David Keys walks straight into the Journalidiot category with his headline, which reads,
Revealed: Industrial Revolution was powered by child slaves (src)
Which is fine, except for a few minor problems:
- This is not a new revelation; I knew about child labour in industrial Britain when I was studying the period at GCSE. (Probably my favourite period of history, by the way. Technology, progress, economics… I loved all that.) I suspect that Marx and Engels had a few things to say about children in factories, too: they wouldn't have passed up an opportunity to slate the wicked capitalists for giving families work.
- It was not simply the Industrial Revolution: children had always worked. It used to be on the farm or in the fields alongside their parents. When the parents moved to the cities to find work in the factories, it became factory work. This is a natural evolution of an existing phenomenon, as the body of the article goes on to note.
- It was not 'powered': children were a part of the workforce, and as the article goes on to note, only about fifteen percent, and they would have provided less of the output since they are not generally as productive. So they were a significant, contributing minority, but a minority nonetheless.
- 'Slaves' is pure hyperbole, if not an actual calumny against mill-owners. The children were paid, just like the adults were, and they went out to work through economic necessity rather than at the barrel of a gun. If 'having to work in order to eat' is slavery, then I guess we are all slaves.
So, I think that leaves 'was', 'by' and potentially 'child' as accurate. Nice work there.
This isn't simply a quibble over an idiot journalist's interpretation of history. Nowadays, it is common among left-wing hacks to refer to child labour as slavery when it takes place in the developing world.
Plainly, that children work in factories is not desirable. I do not dispute this; I am not certain many people would. However, the choice is not simplistically between 'working in factories' and 'not working in factories'. (Or even 'in fields',
etc.) It is between 'eating' and 'not eating': there are developing countries where children neither work nor eat, and developing countries where children work and eat.
In fact, it is practically a
sine qua non of a developed country that children are generally able to eat without working, or equivalently, a good definition of absolute poverty that it is necessary for your children to work in order to eat. The United Kingdom was not, until the latter half of the nineteenth century or possibly even the early part of the twentieth, a developed country by this definition. Hence, children worked in order that the family had enough income to live on.
Nowadays, British children do not have to work in order to eat. The reason that this state of affairs came about was economic growth: parents could earn enough to cover their household necessities without needing the children to work. And the Industrial Revolution was of a significance in that process which cannot be underestimated. So to discover that children during the Industrial Revolution is no surprise. The real news is that the Industrial Revolution ensured that children do not have to work any more. We shouldn't damn the factory owners for employing children, but rather praise them for, ultimately, putting children out of a job!
When we hear about children having to go out to work in developing countries, it is right to be sympathetic. We don't want that to have to happen. But the way that it can be stopped is not by simplistically banning child labour: that is the wrong end of the problem. It takes an unhistorical view, and in fact condemns a country to grinding poverty. Those countries are socially and in some senses economically at a level similar to industrial Britain, and they need to grow economically in order to generate sufficient wealth to be able to afford for the children in them not to have to work.
And all together now, what is the solution for that? Capitalism, free trade, investment, progress… all things which David Keys, in his rush to be a trendy anti-imperialist, seems to want to denigrate.
8 comments:
"Slavery" isn't just working without pay: it's working without choice.
By which I mean: yes, if I didn't work, that would have all sorts of undesirable consequences. But that doesn't mean I aren't "free" to leave the job I'm in.
But a child under the age of ten is not in a position to make a meaningful choice either to start working or to stop doing so. That's why "slavery" - while I recoil from it just as you do - is not an inappropriate term, and indeed "child labour" amounts to something of a euphemism. (Albeit not a very euphemistic euphemism!)
Also, where's your evidence that "there are developing countries where children neither work nor eat, and developing countries where children work and eat" (with the corresponding implication that there are no developing countries where children eat but don't work)?
