Child labor: a personal history

Today I asked a comrade here in Cleveland for his thoughts on Newt Gingrich's call to return kids to the labor market. He is 70 this year, the son of a CPUSA-Lincoln Brigade father, and is, as readers will quickly see, a spirited militant.

My emotions run so high in this matter that at a month's work would be required to tease my objective thoughts from them and respond in a disciplined way to your simple question. I am revolted and incensed, and not only by Gingrich. Nor does my revulsion and anger stop with those few US states are trying to roll back child labor laws. This sentiment extends to the 100 plus organizations that seem willing to settle for half-a-pie-in-the-sky with the "CARE" act which, though it legislates against some of the most appalling conditions of child farm laborers, still endorses:

• children 14 years of age working in the fields of US exploiters,

• children of 16 working in the fields of US exploiters , without restriction, even when such work is known to affect their health or school performance,

• young persons 18 to 24 allowed to do hazardous work in the fields of their US exploiters though brain development, particularly development of that region of the brain that equips humans to reason about future consequences of present action like the cost vs benefit of performing hazardous work risking permanent loss of ability to work for a small wage today, is normally not complete until age 24.

• adults working in the fields of US exploiters, under conditions so brutal and for wages so low that no worker should be made to suffer them. They are paid below subsistence wage, and this leaves them in the position where exploitation of their children in the fields continues to be dangled as a life line for their children and themselves. The legal "protection" from this is bound to seem rather remote under such circumstances. Particularly if, as is often the case with such "protection", there is no enforcement of the law.
  

At the same time that I am outraged, I am not at all surprised.

Labor history has been so long and so well suppressed in America that workers seem to think that legal protection from our exploiters employing our children in their fields and factories came to us from an alliance of the Founding Fathers, the Work Fairy, the SPCA and beneficent bosses made long ago and far away. When in fact generations of workers, organized into a formidable fighting force by a cadre of IWW, Communist and labor union organizers, and armed with an understanding of which was their class and which was the enemy class, fought and died for these gains.

This fight, though historical, is contemporary enough that the following markers are within the experience of me and my immediate family.

In an earlier capitalist crisis, her hometown in the grip of a brutal winter, joblessness, starvation and homelessness, my great grandmother led a demonstration of workers and the unemployed to the city hall of Rockford, Illinois, where she demanded a relief convoy stocked with food and blankets for those in dire need. When her demands were ignored, she organized the gandy dancers [rail laborers] to tear up the track leading into town and carry the creosoted railroad ties to city hall where she had them used to barricade the first floor of the structure, blocking all the doors and windows. She then, torch in hand, demanded that the convoy arrive on the schedule she set, else she would light the place up. The convoy made the scheduled delivery.

Her daughter, my grandmother, at age six, came home from school one day to find her father weeping because his employer had that day offered him the choice of being fired and blackballed from other employment, thus she would starve, or bringing her to work at the box factory where every day some one her lucky school chums only had an arm or leg chopped off in the works instead of being killed.

A generation later her daughter, my mother, left home ad 13 to enter what is euphemistically called "domestic service". A few years later her son, just turned 15, joined the US Navy to join the fight against the Nazis. And 7 years later still her grandson (that would be me) was working heavy road construction at age 11.

My 11th year was an eventful one for me and my family. The events of that year, beyond their personal significance for us, also bear on this matter the recent history of the brutal repression of the American worker and what became of the fighting generations. This is the year that my father was murdered by a pair of FBI agents that had been assigned to the task two years earlier. The Old Man had explained that he was being targeted as part of an effort to kill effective labor union organizers that had already cost the lives of 12 of his comrades. This was also the year that the Chicago cops began their weekly home invasion of our apartment and the gang-rape of my mother. These atrocities continued until my mother's near successful suicide attempt that had her hospitalized and out of their reach for a time.

By the age of 13 I was working full-time, the "graveyard shift", while still in school. By this time I had found work, somewhat less hazardous than road construction, in a hotel. Those same two FBI agents, after murdering my father, and leading the first home invasion of my mother's apartment two years earlier, were now busying themselves with chasing my grandmother and my mother from job to job insisting that their employers should fire them (this would continue for another 8 years). This largely explains how my family was driven by necessity to admonish me at age 11, "You're big enough to pull a train-- get a damned job." Others were still driven to the same extremity that burdened my great grandfather by some other agency of exploitation, e..g., discrimination in its various "racial", ethnic, and anti-immigrant forms (which is still doing its very great damage in the context of struggle in which "CARE" is accepted as the best workers' children can get). Such was the case with my school chum, the third child of a Puerto Rican immigrant family, whose father required that he quit school and take a full-time job. I met with my friend's dad and offered half of my full-time wage if he would let his son work half time and stay in school with me. The offer was refused.

So in my own direct experience, the gains against child labor in America were hard won, tenuous and small. I saw, and still see, at every turn, the need for workers to organize and fight hard and without pause for every scrap they would have from their exploiters.

This is only a bit of personal history from one worker in one rich capitalist country. Yet it is not compassion alone that connects our struggle to the child worker in Bangladesh, who labors for less that two cents per hour, in conditions no better than the horror my grandmother faced at the same age, to stock the shelves of Wal-Mart stores in the US. Just as the generation of my great grandmother understood when they campaigned for child labor protection and universal public education, competing with the forced labor of children drives wages and working conditions down to levels that threaten survival for all adult workers everywhere.

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