to go to school should go and those who don’t, shouldn’t. There’s just the bureaucracy and wasteage involved, of course, and the fact that child labour laws prohibit children who don’t want to go to school from doing anything productive with their time, so a problem student reaches the end of high-school age having been expelled and moved around between dozens of schools and almost certainly having failed to attain a diploma. Instead of entering the workforce with nothing, this problem student could instead have valuable work experience and possibly a trade certification or practical qualification.

It is not the case that all children need to go to school for so long. To be an apprentice tradesperson requires nothing more than basic literacy and numeracy, and it is not the case that these jobs are demeaning or underpaid as the “university for all” school of thought believes: skilled tradespeople such as bricklayers, plumbers, electricians, roofers and so on can make six-figure salaries, especially in big cities. Certainly most tradespeople, factory workers, and other blue-collar labourers make money that shames most university graduates. In any case, it is a waste to push so many into university when there are no intellectual jobs waiting. Statistics Canada reports that a total of 7.8m Canadians of 15 and older have at least a college diploma, 30% of the age group. The CCSD finds that 23% of the (non-disabled) workforce feel overqualified for their jobs. In the 15-34 age group, this figure rises to over 30%, and it can be as high as 50% in some fields such as business management, so it seems that the strategy of packing people into universities (and burdening them with heavy student debt) is not working. The jobs that require such training evidently aren’t numerous enough for all the graduates we currently have, let alone the increased numbers of graduates that we envision generating through various government programs.

The case against child labour is built on many faulty assumptions, including the origins and nature of child labour, the benefits of education and the denial of free will. At this point, the criminalization of child labour is based far more upon emotional reactions, faulty evidence and State propaganda than upon reason and fact. I feel that a re-examination of child labour in the light of actual evidence and logic is in order as a matter of public policy - perhaps a movement that is already underway, at least in the Albertan restaurant industry.