LAD #29: Keating-Owen Child Labor Act

The Keating-Owen Child Labor Act was an important step forward for children becoming children. This act limited the companies to not be able to employ children at the age of 14 or below or else customers could not buy products from the company. Also, this rule applied for mines with miners being 16 or below. This forced companies to stop employing children and for the children to get back to a regular life and become educated. This rule also applied for night jobs and it regulated jobs to be 8 hours long per day. People that helped promote this act and were against the child labor were people like Karl Marx, Lewis Hine, and Charles Dickens. Hine is most famous for his pictures depicting the tough life of the children working in the factories with many disadvantages, like long hours and poor working conditions. Dickens wrote Oliver Twist to depict the life of an orphan working with street criminals in London. This act was deemed to be unconstitutional by many court cases like Hammer v. Dagenhart and Bailey v. Drexel Furniture Company, but was seen constitutional with the U. S. v. Darby, which reversed the unconstitutional ruling. This act helped many children gain their lives back and ruined some companies.