[Last week brought the alarming news that three Kentucky-based
McDonald’s franchises had kids as young as 10 working at 62 stores
in four different states. Some of these under-working age children
were working as late as 2 a.m. ]
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TO PROTECT OUR CHILDREN, LET’S TAX OUR RICH  
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Sam Pizzigati
May 16, 2023
Counterpunch
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_ Last week brought the alarming news that three Kentucky-based
McDonald’s franchises had kids as young as 10 working at 62 stores
in four different states. Some of these under-working age children
were working as late as 2 a.m. _

, Fibonacci Blue – CC BY 2.0

 

America’s social studies textbooks urgently need an update — on
child labor. Our textbooks, ever since the middle of the 20th century,
have been applauding the reform movement that gradually put an end to
the child-labor horrors that ran widespread throughout the early
Industrial Age. Now those horrors, here in the 21st century, are
reappearing.

The number of kids employed in direct violation of existing child
labor laws, analysts at the Economic Policy Institute this past March
reported
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soared 283 percent since 2015 — and 37 percent in just the last year
alone. Last week brought the alarming news that three Kentucky-based
McDonald’s franchises had kids as young as 10
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different states. Some of these under-working age children were
working as late as 2 a.m.

Lawmakers at the state level, meanwhile, are moving to weaken — and
even eliminate — existing limits on when and where kids can be
working. One bill in Iowa introduced earlier this year, EPI
researchers note, would let kids “as young as 14” labor in
workplaces ranging from meat coolers to industrial laundries. In
Arkansas, legislation recently signed into law axes
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requirements that the state “verify the age of children younger than
16 before they can take a job.”

Amid this rush to undo protections for kids, adds
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a _New York Times_ analysis, pending legislation that would “crack
down on companies’ use of child labor has gone nowhere.”

How do cheerleaders for erasing protections for kids justify their
anti-child-labor-law offensive? Jobs for the youngest among us, they
argue, build character.

“We have sheltered our kids so much they’ve forgotten how to do
one of the things we’re all training them to do,” says
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Dan Zumbach, a Republican state senator in Iowa, “and that’s how
to work.”

Over a century ago, in the initial push against child labor, no
American did more to protect kids from sophistry like that than the
noted educator and philosopher Felix Adler, the founder of the Ethical
Culture Society. In 1887, under that society’s auspices, Adler
sounded
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the child labor alarm before a packed house at Manhattan’s famed
Chickering Hall.

The “evil of child labor,” Adler related to some 1,500 onlookers,
“is growing to an alarming extent.” In New York City alone, some
9,000 children as young as eight were working in factories. The entire
state of New York had only two inspectors looking out for the welfare
of working kids. Many of those kids, as a result, “could not read or
write” or even knew “the state they lived in.”

By the end of 1904, as the founding chair of the National Child Labor
Committee, Adler had helped broaden the battle against exploiting
kids. He railed
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against the “new kind of slavery” that had some 60,000 children
under 14 working in Southern textile mills up to 14 hours a day, up
from “only 24,000” just five years earlier.

Adler put full responsibility for this child-unfriendly state of
affairs on those he called America’s “money kings.”

“Child labor is cheap labor,” Adler would explain. “That thought
never enters the mind of the cheap labor employer. Business is
business.”

But Felix Adler didn’t just campaign for laws to limit child labor.
Lawmakers must also, he believed, limit the incentives that drive
employers to exploit kids. They must refuse to let the rich keep as
much as they could grab — by using taxes to cap
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the incomes of the America’s most financially favored. The specific
vehicle he proposed for accomplishing that capping: a tax rate of 100
percent on all income above the point “when a certain high and
abundant sum has been reached, amply sufficient for all the comforts
and true refinements of life.”

Such a levy, said Adler, would tax away “pomp and pride and
power.”

Adler’s relentless advocacy for capping the incomes of America’s
rich would help inspire, after the United States entered World War I,
a national campaign for a 100-percent top income rate on America’s
highest incomes. That campaign would have a remarkable impact. In
2018, lawmakers in Congress would raise the nation’s top marginal
income tax rate up to 77 percent, 10 times the 7-percent top tax rate
in place just five years earlier.

Nearly a quarter century later, during World War, President Franklin
Roosevelt would renew Adler’s call for a 100-percent top tax rate on
the nation’s super rich. By the war’s end, lawmakers had okayed a
top rate — at 94 percent — nearly that high. By the Eisenhower
years, that top rate had leveled off at 91 percent.

Felix Adler would never see the full scope of his victory. He died in
1933. But by the mid-20th century those inspired by him had won on
both his key advocacy fronts. By the 1950s, America’s rich could no
longer keep all they could grab, and masses of mere kids no longer had
to labor so those rich could profit.

The triumphs Adler helped animate have now come undone. We need to
recreate them.

_Sam Pizzigati__ writes on inequality for the Institute for Policy
Studies. __His latest book: __The Case for a Maximum Wage_
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Among his other books on maldistributed income and wealth: __The Rich
Don’t Always Win: The Forgotten Triumph over Plutocracy that Created
the American Middle Class, 1900-1970_
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Stories Press). _

 

* Child Labor; Felix Adler; Tax the Rich;
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