Source: http://aaap.be/Pdf/International-Council-Correspondence/International-Council-Correspondence-3-04a.pdf
http://aaap.be/Pdf/International-Council-Correspondence/International-Council-Correspondence-3-04b.pdf
International Council Correspondence, Vol. III (1937), No 4 (April)
The particular issue that causes so much intra-class conflict among the exploiters from time to time is that of child labor. But the children and youth of the land will continue to be exploited regardless of legislation, protests, and the fine desires of those capitalists whose profit-making does not requite the direct expenditure of children’s labor-power.
Exploitation of Child Labor is necessary to Capitalism
The exploitation of children is a necessary factor in production for profits. Under capitalism, the working class and its children are only a part of the investment capital in the production of surplus value. The labor-power of child workers will be always in demand in capitalist production because its maintenance and reproduction is less costly than that of adult workers. Anything necessary to the production of surplus value cannot be abolished by legislation, but only by a revolutionary working class bent upon changing the relations of production from capitalist to communist relations.
When the framers of the Child Labor Amendment made 18 years the boundary line between childhood and maturity, they had hazardous industries in mind; that is, those particular factories and mills in which the labor-power of children and youth is not so productive.
Under the codes of the one-time National Recovery Act, 100,000 children marched out of mills and factories thruout the country to make places for workers hitherto unemployed because these workers could not successfully bid for the sale of their labor-power at wages at which the children were hired. But American labor embraces more than the industrial scene. Two million children between the ages of ten and eighteen are now listed as working. Industry accounted for only a small proportion of the total. The greatest number, nearly a half million, are engaged in agriculture. Where labor-power is employed on a large scale, children’s hands and eyes are important because they are cheaper, and this is why most of the agrarian states oppose legislation prohibiting child labor.
When, over a period of time, the exploitation of children presents itself to the population in all of its degrading reality, when capitalists themselves can fully view the results of their handiwork-workers with maimed and stunted bodies, mentally subnormal and neurotic, – when such a situation tends to threaten even the existence of capital itself, only then are legislative measures formulated, interpreted, passed upon and enforced. Nevertheless, the gamut of law-making and law enforcement must leave loopholes thru which the politicians eject their interpretation of the law in the interest of those sections of capitalists for whom the labor of children is necessary for their profit-making. In short, the history of child labor legislation reveals the age-old flexibility of capitalist legislation in general, where at times the remedy is wrse than the disease.
The visionaries of a haven within capitalism everlastingly rub elbows with politicians in the hope of eradicating this or that over-shadowing feature of capitalist exploitation, but the pious wishes of such “hopefuls” do not allay the affects of capital in its exploitation of the working class and its offspring, as is disclosed from the monotonous history of child labor legislation in this country.
The States’ “Legislation” of Child Labor
Every State in the Union has on its statutes laws for the regulation of children’s labor. But there are always ways of getting around those laws. An example of this is the amount of tenement home work done by New Jersey children, distributed to them from factories in neighboring states. Thus New York manufacturers who were sending their work to New Jersey to escape the New York regulations against tenement home work, were not subject to the penalties imposed by the New Jersey laws. In this way, they successfully dodged state laws.
Only recently New York’s Legislature supported a measure designed “to outlaw sale and production within the State of goods made by child labor as a substitute for ratification of the Federal Child Labor Amendment”.
Child workers themselves cross state lines in search of work, where state regulations conflict with the necessity which capitalism forces upon the children who must be exploited in order to live. The importation of children from one state to another is a particular feature of capitalism, and cannot be eliminated so long as capitalist relations exist. As many industries have shifted to the southern states, the difficulty of securing adequate labor power has led to the importation of children from northern cities for seasonal work, such as exists in the canning industry, these children returning when they are no longer needed.
New York City is the worst example of tenement home work. Thousands of boys and girls, some as young as two and three old, make artificial flowers, sew garments, make cheap toys. Tedious and menial jobs! The State cannot interfere with this kind of child labor because it licenses tenements for home employment and does not employ sufficient inspectors to see that the child labor laws are obeyed.
Industrial capitalists in some states raise the cry of “Unfairness” when their products must compete on the market with those of manufacturers in states where lower child labor standards are permitted. Even though a Federal minimum of wage rates and hours of labor were fixed for children for all the states, enforcement of these laws proved “too slow and inadequate”. For this reason Congress and the Federal administration were finally looked to for the remedy.
Federal Legislation of Child Labor
In December 1906 the first proposals for a Federal law was made in Congress to “prohibit the employment of children in the manufacture or production of articles intended for interstate commerce”. Ten years later, in September 1917, the Federal child labor law was adopted. Congress sought in this measure to close the channels of interstate and foreign commerce to the products of child labor. After this law had been in operation nine months, the United States Supreme Court passed a decision that the law was not a legitimate exercise of Congress’s power to regulate interstate commerce and was therefore unconstitutional.
