Child labor was already on its way down before those laws were passed. They simply passed those laws and then took the credit.
Child labor also wasn't what it used to be. Families running a resturant and asking their kids to help lid to-go sauces isn't the same as asking a kid to unjam a loom that is still hooked to power. Also, