[Music] welcome to stuff you should know a production of I Heart Radio [Music] hey and welcome to the podcast I'm Josh Clark and there's Charles W Chuck Bryant and Jerry's out there hovering around in the digital weird audio ether and this is stuff you should know this is gonna be a good uplifting fun one bouncy light one I think so and it's you know hot off the presses from our uh my daughter just wrote this episode for us yeah yeah in record time too I was impressed he didn't pay her did you no uh but
it's funny I went to look up you know I've talked before about you know the fact that I started working when I was 13 at a barbecue restaurant and uh minimum wage when I started working was 3.35 cents an hour wow how far we've come it yeah they've doubled it here at the best whatever 40 years isn't that nuts dude yeah and you know we'll get to that but I have a list of kind of where we ended up with minimum wage along the years but yeah JJ's barbecue 335 an hour baby wow that's pretty
great my first um uh job was even younger than that I was like nine or ten when I was a paper boy yeah I mean I couldn't have made more than because I was only it's not like I was working every night I was working weekends I probably made like less than 50 a week um in your third team what were you spending on 13 in like a good clean Christian kit you weren't spending that on anything Archie Comics it buys a lot of Archie Comics yeah it does yes it does although they have a
lot of variations so you could easily spend fifty dollars a week on Archie Comics well back then though those those things were cheap I was living high on the hog but so 13. so uh it sounds like it man it's so our buddy Dave helped us out with this one Dave rooz and he makes a really good point that you and I sitting around talking about oh you know you made 50 bucks a week I was a paper boy like whatever stresses and troubles that we ran into post you know 1970 something um as far
as our first Jobs go when we were younger that does not qualify as child labor that's that's not really what we're talking about here today it's called the kid having a job exactly it's called Uh you just stop your griping right now because there are actual kids out there who are like real deal child laborers who work in like Danger serious conditions for little to no pay who don't get to play who may not socialize with other kids their age they may live and work in a mining camp with nothing but adults and grown-ups like
like they're they're they would they would kill for you know a JJ's barbecue job basically yeah and this is a good time to be talking about that in particular uh because this is 2021 is the international year for the elimination of child labor and as you'll see throughout this episode we've made a lot of strides here in the U.S but like you said it's not not that way everywhere and it should be and I should say it's probably a little off the mark to say that a child laborer would kill for a better job they
would probably kill to just not have to work at all in general and just to get to get to be a kid and I think ultimately for people who are activists against child labor that's the goal is to not like get better working conditions for six-year-olds it's to like just make six-year-olds not have to work any longer and we'll talk about how to solve that how that that um International year for the elimination of child labor aims to do that they have some pretty pragmatic ideas um and so hopefully though this this episode will have
a nice bow on the end but we're going to have to slog through some misery to get there Chuck take it away there's no better place to slog through misery than the founding of this country way back in the old days when the new world was new and settlers came over and they very much believed and why did I think this was Ed you said this is Dave yeah I'm almost positive it was Dave it was Ed it reads like a Dave to me but oh man if it's it I'm sorry sorry to both well
sure you need to get those guys together one day I think the year or maybe we should keep them far apart yeah exactly they might they might turn against us uh yeah so they believe very much that the Idol's hands were the devil's workshop that old saying and it you know this is one of those that was kind of hard for me to you know let's just Lop off you know developing nations today which is clearly awful I found myself as an adult more and more with the cultural relativism thinking like obviously five-year-olds shouldn't be
working in factories but when I read about like 12 and 13 year olds working hard back then I was kind of like it's not great but it was that's just kind of how it was at the time if you had parents that were farmers you're not gonna you know be just hanging out until your sweet 16th birthday having a good time you're going to be working from a pretty young age and I found myself more and more thinking like you know in certain situations that wasn't the worst thing but then you get to the industrial
revolutions and you know that's what things really got bad but kind of early on that's really what we were talking about was a lot of kids working on the farms a lot of boys working on the farm uh girls working in the house alongside their sisters and Mom and you know this kind of started when they were about 13 years old they were sort of expected to either go work and get a job and work full-time or to become an apprentice an unpaid Apprentice to work for food and board and training and I think also
in addition to that Protestant work ethic of a like like just completely in the fabric of America that was just coming out in you it's also this idea of like what else are you gonna do it's not like you can sit around and play video games or watch TV or do almost anything else except just play outside yeah but Chuck I I went back and looked to see if it was always this way and apparently in medieval England you played basically until you hit puberty and then you started to get put to work when you