Following this decision, Congress enacted, in Feb. 1919, as part of the revenue act of 1918 a provision for a tax of ten per cent on the annual net profit of certain establishments which employed children in violation of the age and hour standards laid down in the act. The Supreme Court again held that this law was not a valid exercise of Congress’s right to lay and collect taxes.
Only two methods were therefore left to Congress. It must either abandon the object which was sought in the above two laws, or the constitution must be amended so as to give Congress the power which it was believed to have when these two laws were passed. The latter course was taken.
The type of law that Congress would be likely to pass under the Amendment is as follows: it would prohibit the shipment of interstate commerce of goods produced in mines and quarries in which children under 16 years of age were employed; or in workshops or factories in which children under 14 years were employed, or in which children aged 14 to 16 worked more than eight hours a day or six days a week or between 7 p. m. and 6 a. m.
The Amendment was submitted for ratification by Congress in 1924, rejected by thirty-five states within three years after it was submitted by a two-thirds vote of Congress and revived in State legislatures in 1933 by the N.R.A. Among the 28 states which have ratified the Amendment are many which originally rejected it. As for the record of rejections by States, since 1933 there have been a total of 41 rejections; of these, eleven came in 1933, seven in 1934, nineteen in 1935, and four in 1936. So much for the hopeless attempt to regulate and prohibit the exploitation of children by capitalist legislation.
The Holy Roman Catholic Church!
The Catholic Church is poking its nose into the issue in the hope of stiffening opposition to ratifying the Amendment. The Amendment, if ratified, would “threaten interference with religious education”. This reason took hold of the Church’s flock of Democratic members, particularly in the New York State Assembly at Albany and prevented ratification by that Assembly. The Catholic Church partially maintains its schools, convents and orphan asylums by the labor of Catholic orphans and by the labor of those children whose parents cannot afford to pay for their training. The Church is up to its medieval trickery of hiding under its religious cloak the real reasons for its existence.
To the ladies!
At the time woman suffrage was made lawful in this country, the economic specialists staked their hopes on the woman voter. They expected much improvement in social legislation thru the civic zeal of the woman voter and were confident that American women were against “child slavery”. But, alas! furthered capitalism left its mark: there is not the enthusiasm on the part of the women for child welfare that “public spirited” individuals anticipated, although feminine philanthropists continue to go about as usual in Polyanna fashion prying into the humble affairs of working mothers. In the fashionable Biltmore Hotel in New York City, Secretary of Labor, Frances Perkins, recently appealed to 300 business and professional women “to exercise their ancient mercies” by interesting themselves in those children who are forced to work. The capitalist class is composed of women as well as men; women who do not hesitate to exploit the children of working mothers if such exploitation assures them a life of leisure. The misery of the working class and its children arises from society’s division into economic categories. Therefore, any special appeal to either sex as such is useless.
State Maintenance of Children
From time to time there is advanced the idea that the State should take over the feeding and care of the children, and in this way eliminate child labor. Altho this scheme is entirely an illusion, as capitalism needs the family form for its very existence, assuming State maintenance of children to be possible, then the value of labor-power would drop; it would no longer include the reproduction costs. If parents were relieved of the cost of maintaining their children, then in actuality the wages of the parents will be depreciated by way of competition. Childless married would compete with the fathers of families and share in the wage reduction without being relieved of any burden. Freed of the care of their children, mothers would be forced into the labor market to sharpen the competition there. Childless wives would also be forced into the struggle for wok. Male workers would be compelled to compete with women for their living and their wages would be reduced accordingly. So that capitalism gets the labor-power of the women as well as of the men for the subsistence of the two sexes, instead of only the labor-power of the men.
Child Labor Under Communism
We do not oppose child labor. On the contrary, we are in favor of children working. What we do oppose is the ruthless exploitation of both child and adult workers in the production for profits.
In the absence of capitalist relations of production, children will be required to work, but their labor will be combination of productive labor with instructions, according to different age periods. Training children at an early age to work will be a necessity under communism. It will lay the foundation during tender years for future useful men and women of a society where each individual contributes his share to the total social labor. Freed from the necessity to exploit the labor of children, society will find no need for “demands”, above all, such a sentimental one as “Prohibition of Child Labor”, a demand arising from the ruthlessness of capitalist exploitation of children, coupled with the sight of children of the capitalist class who are coddled, overfed, trained at an early age to class distinction, with an aversion to work. For that future society, the demands, protests and legislation attempting to “prohibit” child labor, all the issues concomitatnt to the exploitation of the working class and its offsprng, will form only a part of the historical epoch that was capitalism.