How Photography Helped to End Child Labor in America

The haunting photographs of Lewis Hine

In the year 2023, we apparently have a child labor problem in the United States. Over the last few months, the topic has popped up in the news a number of times:

• Migrant children increasingly find themselves working illegally due to governments’ and businesses’ “chain of willful ignorance.” Twelve and thirteen-year-olds find themselves making auto parts, roofing homes, or working 12-hour shifts in agriculture after arriving in America.
• Child labor is increasing on the whole — it increased by 283% between 2015 and 2022, and earlier this year there were more than 600 active federal investigations into child-labor violations.
• At least ten states are trying to make it easier for children to work. Because of the tight labor market, states like Wisconsin, Arkansas, and Ohio have taken up bills that loosen the rules around kids’ jobs. Arkansas changed its laws around age verification and parental permission to work; Minnesota, Iowa, and New Hampshire are considering whether to remove rules around dangerous work and minors’ ability to work around alcohol; and a number of states have introduced bills to increase the number of hours that kids can work.

If you’re anything like me, you might have seen this news and thought — didn’t we solve this problem long ago?!

The answer is yes, sort of, but it was a slow and incomplete process.