hit puberty at four right like 14 but like there was like a childhood and it seems to have been somewhat wiped out by that Protestant work ethic that the Puritans brought over um or at the very least it was set back a little more you know age-wise where you started working maybe a little sooner than you would have had you been in medieval England at the time right I think I guess I'm just trying to draw a line between life in the 1640s and then life in 1938 when we eventually did something about it in
the U.S yeah no totally and there is an enormous distinction between that because it was it was like widespread but it just it seemed like they were mostly working with their families and it was just kind of the way that things were that was how life was but able to try and like keep your family alive it's not like yeah you know they were they were trying to just all survive basically right and that's actually the reason why it's still around in other parts of the world today it's not not even necessarily like a like
a work ethic where children should should work because Idle Hands Are The Devil's play things like the the Puritans thought it said it's like this is an extra worker we can have go out and make money to keep the rest of the family alive yeah we just don't have a choice in not doing that and that's that's what drives it still today right uh when the Industrial Revolution came around and we're talking about basically cotton factories in a big big way uh there were a lot of little kids working there and people like George Washington
and Alexander Hamilton thought that was awesome they did and like we're going to be skewered for even suggesting that Hamilton said this but he did he said that women and children in America would be quote rendered more useful by manufacturing establishments than they otherwise would be um and I think what he was saying is like I'm not even going to paraphrase what he's saying I think it's it you can understand it on its face yeah he's saying what you know they're not doing much use for us these kids he's mainly talking about kids here who
would otherwise quote who would otherwise be idle uh uh this isn't linmail Manuel Miranda saying this we all love him no this isn't he didn't say this in a Charming rap no this is the real Alexander Hamilton and again it was just a different time um but even way back then in the early 1800s not everyone thought this was a great thing there was a future mayor of Boston named Josiah Quincy Diamond Joe Quimby who toured a Cotton Factory a cotton spinning Factory and they had you know four-year-olds working there all the way to ten
uh maybe 10 12 hours a day for anywhere from 12 to 25 cents a day not an hour right and he said uh compassion calls us to pity these little creatures applying in a contracted room among flyers and cogs at an age when Nature requires for them air space and sports there was a dull dejection and the countenance of all of them and uh you know we'll get to some of these photos of some of these kids later on when you look at them they look like beaten down miniature adults yeah yeah they really do
they look like us exactly they look ready to retire they look unhappy they look um yeah just beaten down but they're miniature and their kids their children and it's really upsetting to see that a photograph of that I'm sure it's even more upsetting to see it in real life um and that's actually how a lot of this a lot of changes came through is just people being exposed to seeing that and kind of being shocked having their conscience shocked but as as potentially like bad as it was for the children of colonial America who were
forced to work um it got way way worse when the Second Industrial Revolution kicked off the one powered by Steam and steel and railroads and little hands and on Bridal capitalism when you inject unbridled capitalism into uh a an economy that allows for child labor you can imagine that things are going to get much much worse for the children before it finally gets better that's right and things did get worse uh when you're when all of a sudden you have a robust steel industry and coal mining industry um you have railroads that need this stuff
in a big big way and they uh you know partially kind of ran out of workers and partially just saw what was right underneath their noses which is these kids who they at this point they had long known that they could work and farm and work hard so they said you know what a lot of these families in Rural America farming dried up a bit so they moved to the city a lot of it was immigrant labor as millions of people came into the country from Europe fleeting their poverty famine-stricken countries and no matter where
they came from it was all under the thumb of the robber barons which was uh I can't remember when we did it feels like a few two or three years ago but pretty good podcast on the robber barons yeah and we also talked about them uh in our book when we talked about keeping up with the Joneses they played a big role in that too but yeah so like these the robber barons got rich through Innovation through consolidation through some pretty clever stuff a lot of them invented new techniques or processes or procedures so like
they they definitely were doing something they were being productive but they also got to be filthy rich off of the backs of immigrant labor child labor that they directly exploited and um it was basically like there was just nobody looking out for anybody else at this time it was just such a period of such enormous economic insurgence that there weren't there weren't anybody or there wasn't anybody who was sitting there saying like whoa everybody we need to stop and really think about this and do this in a much more directed smarter healthier way for our
