"The Canner Kids of Baltimore, 1909 Baltimore’s oyster and vegetable canneries ran on children. “Canner Kids” started at 4am, shucked oysters or snipped beans for 14 hours, and slept in the cannery. Ages 4 to 14. No school. No gloves.
8-year-old Mamie “Bean” Kowalski was a bean snipper. Her job was to break off the ends – 2 tons per day to make $1. Her fingers bled into the beans. At night she hid under the tables and slept there because the walk to the tenement was too far.
In 1909, Lewis Hine photographed her. He asked her age. She said “I don’t remember.” He asked what she wanted to be. She said “I’d like to go to school.” The photo ran nationally with the caption “The Price of Beans.”
Public fury forced Maryland to pass its first child labor law in 1912. Mamie got to 4th grade before she had to work again. She kept Hine’s photo her whole life.
It astounds me that the solution to this was to make small rollbacks to individual aspects of the capitalistic system via regulation. Any sane society's conclusion would have been to mobilize entirely toward the opposite, and then put the onus on the entrepreneurial class to make people actually want to work.
We don't have a society. We have a torment nexus.