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The Decline of Child Labor in the U.S. Fruit and Vegetable Canning Industry: Law or Economics?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 December 2011

Martin Brown ,
Jens Christiansen  and
Peter Philips
Martin Brown
Affiliation:
Martin Brown is an economist at the Applied Research Branch of the National Cancer Institute.
Jens Christiansen
Affiliation:
Jens Christiansen is associate professor of economics and environmental studies at Mount Holyoke College.
Peter Philips
Affiliation:
Peter Philips is associate professor of economics at the University of Utah.
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Abstract

Child labor in the U.S. economy declined significantly between 1880 and 1920. This case study of the fruit and vegetable canning industry examines variations in laws, technology, and income across states and time to assess the relative importance of legal and economic factors in reducing the employment of children. The authors find that economic factors, especially a technologically driven shift toward a greater demand for adult labor, were relatively more important. While economic development was often a precondition for legal restrictions on child labor, compulsory schooling and child labor laws restricted the employment of children in technologically backward canneries.

Type
Articles
Information
Business History Review , Volume 66 , Issue 4 , Winter 1992 , pp. 723 - 770
Copyright
Copyright © The President and Fellows of Harvard College 1992

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References

1 The proportion of children in the work force stayed fairly constant at around 18 percent between 1880 and 1910 but fell to 8.5 percent by 1920. See Urofsky, Melvin, “State Courts and Protective Legislation During the Progressive Era: A Reevaluation,” Journal of American History 72 (June 1985): 63–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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3 The most complete version of this argument can be found in Nardinelli, Clark, Child Labor and the Industrial Revolution (Bloomington, Ind., 1990)Google Scholar; but see also Sanderson, Allen, “Child-Labor Legislation and the Labor Force Participation of Children,” Journal of Economic History 34 (March 1974): 297–99CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Goldin, Claudia, “Household and Market Production of Families in a Late Nineteenth Century American City,” Explorations in Economic History 16 (April 1979): 111–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Goldin, Claudia and Sokoloff, Kenneth, “Women, Children, and Industrialization in the Early Republic: Evidence from the Manufacturing Censuses,” Journal of Economic History 42 (Dec. 1982): 741–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Keil, Thomas J. and Usui, Wayne M., “The Family Wage System in Pennsylvania's Anthracite Region: 1850–1900,” Social Forces 67 (Sept. 1988): 23–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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9 Quoted in Callcott, Child Labor Legislation in New York, 168.

10 San Francisco Examiner, 4 Sept. 1881, 1.

11 Representatives of the Cutting Packing Company in San Francisco in 1870 explained that they employed Chinese after they had experimented with hiring white boys but found them playful, inattentive, and less productive. San Francisco Evening Bulletin, in J. S. Hittel, “Scraps,” Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

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13 The data in Table 2 are occupational data from the Census of Population which does not provide data on children under age ten. In these reported data for 1900, fruit and vegetable cannery workers are aggregated with meat canning and packing as well as fish canning. To minimize the effect in Table 2 of meat and fish packing and canning employment on our estimate of child labor in fruit and vegetable canning, we have restricted our sample to California, Maryland, and New York, leading fruit and vegetable canning states. This yields a sample of 362 children. In Table 2, manufacturing data for canneries in the entire country in 1899 show that 9 percent of all fruit and vegetable cannery workers were under the age of sixteen. Our selected states occupational data generate a comparable 10 percent children among all cannery and packing workers.

14 “Cutting Packing Company,” manuscript, c. 1882, no author but probably J. S. Hittel, in Hittel, “Scraps,” Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

15 Ibid. This seasonality ratio of 3.0 corresponds roughly to figures for California and Maryland in 1899 (see Table 3).

16 Brown, Martin and Philips, Peter, “Craft Labor and Mechanization in Nineteenth-Century American Canning,” Journal of Economic History 46 (Sept. 1986): 743–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The best description of in-place cookroom technology just after the Civil War is U.S., Commissary General of Subsistence (Wilson, Thomas, author), Notes on Canned Goods (Washington, D.C., 1870)Google Scholar.