society it was like it was like just go go let's see where this takes us and a lot of people got trampled underfoot and that definitely included children laborers or child laborers that's right and uh I think that's a good time for a break yay yay that's two years any Nays [Music] um [Laughter] so we'll be back and we'll talk a little bit about what some of these jobs might have been uh in the late 19th century for these kids right after this [Music] thank you [Music] I wonder how many gallons of coffee everyone who
has listened to this this show since the beginning has heard me drink I didn't even hear you drinking oh you didn't when I said uh-uh I had a I had a mouthful of Cafe oh interesting I have no shirt on [Laughter] that's awesome man top mine [Laughter] I think you should have left it mysterious Chuck because there were a few people out there who were about to email and say I was offended that Chuck said he wasn't wearing a shirt yeah no I put it on right before he recorded I had it off it's uh
it's a little hot I felt like I needed to dress up but the T-shirt right do you are you wearing one of those tuxedo shirts t-shirts have you ever had one of those did you ever have no I didn't no I didn't either you didn't you didn't wear them with your Rainbow suspenders now that's that stuff was a little too cutesy even for me gotcha what about one that looks like a like a ripped like chest and abdomen have you ever worn t-shirt like that no those are fun though um I think for certain people
they're fun they're also like really good at boosting your ego quietly sure there's nothing like me looking in a mirror at my beer belly covered in spray painted abs it really works your brain the brain is so dumb that it falls forward every time I can attest um all right so we were going to talk about what some of these jobs might be and it kind of really depended on where you were living um if you lived in the city or if you lived in a company town where they had these factories you were going
to be working in factories flip out in the rural areas you can be working on farms and most most Americans still lived on farms at the time so yeah sure most child labor took place on farms but if you were on that farm uh you're going to be picking cotton and tobacco you're gonna be picking a lot of stuff and doing all the sort of stuff that goes on after the picking which is stemming DC yeah all that stuff shucking mm-hmm yeah stuff I did when I was a kid we had a big big garden
and my mom took us to The Cannery uh and it was awful I hated it just took you to The Cannery to like for a sightseeing trip or for work to can so like there was a cannery that your mom went to you guys had so much stuff you had to go to a second location to can it there was a cannery in DeKalb County a sort of industrial Cannery for the people okay and we would take green beans and corn and uh we made preserves and all kinds of stuff and they had like and
you know you could can your own junk there it sounds like it's like a lot of zootopia and yeah and we would you know put sharpie uh like beans on the can and Sharpie and put it in the pantry huh that's really it's really interesting I had no idea that there was a cannery in DeKalb County yeah not too far from where I live now actually it's like 15 minutes away probably do you shudder every time you pass it I do a little actually I don't pass it much but it's over near the dog uh
pound where you can go adopt a dog and so I think we adopted Nico there and I drove by the Cannery and just like yeah I'll bet it was hot well you were lucky you weren't five or six and left there to work all day every day aren't you yes you know for almost no money yeah pennies for a bucket of whatever you shucked or shelled or did whatever peeled um yeah working at a cannery would probably not have been very fun um they were also furnace stoking jobs available whether you wanted them or not
what else Chuck uh well kids did work in canneries they also worked in textile mills they had bobbin boys and Bob and girls this one doesn't sound so bad to me but I'm sure I'm missing something that makes it atrocious well I mean they would climb up on the machine and remove the bobbins the full bobbins and replacing them with empty ones so I don't think that was like the worst job in the world but uh when you're doing that for 10 or 12 hours a day and you're six it's right it's probably a bit
of a buzz kill yeah yeah I have an a problem inherently with child labor in general no no I know what you mean not like having a job like you or I had first off they got no problem with that but child any kind of child labor even if it is kind of kush comparatively no I agree that one wasn't terrible it may have been dangerous I don't know there's no way those bobbins were yeah there's no way it wasn't dangerous it had to have been dangerous we're talking about the 19th century in Industry it
was dangerous in some way there was no OSHA no no one uh if you did live in the city and did uh work uh around factories um you would do that but there were also plenty of other jobs you could deliver like be essentially they call them Telegraph boys sort of delivering you know emails basically by hand to people all over town uh you could shine shoes you could sell newspapers like you did I didn't stand on the street corner I was in a newsie which we'll talk a little more about Newsies in a second
I was a delivery boy and not not a really great one either I frequently overslept and um it was not good at delivering papers my mom and my oldest sister would have to do my route once in a while is this a bike deal yes okay um and uh the thing is is like they also make you shake down the people for their delinquent subscriptions so I was like a strong arm guy too for the Toledo Blade as well I want my two dollars basically that's exactly right and that was right in my wheelhouse too
I was like this hits a little too close to home for me to laugh at this kid I know what he's going through I've had to put my foot in somebody's door before to get there two dollars didn't ask for a dime hahaha I haven't seen that in a while that was a good movie yeah classic yeah uh if you lived in the mountains of Appalachia you might have been a a breaker boy um or a mule Handler and breaker boys will get I guess we can go ahead and tell everyone what that is sure
