LAD #29: Keating-Owen Child Labor Act

In the year 1916, the Keating-Owen Child Labor Act limited the number of hours that a child could work and forbade the sale of goods produced through child labor to be sold across state borders. Ranging from young children to smaller teens, a census showed that nearly two-million girls and boys were working across America at the beginning of the twentieth-century. This finding called for an end to be brought to child labor. Muckrakers such as Lewis Hines used photography of children fixing dangerous machinery and working in filthy coal mines to further this movement. Many influential individuals, such as Carl Marx and Charles Dickens, sided with these muckrakers against child labor. Dickens used his works of literature, such as Oliver Twist, showing the lives of young orphans working and living in poorhouses in London. First proposed in the year 1906, the Keating-Owen Child Labor Act "banned the sale of products from any factory, shop, or cannery that employed children under the age of 14, from any mine that employed children under the age of 16, and from any facility that had children under the age of 16 work at night or for more than 8 hours during the day." Eventually being passed by Congress and instituted by Woodrow Wilson, the act was later found to be unconstitutional in the Supreme Court case of Hammer vs. Dagenhart. It was not until the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, an Act still in place today, was an effective labor act set into motion in the United States.