Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Hard at Work in Factories and Mines
Hard at Work in Factories and Mines
Hard at Work in Factories and Mines
Industrial Revolution
parents began to earn higher incomes and were thus less willing to send their children out to
work, new legislation banned certain types of child labor, and further technological
developments reduced the demand for child labor.)
Tuttle's argument suggests a mildly optimistic picture of the British economy during
industrialization, although she is careful to capture the drama of this labor market's rougher
edges with compelling, sometimes hyperbolic, descriptions of wearying, mind-numbing,
degrading work and its detrimental effects. However, a more skeptical reviewer could easily
disagree with her conclusions, as her thesis is handicapped by a shortage of appropriate data.
Economy-wide data do not adequately reveal the crucial evidence: whether or not child and
youth labor-force participation rates were rising or falling before the middle of the century.
Tuttle rejects an outward shift of the child labor supply curve and accepts a rise in demand,
partly based on the fact that average wages for many children's occupations rose between
1839 and 1859. However, these data are too late, since a later table shows that child labor may
have been on the wane by this time: children's share of the textile workforce, for example,
was already on the decline. In addition, the data presented are nominal-not real-wages, and it
is impossible to ascertain whether the wage changes are due to a shift in the composition of
the child labor force. During this period, factory legislation was enacted that helped push up
the average age of child workers, so the upward wage trend could have resulted from
maturing of the young workforce rather than rising demand.
I have questions about all three of the forces the author has linked to the growing demand for
child labor. Evidence on the ratio between adult workers and their helpers in specific jobs
(e.g., piecers and spinners) shows that the ratio of helpers to adults rose, but it does not prove
that the number of child workers performing the tasks increased or that the demand for these
workers was rising. There is evidence that certain innovations reduced the number of adults
needed, and one table even quantifies the number of men thrown out of work by automation
in certain factories between 1829 and 1841, but this evidence does not confirm that more
children were hired to fill their places. Likewise, Tuttle's explanation that children were the
preferred users of certain textile machines seems backward: The argument that the textile
machines (including spinning jennies, water frames, and self-acting mules) required workers
who were small in stature could be plausibly countered by the suggestion that the individual
machines were built to accommodate small workers. The evidence on children's comparative
advantage in certain mining tasks is much stronger. In a book that is otherwise free of
econometric analysis, Tuttle shows a strong relation between the average thickness of coal
seams and the percentage of children in mining workforces, and she describes the economic
advantages of having small people haul coal through the small spaces. Elsewhere, however,
her discussion of the advantages of child labor-listed as dexterity, docility, ease of training,
the ability to withstand monotony, and greater endurance-appears overly anecdotal. For
example, on page 78, she states, "As any parent knows, children seem to have an unlimited
supply of energy and are in constant motion."
Tuttle has summarized a great deal of information about child labor during the British
Industrial Revolution and introduces a subject that is critical to our judgment of that
economy's performance.
AuthorAffiliation
Robert Whaples is associate professor of economics at Wake Forest University. His research
focuses on American labor markets in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and he