you would sit around and and break apart lumps of coal into uniform pieces all day long yep and break dance on your brakes yeah breaker boys but that was it and they wouldn't let you wear gloves while you were a breaker boy too because they're like no no you can't break these things as uniformly if you wear gloves you stupid kid so you you have to basically absorb all of this coal dust into your skin get all sorts of little cuts and calluses and all that by the time you're six seven eight um and just
do this this is your life now welcome to Pennsylvania right uh then let's say you managed to escape all forms of formal jobs your parents they didn't make you go to the factory you did live in the city so you didn't have to work on a farm and you might think he just had it made in the shade not so because there was plenty of jobs that you could do right there from your cruddy little tenement apartment uh like weaving baskets or making paper flowers or hand rolling cigars and cigarettes all day long and selling
them yeah it was like you know your whole family worked on a farm or if you lived in a tenement your whole family worked you know in what are called tenement Industries so there was basically not a lot of Escape I get the impression that you basically had to have wealthy parents to not be forced into child labor at the time yeah and I might have mentioned this once before my mom did a thing for a little while where uh we would make money doing like stuffing envelopes did you remember that stuff I do and
I don't even remember what it was for I guess there were three companies uh okay I want to say Easter Seals had people do that too but I'm sure they didn't pay there no no so this would be like a company that would have like a packet they would send out that had like five things in it I gotcha and we would be responsible for getting all that stuff in huge boxes assembling it all into the envelopes that they could mail and we would get paid as a family to do that that's cute that's super
late 70s early 80s like I can see your mom talking on the princess phone making all the arrangements for them to ship that to her and getting the instructions you know and then hanging up in that 50 foot long cord just kind of coils up on its own quietly on the floor yeah and I didn't mind that so much because I made a little money and I could that's something I could do while I watched television yeah totally totally which is the perfect job as we all know yeah not exactly a high pressure job it
sounds like I wouldn't even know if that qualifies as a tenement industry to tell you the truth no not in the 1970s no you had a lot of jobs though as a kid good for you I've always wanted my own money products didn't work ethic shining through like a city upon a hill should we talk Newsies yeah we should and I think also the newsy um strike that we're going to mention deserves its own episode at least I shortly agree if not yeah it's on an episode Okay so yeah let's just not talk about Newsies
no no I thought the same thing and the more I got into the strike I was like this is just too much we got to do something uh but the idea was that little boys would buy a stack of newspapers wholesale for about 50 cents per 100. girls too I saw girls that did it too oh girls did it too all right and they sold them for a penny a piece so they would make half a penny per paper uh selling in the big cities especially New York City of course and then eventually in 1899
they did go on strike and it was a big deal it kind of ground I mean it didn't grind them to a complete halt but it really disrupted their their flow in getting newspapers into the hands of people dude the their sales over this two-week strike went down two-thirds yeah like they brought the they brought Pulitzer Pulitzer and um Hearst to their knees basically these Newsies did and they got some concessions too yeah and I think the deal was is that morning subscribers were generally subscribers or the morning paper was generally for subscribers but it
was that afternoon paper that second edition that the Newsies really raked it in on because most people didn't subscribe to that right and uh so they really weren't selling any second editions hardly and the one big concession they got which was huge was they got them to agree to full buybacks on unused unsold papers which is a really really big deal but it also really kind of goes to show you how much the the the newspaper Barons believed Newsies were Scrappy enough that they wouldn't just sit around and be like I don't have to sell
these all you know I don't have to worry about this you know they'll be bought back anyway I don't have to work to sell them well but buyback just means they give them back the money they paid for him it's not like they would make any money they would just in fact it incentivized them I think to take out more papers yeah and sell more papers because they knew they wouldn't be stuck with them yeah totally we'll probably edit that part out so um one of the things you mentioned was making cigars like in your
family's one-room apartment in say New York or something like that right yeah and that was um apparently really bad in that not only did you work long hours for very little pain cramped working conditions with with your family on top of everything else um you would frequently come down with nicotine poisoning as a little kid because you're rolling cured sometimes you're handling uncured tobacco and you're ingesting lots of nicotine through your skin at the time like you know in a single day and so you might be nauseated you might be dizzy you might just turn
green it can get worse than that too you actually can suffer respiratory distress as well and apparently this is a big problem still with child laborers in Zimbabwe because I think about 20 years ago that country doubled down on their tobacco production and now it's like one of the biggest um the biggest exports of Zimbabwe but it's also a very poor country so they use child labor a lot and so children are still to this day being exposed to tobacco and they're rolling their handling tobacco they're rolling stuff they're rolling cigars they're sorting it they're
