Minimum age and a minimum wage: seventy-five years ago, Congress passed the nation's most important legislation dealing with workers' rights.

• Author: Berger, Joseph
• Position: TIMES PAST 1938

By the time he was 12, Furman Owens, a lanky youth in overalls who possessed the weary eyes of a middle-aged man, had been working in South Carolina's mammoth textile mills for four years. Every day he breathed in cotton dust and risked fingers and limbs in the powerful looms.

Furman couldn't read or write. He didn't even know the alphabet.

"Yes, I want to learn but can't when I work all the time," he told photographer Lewis Hine in 1909. Hine used his box camera to document scores of child laborers like Furman across the country.

In the first decades of the 20th century, almost 2 million children in the U.S. under 15 worked in coal mines, glass and garment factories, canneries, and on farms. These weren't the after-school jobs many kids have today. These children often worked 12-hour days, six days a week, sometimes in treacherous conditions where they could be scorched by hot machinery or suffer lung disease or mangled arms.

It was a different time with a different mind-set. And many struggling families, especially immigrants, depended on their children's incomes to help ward off starvation.

"It was not considered exploitative," says Daniel B. Cornfield, a sociology professor at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. "The idea of all family members participating in the enterprise was the norm."

All that began to change 75 years ago, in 1938, with the passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act, one of the most groundbreaking initiatives for human rights in the nation's history. FLSA is one of the signature accomplishments of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal (see box, p. 18). It set standards for the age at which children could be employed, what kinds of jobs they could do, and for how many hours. Children under 18 could not perform certain dangerous work, and children under 16 could not work during school hours.

It also created a federal minimum wage for all workers: 25 cents an hour in 1938--when many people worked for $1.50 a day. And it set a standard work week at 40 hours, requiring employers to pay time-and-a-half for hours worked beyond that.

The Industrial Revolution

How could a democratic country like the United States ever allow young children to work at such grueling jobs, or men and women to toil for so little pay?

The answer has to do with a sea change in American society. The U.S. in the early 19th century was largely a country of family farmers and solitary artisans, like carpenters and cotton loomers. During the Industrial Revolution, the invention of steam power, new machines, railroads, and assembly-line methods of production radically transformed the kinds of work Americans did. But families continued the practices they'd inherited from farming days, putting their children to work alongside them in factories or mines. Back then, government was also less involved in regulating business; and in many states, schooling wasn't compulsory.

In New York's garment industry, kids often helped their mothers and fathers as they bent over sewing machines in home workshops or in sweatshops, factories where workers toiled in poor conditions for little pay. The youngest victims of New York's notorious Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire of 1911, in which 146 garment workers died, were 14-year-olds Kate Leone and Rosaria Maltese (see Timeline, p. 18).

Factory owners liked hiring children for their nimble fingers and reluctance to complain. They could also pay them less. In the coal mines, "breaker boys" as young as 8, their faces blackened with coal dust, some...