Caution: Children at Work - TomDispatch.com

Caution: Children at Work - TomDispatch.com Steve Fraser, Return of the Repressed July 6, 2023 Yes, as TomDispatch regular and historian Steve Fraser, author of Class Matters: The Strange Career of an American Delusion, points out today, child labor is making a grim comeback in this country -- and immigrant children are leading the way. This brings to my mind a tale from my own past. My grandfather, born in what's now Ukraine, fled home at age 14, spent two years all too literally working his way north to Hamburg, Germany, where he got a job as a "scribe" -- he had beautiful handwriting -- and then boarded a boat for America. As his daughter, my Aunt Hilda, wrote years ago, "A boy of 16, he arrived in New York from Europe in March 1888. It was during the famous blizzard and after a sea voyage of about 30 days. He had no money. He often said that he had a German 50-cent piece in his pocket when he landed. His trip had to be in the cheapest part of the ship -- way down in steerage. Poor boy... and for the first few months in America I imagine he slept behind the stove in somebody's kitchen." She hardly needed to add that, as immigrant labor, he went right to work. His wife, my grandmother Celia, was born into a poverty-stricken family -- her parents had been immigrants -- two years before he arrived and, as Hilda reported, she completed just one year of high school before she, too, had to go to work "as soon as possible... The last job she had was with the telephone company as an operator. She was with them for a year or two when she left to get married" at age 17. And that is indeed ancient history, personal and otherwise. But how unbelievably eerie that such a distant tale should once again be so desperately of this moment. Let Fraser explain. Tom