just the kids in tobacco should not be in the same room together basically yeah it you know it never occurred to me that that I guess it would be a transdermal ingestion right yeah totally uh but sure I mean you put Tobacco on bee stings and all kinds of things so of course it's going to get into their skin yeah and having gotten myself sick on Tobacco a time or two in my life I can tell you it is not pleasant and to do it against your will just because you're handling it for your job
that you don't even want is that sounds torturous actually yeah I love that story uh should you retell it for people who haven't heard it are you talking about eighth grade in the tree fort is that when you like smoke the whole pack of cigarettes and got sick it was more like a pack and a half okay it was right after I first started smoking and I was like unbelievable I was like uh I really like how this makes me feel let's see how like 30 of these things make me feel and I was seeing
my reading and comic books up in the tree fort in the woods that my friends and I built and uh I just went too far man I felt so bad oh man like that was rough like I felt like I looked green it was it was bad news that's one of those moments where you like you really wish you could have like video footage kind of that's what that looked like I kind of hope when I die it's a little bit like Defending Your Life so they can try I'll be like show me that one
we can go over the other stuff but I really want to see that clip yeah Rip Torn will be there yeah out of this though is do not ever start smoking I I deeply regret ever having started smoking as a kid as an adult it doesn't matter like just don't ever start smoking and do yourself a real favor you did a great job quitting though and you've never looked back nope I didn't good job it was it was surprisingly easy because I was like oh hold on one more thing yeah I think if there are
people out there who are considering smoking right now and are worried about the time they're gonna have one of my big worries was that I was going to spend every day of the rest of my life wishing for a cigarette and that's just not how it goes be like you you spend a week two weeks if it's really bad maybe three weeks really longing for a cigarette and then it starts to get easier and easier and then eventually you're grossed out by the thought of cigarettes and people smoking cigarettes around you and you don't ever
want to see one again so if that's what's keeping you from quitting don't let it because that's not how it is I like that good PSA thanks man thanks uh I think before we break maybe we'll just go over some of these final stats here uh at the basically the peak and then about 1900 um by 1891 out of every five kids under 16 was working um 1.7 million kids under 16. uh was six percent of the total Workforce in the 1900 census and that's just kids who were registered to work in these factories like
that does not include these kids rolling cigars in their house or the kids on the family farm so it was much much higher than that yeah because I think two-thirds of kids um in general in the in the country worked in agriculture so yeah if they were not counting agriculture they missed out on a lot of kids in that number and that's still a staggering number in and of itself 1.7 million yeah and if you're wondering back then what effect this had on education just a snapshot from Philadelphia in 1900 uh 15 of 13 year
old boys had left school to work and I think half of 15 year old boys were not in school anymore because they were working or the and like a significant portion because they were naughty right yeah they just didn't want to do anything but get this this is the Staggering one to me it's 17 year old boys only 10 percent of them were still in school in 1900 in Philadelphia that is that does not bode well for the future um of a of a of a an economy and I think that actually is one reason
why public education became so much more compulsory and one reason why people uh came around to anti-child labor laws is the idea that no there's a lot more that they could be doing than just working in a factory almost literally their entire lives like we can do we can do better and we can build a better a better society and a better economy if we invest in their education instead of robbing them of it all right I guess we'll take a break and talk about when that started in Earnest and it wasn't just then when
you mentioned it [Music] [Music] so uh Chuck um it turns out that there were so the progressive error is one of my favorite errors or I should say the people from the Progressive Era are some of my favorite people like Francis agreed although she was a second or third wave Progressive reformer but she was inspired by some of these earlier ones who were working on things like um Fair wages like a minimum wage minimum or maximum uh work days or working hours and then they also train their sites on things like ending child labor or
at the very least really restricting the amount of work a kid could do especially um in regards to them being in school too the idea was to put school first and then if the kid had the wherewithal or their parents really needed the money or something like that they could let them work in addition to school but School needed to come first and this is really radical I mean it seems radical we had kids rolling cigars in their one-room apartment in New York their whole lives and now all of a sudden some people are coming
