"The Canner Kids of Baltimore, 1909 Baltimore’s oyster and vegetable canneries ran on children. “Canner Kids” started at 4am, shucked oysters or snipped beans for 14 hours, and slept in the cannery. Ages 4 to 14. No school. No gloves.
8-year-old Mamie “Bean” Kowalski was a bean snipper. Her job was to break off the ends – 2 tons per day to make $1. Her fingers bled into the beans. At night she hid under the tables and slept there because the walk to the tenement was too far.
In 1909, Lewis Hine photographed her. He asked her age. She said “I don’t remember.” He asked what she wanted to be. She said “I’d like to go to school.” The photo ran nationally with the caption “The Price of Beans.”
Public fury forced Maryland to pass its first child labor law in 1912. Mamie got to 4th grade before she had to work again. She kept Hine’s photo her whole life.
I believed this story till they said an 8 year old said they’d like to go to school. I remember when I was six, I wanted to work at McDonald’s because with all the buttons, and beeping and headsets and dials, and uniforms, the place look like the deck of Battlestar Galactica. Labors laws are in place because kids will joyfully work for free in the worst jobs.
This is one of the most asinine, clueless, and unaware comments I’ve ever seen on the internet.
Woah! Which instance did I stumble into here? I was just making a joke. Is this one of the hardcore anarcho-communist instances? Oops.
Your joke is asssss
Dang, you’re mean.
Nah you just aren’t funny, sorry.
“hey kid, if you work in the mine we’ll give you a pipe and a hat!” “Ok!”
I mean, when I think of child labor the first thing that comes to mind is China.
China is officially run by communists.
I’ll just leave this here…
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1043951X1630061X
![Chinese workers assemble electronic components at a factory in Shenzhen in the southern Guangzhou province in May 2010] (https://sh.itjust.works/pictrs/image/f6f311ce-15bb-4e70-81d9-8d056aa1a41f.jpeg)
All things considered the fact that the average was ~8% of kids ages 10 to 15 working is better than I expected.
I mean it should be 0 but I bet you the USA has a lot of hidden (and not so hidden in some places) child labor too. Probably not near that 8 percent level but some states are really pushing to get rid of child labor laws.
This is the problem with today’s youth they are soft due to lack of work in the factories. /s
Hard Kids Create Strong Beans,
Strong Beans Create Good Burritos,
Good Burritos Create Fat Kids,
Fat Kids Create Hard Poops,
Edit: wait a minute… Is that right?
Removed by mod
Vote for harm reduction, while doing other things to try get rid of capitalism
Lol harm reduction isn’t on the ballot here.
Yes it is. When literally harm is on the ballot (any country with a hard right candidate) then voting for the opposition is harm reduction.
Cthulhu isn’t descending down in bathed in Golden light bearing gifts of your perfect candidate. And if you do fuck all, then your just as guilty as the very faithful right wing base that WILL impose their will onto you.
Have fun in fantasy land though.
Removed by mod
No, trump is measurably worse against, eg, trans people and immigrants, than Harris would’ve been even if she did nothing
Harris forced trans women in California prison systems into men’s prisons.
Her decision, back when this wasn’t a big culture war issue, people lobbying her to not create a new ‘most raped’ prison population.
Fuck you, trans people are not your fucking tool to hawk your bullshit. Shut the fuck up, you rapemongering transphobe.
People like the one you responded to are trying to depress the vote so republicans win again and they can tell you how the system doesn’t work.
No, harm reduction is actually reducing harm. Like giving clean needles to iv drug addicts.
It’s a real thing. This is just like when the cops call snitching and boot licking ‘mutual aid’.
Post a source, coward.
I couldn’t find this particular photo in his collection, but there are many like it, and one taken during the same month likely at the same cannery.
https://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/hine-photos.
I don’t know why following up, when you’re openly hostile, but there you go, turdlicker.
This picture is not by Hine. This is genAI, just own up to it, but don’t misattribute from ignorance. Philosophy Fuse is a FB slop page. They exaggerate and distort real stories to make them more emotionally manipulative. This particular image and the whole story is a fabrication. They first published it in june of this year and this particular picture has never been a part of Hine’s published works. This is a blatant if not intentional violation of the only rule on this community.
K
Hey OP, where did you get that picture from?
We both know OP won’t respond
Seems very high quality for a photo from 1909. Idk anything about photography and preservation though.
Photos were pretty damn good on film. Its the digital age that converted our world to pixels.
Yeah, like the old TVs with the tube screens. For my taste digital age regarding the photography and TV isn’t a step forward as people hype it to be. Analog was better quality if you know what you’re doing.
The film at the time wasn’t that good. The photo has no grain, it’s fake as fuck
You can read more about the photographer on wikipedia. Many of the photos are of equal quality.
I don’t see this photo in the linked article. And none of them are perfect like the one in the post. It’s fake unless OP provides credible source
This picture is not by Hine. It’s genAI. First published by Philosophy Fuse FB page. A notorious slop shop. This photo didn’t exist before july of this year. It’s obviously from stolen material similar to Hine’s, but it is not by him and don’t attribute it to him. This is disgraceful. How can people be so gullible.
Children yearn for meaningful work.
They like mines because it reminds them of the womb.
What if they just didn’t do it? Were they working for food?
Can you read? It said she made $1 a day for snipping 2 tons of beans.
