gems, AI, artificial intellegence, pyschology, poverty, child labor

Young Sadie Pfeifer, just four feet tall, was one of many small children working at Lancaster Cotton Mills in South Carolina in 1908. Prior to reform, employers could invoke “contributory negligence” and dock a worker’s pay if he or she was deemed careless enough to damage a machine by losing a finger—or even a limb—on the job. Employers commonly used a “truck system,” or fining system, in which wages were reduced for damaged goods, broken equipment, or perceived mistakes. A child might work a full week and, after fines were applied, still owe money at the end of it. This practice was widespread in textile mills and amounted in practice to debt bondage, though it was rarely prosecuted as such. The combination of children being maimed without compensation—and then fined for the privilege—became a powerful argument for the labor movement. Through compulsory education, reform campaigns, legislation, minimum wage laws, and increased taxation, child labor was largely eliminated in much of the United States by the end of the 1930s. These policies were fiercely opposed by industrialists but were crucial in laying the groundwork for the largest expansion of the American middle class in U.S. history in the decades that followed. Photo: Lewis Wickes Hine; public domain.