up me like no no kids should be in school and then maybe working preferably not working so how do we make that happen yeah it was a very big deal and most of these or a lot of them were women people like Jane Adams and Julia Lathrop and Lillian Ward um anti-poverty measures and this is stuff that you know they would also go on to Champion uh women's rights and women's rights in the workforce and women's rights to vote so it was the whole Progressive Movement was kind of tied up in all these you know
radical ideas about you know being fair and good decent human beings right yeah radicals um so uh here's the problem is you've got these robber barons and these Factory owners and then these industrialists who are like wait a minute we got a good deal going because we don't have to pay these kids much they're probably not going to unionize like the Newsies thing was definitely an anomaly yeah uh that didn't happen much and he said they were like we gotta we got a good thing going and uh so we're gonna Lobby against this as hard
as we can but surely they were unsuccessful right no they were successful they they did they blocked a lot of legislation early on uh for this kind of Regulation um federally States uh you know it kind of depends on where it was but states did establish child labor Commissions in some states had some minimum ages minimum or maximum hours and minimum wages it was um they were sparse I couldn't find what states passed it but um for the most part there was a they were probably for the most part though there was a a lot
of pushback and enough pushback among the states the residents of the states that that not a lot got passed so there was a progressive movement that started saying like the 1890s and it had to it basically like any Progressive Movement it ran full steam ahead hit a huge wall of industry and then had to slowly just keep pushing and pushing and chugging and chugging and keeping at it for a few decades before it was successful and one of the ways that it became successful or the way that it kept pushing at it after it hit
that wall of industry is um a group called The National child labor committee formed and I think they formed in back in 1904 and they were basically they became a lobbying group to Lobby against the lobbying against child labor laws that ended child labor yeah and they had a pretty uh smart way to get attention and that was in hiring a photographer named Lewis Hein yeah to go around and sneakily document what was going on with this camera yeah like he was he worked as a sociologist and a teacher and then later became a photographer
was also a photographer and uh I think he himself was a kid who was working 12 13 hour days so he was like let me start taking pictures of these kids and maybe that because you know that's worth a thousand words they say at least and he said five thousand yeah so that means that he took 50 000 words no five five thousand I'm just kidding 500. no I know I undermine your confidence it was totally wrong it was purposefully wrong though let me just do that real quick he took five million words that's a
lot of words um and if you go back you've probably seen a bunch of these pictures if you've seen pictures of very unhappy kids outside of a coal mine or standing on the mountains of shucked oysters or standing around uh Factory machines like little miniature adults they were probably Lewis Heinz photos yeah I mean 5 000 photos all archived in the Library of Congress from what I understand um and he had like a really great eye to begin with so like they're really good photographs in and of themselves but you know you don't have to
sit there and like you know try to really contemplate it it just hits you immediately what you're looking at and how sad what you're looking at is and so he and the national child labor committee got these into newspapers and like you said uh he was very sneaky he he would poses different things one of them made sense to me the industrial Machinery photographer okay yeah got that but what excuse for the Bible salesman have for taking photographs of the kids at the factory I could not find that don't save my life I mean the
only thing I would could think is that got him in the door and then maybe he was like and I just love kids and can I take some pictures but I don't know and this is a time before stranger danger I guess so they were like sure right I mean they're child laborers I don't care about them yeah he also um he wore a special jacket where he had the buttons on the jacket aligned and known measurements so if he went over and stood like he would take a kid's picture and he would ask you
know they're documented like their names and their ages and stuff uh as best he could but he would go stand next to them if he felt like he couldn't outright ask what their age was to kind of tip off that maybe he was not a Bible salesman right uh and you know if the kid went up to the second or third button he would know roughly how tall they were or no he would know how tall they were then roughly how old they were right the other thing they were giants right right yeah I'm sure
you know he didn't get them all right but you know you can't win them all but the other thing that made it um that jacket special Chuck was that the lining was made of a t-shirt of a ripped chest and abdomen and it would make him feel really good about himself when he put that jacket on oh that's good nice call back uh when did things finally change though uh well they started to kind of change like these these pictures shock the conscience of the nation when they when they saw them when they made them
into newspapers and they were accompanied by muckraking articles about how bad these conditions were and you know shame on you America for turning a blind eye to this kind of thing um but it wasn't like an instantaneous switch was thrown it still took decades I think the first proposal for anti-child labor um legislation came in 1906 Senator Albert Beveridge of Indiana um was the first to propose it got taken up in 1916 by the Keating act that was actually passed but the Supreme Court shut it down and then there was some more legislation that there
