Global child labor is correctly perceived as a problem of economically underdeveloped nations.  But we know of no major advanced nation that did not go through a stage of pervasive child labor on the path to advancement.  If widespread child labor is viewed as predictable during certain stages of economic development, then the economic history of advanced nations may serve as a guide to its eradication in the developing nations of today and tomorrow.  This book examines U.S. child labnor history with the intention of identifying lessons learned that might be applicable to persistent problems of global child labor.

    Child labor is a problem of immense social and economic proportions in many developing regions of the world today.  It came to be viewed in the same way when the United States was, industrially speaking, a developing nation.  But child labor was not always seen as a problem.  We came to recognize the problem only gradually, then to resolve it even more gradually and still incompletely.  Though history can never quite repeat itself, a retrospective appraisal of the U.S. experience may inform the struggle against child labor in the world today.  To the extent that we better understand the causes and effects of child labor in U.S. history, see why it matters socially and economically, understand how our nation came to grips with and made its accommodation to the child labor problem, understand the how and why of effective reform in our own history and the how and why of our failures to achieve effective reform, we may be able to contribute more effectively to solving the global child labor problem.

    No nation has developed an advanced industrialized sector without going through this "dirty" phase of development.  In early-twentieth-century America, young boys worked their fingers often literally to the bone in the coal breakers, young boys and girls continued to work sixty- and seventy-hour weeks in the cotton textile industry that they had helped build, and children were drawn into work in agriculture and food processing at such a young age that the term "infant labor" would not have been entirely inappropriate.  Child labor stands as one of the more persistent social and economic problems in the history and in the world today.  This book sheds new light on child labor in U.S. history in a way calculated to shed light on the problem in the world today.

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