Iowa, 13 other states intentionally trying to undermine decades-old child labor protection laws

My grandfather and his brother worked as 11- and 12-year-old “slate boys” in the coal mines of Georgia and Alabama starting right before World War I got underway in Europe. Their job was to straddle conveyor belts carrying coal from the mine face and remove chunks of slate from the fast-moving belts. Dangerous work for anyone, but especially children. Injuries were an everyday occurrence, and some unknown number of boys were killed performing this task. My grandfather’s brother lost two fingers grabbing slate.

In their mid-teens, both of them began working underground. In his late 20s, the brother moved to Nebraska to work the rest of his life in various jobs for Union Pacific. My grandfather became a union organizer in 1927 for the United Mine Workers. Over the next 22 years, that job took him to Ohio, Pennsylvania, Illinois, and, for a brief time, Wisconsin, as the UAW experimented unsuccessfully with organizing hard-rock miners. Both men died horribly of black lung, even though the time each worked directly in the mines was less than a dozen years.

They were just two of the tens of thousands of children forced into grueling and sometimes lethal full-time work in that era. Like so many others, neither of them got as far as the sixth grade. Adding to the physical injuries, because they were Indigenous, they were paid even less than the paltry wages white slate boys earned.