was a constitutional amendment actually that got passed but wasn't ratified by the states and then it wasn't until the Great Depression and the New Deal that it finally got passed and I think if it were just the New Deal it wouldn't have gotten passed but the Great Depression changed things socially enough that it opened the door for an end to child labor in America yeah like ironically I think massive unemployment with so many adults out of work they couldn't turn around and just hire kids to do these jobs for lower wages it was I mean
even at a time when it a bad look didn't really matter as much as as it does today they even knew that that was a really bad look and that they probably couldn't do something like that so yeah uh eventually the fair laborers Fair labor standards Act of 1938 uh thank you Francis Perkins our old buddy that's right among others um this finally set a national minimum wage for the very first time uh maximum number of hours for workers and then child labor limitations notably that if you are under 16 you cannot work in manufacturing
and you cannot work in coal mining at all because they're just too dangerous another couple of things it did it established uh overtime time and a half oh yeah so if you went over 40 hours a week you could only work up to 44 but you could work four hours at time and a half and that very first minimum wage was 25 cents an hour man uh 1939 it went up to 30 45 I went up to 40. uh in 1956 it finally reached a dollar kaching and it didn't crack six dollars until 2008. I
know dude it's just shameful isn't that nuts we definitely need to do a minimum wage episode two because it's just not as cut and dried as yeah it's raised the minimum wage like there's just it like there's a lot to it I really want to do one on that yeah I hadn't really kept up with it because I before I got salary jobs I worked as a waiter for 15 or 20 years or something so or as a PA on movie sets and TV sets and that's not a hourly thing either so like I hadn't
had an hourly rate job since College so I didn't really know you know kind of how it changed over the years I did not know it was 2008 when they cracked six dollars that's really low it really is it's very it's that's just not okay and it's still at seven something right now it's 97.75 uh no it's 7 25 actually I think it yeah that's the national minimum wage right yeah again some of the states are are raising stuff slowly but surely but that's the federal one still boy this is Alabama doesn't have a minimum
wage is that right is that possible yeah that's possible man it doesn't have to look into that that's on the Fly well um yeah we'll do a whole one on minimum wage for sure coming up but um you said that the the fair labor standards act uh was um uh passed in 1938 and it's still basically governs child labor um and one of the things that it does Chuck is it it divides uh child labor into Agricultural and non-agricultural jobs and with agriculture or non-agricultural jobs there's like a pretty decent amount of protections like kids
can't work in hazardous stuff until they're 18 things like blasting mining Forest firefighting that kind of stuff um that if you're under 16 you can only work a maximum of three hours a day during the school year um there's some exemptions did you see the thing about home-based wreath making yeah so you cannot non-agriculturally you cannot work if you're under 14 at all like I could not have worked as a busboy at 13. right supposedly but I still did um unless that was passed since then because this thing's been ratified a million times or uh
yeah not ratified but amended uh but yeah the if you're a child actor you can work if you're under 14 obviously if you're a newsy you can still deliver newspapers if you're under 14. and home-based wreath makers dude so weird it is weird and not only is it home-based wreath making is Exempted from child labor laws in the United States it has to be a specific kind of wreath that has to be mostly Evergreen wreaths so if you're making wreaths and it has to be at home if you're having your kid make wreaths at home
and they're not mostly Evergreen that's illegal and if they're making things out of Evergreen that are not wreaths like say Garland that's illegal specifically a homemade wreaths that are mostly Evergreen it's really really interesting it's one of the most bizarre facts we've ever talked about on this episode in this show yeah we're gonna keep that one in my pocket totally but agricultural though they have like very little protection like almost shamefully little protections yeah if you're 16 years old and you live on your family farm they can work you um there's no limit on how
many hours they can work you you can work jobs that the Department of Labor considers hazardous I think 14 year olds also can work unlimited hours if it's outside the school day and then the kids as young as 12 I think actually 12 and younger can work with parental consent yeah still yeah basically unlimited hours uh or at least up to 72 hours and that's during the school year as well and as a result of this uh 55 of child Farm Workers graduate from high school here in you know the 2020-ish yeah in the United
States we're talking about in the hundred thousand of them are injured on the job every year child Farm laborers yes trying to get all this changed yeah they're basically saying like look just just take these things that we apply to non-agricultural jobs and apply it to agricultural problem solved and that would solve a lot of problems I'm sure it would create a lot of problems that you and I are unaware of not being Farm folk but it would solve a lot of the child labor problems that child labor activists have issues with if we do
nothing for the the the much more rampant problems that are endemic around the world with child labor where a lot of it resembles basically uh how America was with how labor at the at the you know during the Gilded Age yeah 158 million kids are estimated to be the victims of child labor around the world uh the good news is that's down 30 percent from 20 years ago um but the bad news is is that's a lot of kids and uh I think 71 of those are in agriculture harvesting fishing herding stuff like that uh
but there are a lot of kids around the world that still like work in Coal Mines yeah like that's too narrow for an adult it's too dangerous you go in there and do it instead and they'll work with like they'll work at Wildcat gold mine so they're having to like separate gold with Mercury so they're getting mercury poisoning at a young age which really messes with you developmentally um on Tobacco farms in places like Zimbabwe not only are they having to get um you know nicotine poisoning they're also being poisoned by um toxic pesticides that
are used on the crops and stuff too so like these kids are working in like deplorable working conditions and um there's just some really basic stuff that needs to change that would just free The Children of the world the world around from what is essentially like indentured servitude right now yeah and there's four kind of basic things that the ILO says we can do around the country and that like you said at the very beginning they're very pragmatic they all make sense and they would really make a difference and the first is expand access to
education uh get kids in school and um get rid of fees to be in school and put them if they're in a school situation they're way less likely to join the workforce that that's what our friends at co-ed do they they're like helping get kids off of Family Farms and into schools by removing any barriers between them and in school yep it's all through education it's a great great organization yep what else uh and that's by the way the Cooperative I always I'd say that word wrong cooperative for Education yeah look them up we've championed
them for years and we got a little uh a little uh fun thing coming up that we're doing with them that you guys might be interested in so stay tuned for that yeah uh let me see what's the next one help families meet basic needs uh this could be a universal basic income it could be a monthly stipend but basically so families don't have to send their kids out to Works to provide at the you know most basic level yeah and a way that you can help that is through Kiva um by lending making micro
loans to people so that they can they have the capital to grow from uh initially yeah um there's also like if you make sure that adults are getting better wages and pay and their rights are protected it makes their children less likely to be forced into the workplace to begin with because it's not again there's not like adults the world Brown saying you know our kids need to be working because they're lazy like their kids need to be working because they the adults aren't getting paid enough and if you um make sure that your you
know if you're a western company and you make sure that you're paying everybody a fair wage there's a good chance that you can eradicate child labor from your supply chain yeah uh and then the last thing is just enforcement they can put all the laws that they want on the books but unless someone's gonna actually work on enforcement then it really doesn't matter much so uh that's really sort of the last step is uh funding for enforcement yeah and Germany actually just passed the law recently that that demands that its companies examine do due diligence
and examine their supply chains to see if there's child labor involved and to do something about it that doesn't have like as much teeth as Human Rights Watch was saying that they wish it had but it's a good first step and hopefully the way that that you know Progressive Nations will start moving that's right um two things big shout out I can't remember uh his name but the young listener who was mowing the lawn for his dad and wrote in to request this episode oh that's right I think he prompted this episode so hats off
to you young sir I hope you can kick up your heels for a little while and then also this was indeed a Dave Rouge joint so thanks again to Dave for this one right that's right since Chuck said that's right everybody means it's time for a listener mail I'm gonna call this uh I think it's just thanks uh Hey guys writing in from Louisville Kentucky do you say how much I love the show even though Josh said the kfcm center was in Lexington I'll never live that town your correction put a smile on my face
knowing that there are other stuff you should know fans near me I work in long-term care and use your podcast many different ways I help people with cognitive impairments set up their tablets and such for enrichment socialization and stimulation and one of the first activities I show them is how to access entertainment with educational podcast everyone can find something they want to learn about on stuff you should know also help people find ways of remembering new information and use your short stuff episodes for those with shorter attention spans and finally my own enjoyment is a
factor I listen to many different podcasts during my drive to and from work but only stuff you should know has the ability to get me into a different headspace I attribute that to Josh and Chuck none of these topics would be nearly as interesting without you guys but cried and laughed sometimes both all in all of your episodes even the really mathy ones uh I feel you on that one Chuck and Josh yeah oh that was a dig I wouldn't dig be mask guy no no but I I like to think I am yeah okay
sorry about that uh the episode on snake handling is a personal favorite I appreciate and absolutely love the show and everyone that works on it thanks for keeping it going I hope to see you all in Kentucky that is from Ellie well thanks again Ellie and uh if you want to get in touch with us like Ellie did you can write us an email send it off to stuff podcast at iheartradio.com stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio for more podcasts my heart radio visit the iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts or wherever you listen
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