Child labor hurt children — and adults — until the government intervened.
More than a century after public policies dramatically reduced child labor in the United States, the topic has burst back into the headlines in an unlikely manner: President Trump's now-withdrawn nominee for the Federal Reserve Board, Stephen Moore, came under fire for suggesting the repeal of child labor legislation. During a panel on the minimum wage at the 2016 GOP convention, Moore said: "I'm a radical on this, I'd get rid of these child labor laws. I want people starting work at 11, 12."
This piece was written by Oenone Kubie, a Research and Teaching Fellow at the Rothermere American Institute, University of Oxford, and a Visiting Research Fellow at Texas Tech University.