17 The Canning Clan (New York, 1937), 21–30Google Scholar; Warfield, S. Davies, Reference Book of the Warfield Manufacturing Company, Manufacturers of Special Machinery (Baltimore, Md., 1889), 48Google Scholar.

18 Ibid.

19 Ibid.

20 Keuchel, Edward F. Jr., “The Development of the Canning Industry in New York State to 1960” (Ph.D. diss., Cornell University, 1970), 143–52Google Scholar; U.S. Commissioner of Labor, 13th Annual Report, “Hand and Machine Labor” (Washington, D.C., 1899), 2: 1058–80Google Scholar.

21 Sprague Canning Machinery Company (Daniel G. Trench & Company, Agents), General Catalogue of Canning Machinery and Canner's Supplies (Chicago and Hoopeston, Ill., 1904)Google Scholar; Huntley Manufacturing Company, Monitor Catalogue (Silver Creek, N.Y., n.d.)Google Scholar; Berger, Carter & Company, Canning Machinery and Supplies (San Francisco, Calif., n.d.)Google Scholar. Copies of these catalogues are in the authors' possession.

22 Ibid.

23 New York State, Second Report of the New York State Factory Investigating Commission [hereafter, FIC, Second Report] (Albany, N.Y., 1913), 2: 861Google Scholar.

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25 Maryland, Third Biennial Report, 58.

26 Maryland, State Board of Labor and Statistics, Twenty-Sixth Annual Report (Baltimore, Md., 1917), 99–100Google Scholar.

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28 Ibid., 100.

29 Ibid., 102.

30 Maryland, Bureau of Statistics and Information, Twenty-Fourth Annual Report (Baltimore, Md., 1915): 210Google Scholar.

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32 FIC, Second Report, 2: 878Google Scholar.

33 Kelley, Florence, “A Privileged Industry,” Twentieth Century Magazine (Boston, Mass.) 6 (July 1912): 228Google Scholar. Kelley answered the rhetorical question in the following way: “In the end, however, the legislature showed that it held perishable fruits and vegetables in higher esteem than perishable women and girls, by exempting the canning industry from the provisions of the eight-hours law. In the child labor law, these industries had already been exempted.”

34 Ogburn, Progress and Uniformity, 71.

35 Ibid., 132–34.

36 Ibid., 83.

37 Loughran, “The Historical Development,” 57; Ogburn, Progress and Uniformity, 71.

38 Callcott, Child Labor Legislation in New York, 164.

39 FIC, Second Report, 2: 763Google Scholar.

40 Ibid., 767–68.

41 Quoted in Callcott, Child Labor Legislation in New York, 169.

42 Ibid., 177–78.

43 FIC, Second Report, 2: 131Google Scholar.

44 Callcott, Child Labor Legislation in New York, 175.

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46 Ibid., 141–42.

47 Callcott, Child Labor Legislation in New York, 181.

48 Ibid., 182.

49 New York, Commissioner of Labor, Report 1914, “Special Report on Canneries” (New York, 1914), 132Google Scholar.

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51 Callcott, Child Labor Legislation in New York, 169.

52 FIC, Second Report, 2: 775Google Scholar.

53 Ibid., 20; U.S. Bureau of the Census, “Manufactures: 1919, Statistics for Canning and Preserving,” Fourteenth Census of the United States: 1920, Bulletin (Washington, D.C. 1922), 22Google Scholar.

54 California Industrial Welfare Commission [hereafter, CIWC], The Regulation of the Fruit and Vegetable Canning Industry of California (Sacramento, Calif., 1917), 111–12Google Scholar.

55 See Sources for Figure 1.

56 For a detailed account of the importance of Baltimore as the dominant cannery city during the early period, see Keuchel, “Master of the Art of Canning.”

57 U.S. Bureau of the Census, Thirteenth Census, 16–19; U.S. Bureau of the Census, Fourteenth Census, 22.

58 U.S. Department of Labor, Children's Bureau, Children in Fruit and Vegetable Canneries: A Survey in Seven States (Washington, D.C., 1930), 90–91Google Scholar.