The problem with the word 'slavery' is it has connotations. Were these children rounded up at gunpoint and frogmarched off to a dark, satanic mill to work for next to nothing? No. They were sent out by their parents; but I'll grant that subject to that proviso the children were not in a position to make an informed, consenting choice. However, you're skating on very thin ice if you want to use that fact to undermine a parent's choice to send a child out to work, since it cuts into any choice a parent makes on behalf of a child. So I'll split the difference: if there was any enslavement going on, it was as a rule the parents doing it.
Moreover, there were two classes of child worker: those sent out by their parents, and those sent out by workhouses. (This is indisputable.) There is a suggestion, which is more disputable, that it was the latter who were really badly treated because they had no parents to look out for them, while parents tended to keep a better eye out for the conditions in which their offspring worked (src). I'm not qualified to assess the analysis in that link, but the handful of arbitrarily-selected facts I checked stand up.
As for evidence for the current state of affairs, you know of course that proving a negative is very difficult. Any statistical analysis would be vulnerable to the obvious squabbles over causality, since it is necessarily dischronologous. However, an historical analysis is at least chronological and so avoids some of the causality issues. Are you suggesting that history goes in any direction other than countries reducing their dependence on child labour as their general labour productivity increases?
"Nowadays, British children do not have to work in order to eat. The reason that this state of affairs came about was economic growth: parents could earn enough to cover their household necessities without needing the children to work."
I argue the exact opposite: Removing children from the work place was a major driver of economic growth, not merely a symptom.
You overlook the fact that child labour is enticingly inexpensive for the employer. Removing this cheap, sprightly, disposable section of the workforce forced employers to pay adults to do the work instead. Just as with the (re)introduction of a minimum wage at the end of the 20th century this process fed the economy rather than stifling it as free market absoluteists instinctively feared.
Pete: that reinforces a point I was going to make, which is that developing countries don't exist in a vacuum. Western companies make significant use of the cheaper labour that developing countries offer - which means that they (and hence we) benefit at least indirectly from child labour, as even reputable companies that avoid child labour will still benefit from its depressing of adult labour rates.
This diagram tends to support your point about ending child labour being a precondition for ending poverty rather than a mere consequence of it.
John, I can't believe you're seriously setting that diagram up as evidence in support of an argument. It's an hypothesis, and one with no supporting evidence.
Other Pete: There may be an element of that. But worker productivity has to be taken into account: you cannot consume what is not produced. In any case, it's very difficult to test the counter-factual: the claim against (to take your other example) the minimum wage isn't that it would totally spanner the economy, but rather that the economy would grow more slowly than it would have done had it not been introduced.
If 'having to work in order to eat' is slavery,
Bingo. That's why in Marx's fantasy utopia, work becomes play, and no one has to do anything except that which he feels so inclined to do at the moment. The abolition of the division of labor and the rise of the class-consciousness will lead to a kind of "pleasurable productivity" where work no longer is a toil or burden. So whereas pre-socialist man prefers to spend his leisure time reading books, playing cards, and listening to music, for the newly formed man of the socialist commonwealth, having been liberated from his alienation, building bridges will be as pleasurable to him as listening to a concert, so the productive operations of society will happen spontaneously, without any need for capitalist accoutrements such as "pay" or "investment."
It's all total nonsense, of course, but that's where the thinking that employment is slavery leads.
John H, if a picture pulled from your imagination serves as evidence, I can find substantial evidence that cavemen rode dinosaurs--dinosaurs with laser guns on their heads, while I'm fantasizing.
Ending child labor only drives economic growth when the opportunity costs are outweighed by the benefits. But that's true of every economic action, not just child labor.
"David Keys walks straight into the Journalidiot category with his headline..."
Journalists have no control over their headlines.
Well, I never knew that. I had an idea that they were written by someone else, but I thought they'd at least get run past the journo: after all, it's going out with his name underneath it. I'd be incandescent if someone came up with an utterly imbecilic headline to put atop something I'd written: it's bad enough having to stand by my own words, never mind be held accountable for someone else's! Perhaps this is yet another reason why I am glad I never contemplated a career in the media.
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