The question was probably why they had to do that
This picture was created by Facebook page Philosophy Fuse, which thrives in emotional manipulation AI. It creates sad stories for people to repost with AI generated images. They use semi believable settings, including the use of popular known stories like Christopher Reeves or Bruce Lee, to lend credibility to their posts. But it is all manufactured and usually exaggerated for effect. Some pages have picked this up and incorrectly attributed it to Lewis Hine. There’s one other picture of a mamie Kowalski, attributed to Hine, but it is also from a FB page. Both images were posted within a month of each other and don’t exist at all before june 2026 anywhere else.
While child labor is indeed a problem, even today, this particular story is most likely a fabrication and this girl probably didn’t exist.
It astounds me that the solution to this was to make small rollbacks to individual aspects of the capitalistic system via regulation. Any sane society’s conclusion would have been to mobilize entirely toward the opposite, and then put the onus on the entrepreneurial class to make people actually want to work.
We don’t have a society. We have a torment nexus.
I dislike capitalism as much as the next guy, but child labor and labor oppression ij general is not exclusive to capitalism. If you were to revolt, bring on a new system and put the same people in power, you’ll end up with the same problems.
It’s not the gun that kills people, it’s the people that allowed those guns to be sold at every street corner in town.
exclusive
that’s neat but misses the entire point. we are currently under capitalism and your “yeah but the other guys…” bifurcates the energy needed to keep being angry at capitalism. stop that. :)
Nah. I hold integrity in higher value than that. I won’t do populism.
where’s the popularism here in my reply?
also: related, have you ever read Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle”? Fantastic (fiction but not really) read about this stuff.
I have not read that. I’ll check it out.
The way I see populism is about cobtrolling the masses by anger. That can be a misguided anger towards brown people or a common anger towards capitalists. Anger can be used for more than populism,but what made your comment populist in my eye, was because you want to use it to keep the energy against capitalists high.
We’re all angry, and rightfully so, but we shouldn’t let that anger guide us. That never leads to anything good.
so the anger doesn’t guide, it informs. it’s not telling me how to be angry but remembering why helps recollect into a conversation about class, at its core. this conversation is what is (often) lost when we “whatabout” with other things that are also bad.
it’s bad all the way down. :(
also yeah totally check that book out! :)
I agree with that. Anger can be a good reminder. I sure now it keeps me on edge. Like is said, it can be used for many purposes, but my first thought was the populist way. I see now that is not the case. Life is omplicated and political views even more so.
I also see that your argument for the “whatabout” holds true for many cases. It’s also a populsit tactic to “muddy the waters”. It’s also a good excuse for some to refrain from action.
However, it was not my intention to “whatabout” about capitalism. The original post was about child labour and labour laws, OP called out capitalism in the title. I merely pointed out that capitalism is not tge only place where it happens. So, the subject was child labour laws, not capitalism.
Also, I appreciate this discussion. Who’s downvoting me and ruining the atmosphere?
Maybe stop being angry at capitalism if it is not really the problem?
that sounds an awful lot like bootlicking talk. pfft.
Oh honey…
The entire point of threads like these is so we can be angry at capitalism on our phones
Oh, my bad. Fuck CaPiTaLiSm.
That’s actually a very valid point. Sweatshops aren’t just a capitalist invention - they occur in lots of places with different types of government.
The nature of work (employment) under capitalism is different though.
- It overrides intrinsic motivations (love, community, fun, meeting needs) and forces upon us an extrinsic motivation (make as much money for the boss as possible or starve to death.)
- It is inherently cruel and wasteful. We already produce enough to meet everyone’s needs, yet the capitalist hoards the fruits of working class labor, then forces us to buy it back from them. And whatever can’t be sold will be discarded rather than given to people who need it. Food will be thrown into dumpsters while children starve in the streets. Poverty is a feature under capitalism, not a bug.
- It is inherently exploitative. Your employer will never pay you the full value of your labor. If they did, they wouldn’t have any incentive to employ you. They always steal some or a lot of the value you produce with your labor.
- It is inherently authoritarian and alienating. It separates you from the fruits of your labor. It forces you to compete with you coworkers. You have no say in what you produce, how you produce, and where you send it after it’s produced. You have no say in the hours you work, when you take breaks, what you wear, how you dress, how you talk, how you treat customers. If you break the rules, your employer will deprive you and your family of your livelihood.
Yes, children will always work. Work is a good thing. But it is for all the above reasons and more that we must not let capitalists employ children. And they’re also the reasons why capitalism must be abolished entirely. It cannot be reformed.
Literally none of your points are unique to capitalism and indeed were present in economic systems for millennia prior to capitalism’s adoption.
While it’s not exclusive to capitalism but it is inherent to capitalism because exploitation is inherent to capitalism. I don’t see why we should stick to a system that not only doesn’t serve us but actively works against us.
And I’d be less concerned about the same people put back into positions of power. To change the system you need to remove the people who don’t want to change and replace them with people who do want change. They’re not interested in changing the system so they need to be replaced for change to happen in the first piece.
Can you give an example?
It took 3 years to get a law past to prevent this kind of child abuse (from the time this photo was published) … But only in the state that this directly affected. That Lil kid prob produced over a thousand lbs of canned beans before some one did anything about her shitty situation. A reminder that the wheels of justice move slow as fuck, and that the only thing that helps push them forward is exposure and pressure.
Capitalism works best when it has competition… The New Deal was a response to competition from other forms of economics in the 1930s. The same kind of result could happen again.
Make sure you protest-non-vote to ensure this doesn’t happen to you
/s
The dems will save us!
We should still be pissed because she got to go to school until 4th grade then back to minds. But this a failure on the parents as well.
Its important to have all the context here. Children of poor families worked at these places, not wealthy people. It was a necessity for those families, or they wont eat. Its a systemic failure, not a parental one. Especially when they didn’t have a choice.