59 The Canning Trade 25 (2 Feb. 1903): n.pGoogle Scholar.

60 See sources for Figure 2.

61 U.S. Department of Labor, Children's Bureau, Children in Fruit and Vegetable Canneries, 88.

62 The Canning Trade 42 (24 Feb. 1919): 29Google Scholar.

63 CIWC, Regulation, 174.

64 Ibid., 65–67, 114.

65 U.S. Bureau of the Census, “Canning and Preserving,” Census of Manufactures: 1914, Bulletin (Washington, D.C., 1917), 12.Google Scholar

66 Maryland, Bureau of Statistics and Information, Twenty-Second Annual Report (Baltimore, Md., 1914), 77Google Scholar.

67 California Bureau of Labor Statistics, Special Report: Labor Conditions in the Canning Industry (Sacramento, Calif., 1913Google Scholar).

68 Loughran, “The Historical Development,” 15–17.

69 California Bureau of Labor Statistics, Fourteenth Biennial Report: 1909–1910 (Sacramento, Calif., 1910), 19–24Google Scholar; Fifteenth Biennial Report: 1911–1912 (Sacramento, Calif., 1911), 22–23Google Scholar; Hichborn, Franklin, Story of the Session of the California Legislature of 1911 (San Francisco, Calif., 1911), 249Google Scholar; Hichborn, , Story of the Session of the California Legislature of 1915 (San Francisco, Calif., 1916), 176Google Scholar.

70 CIWC, Regulation, 51–57 and 143–50.

71 Ibid., 114.

72 Loughran, “The Historical Development,” 89–93.

73 Ibid., 38; Braznell, William, California's Finest (San Francisco, Calif., 1982), 163Google Scholar.

74 Letter from Preston McKinney, secretary of the Canners League of California, to the National Consumers League, 11 March 1920, CIWC Archives, San Francisco, Calif.

75 CIWC Archives, San Francisco, Calif.

76 Maryland, Bureau of Statistics and Information, Sixteenth Annual Report (Baltimore, Md., 1908), 13–20Google Scholar; Maryland, Twenty-Second Report, 76–77.

77 National Industrial Conference Board, Inc., The Employment of Young Persons in the United States (New York, 1925), 67–68Google Scholar; U.S. Department of Labor, Children's Bureau, Administration of the First Federal Child-Labor Law, 94–99. See also text at footnote 31.

78 U.S. Department of Labor, Children's Bureau, Children in Fruit and Vegetable Canneries, 97–98.

79 Maryland, Third Biennial Report, 80–81; emphasis in the original.

80 Ibid., 113 and 187.

81 U.S. Department of Labor, Children's Bureau, Children in Fruit and Vegetable Canneries, 93–94.

82 Ibid., 102, 103.

83 ibid., 134.

84 These are the only years in which all the variables that we have identified as crucial are available. They also are the most important years for the reduction of child labor in the canning industry. Information on laws comes from Loughran, “The Historical Development,” and Ogburn, Progress and Uniformity.

85 The capital stock data from the U.S. Census are deflated by a price deflator from U.S. Department of Commerce, Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970 (Washington, D.C., 1976)Google Scholar.

86 Martin Brown and Peter Philips, “Industrialization, Unionization, and the Labor Market Structure in the California Canneries,” Industrial and Labor Relations Review 38 (April 1985): 392–407.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

87 For 1899 and 1904, the Census of Manufactures provides wage data for adult workers. For 1909 through 1919 the Census merely provides total wages and lists separately the number of adults and children employed in canning. We calculated the average wages paid to adults in these years by exploiting the fact that child-adult wage ratios are fairly stable over time. The 1899 and 1904 data indicate that children in canneries were paid roughly 60 percent of adult wages. Armed with the assumption that children earned 60 percent of adult wages in the period 1909–1919, we divided total cannery wages paid in each of these years in a state by the total number of adults employed plus a discounted 58 percent of all children employed. This procedure minimizes the downward pull on average cannery wages resulting from increased numbers of children employed.

88 Information regarding laws in force was derived from Ogburn, Progress and Uniformity, and Loughran, “The Historical Development.”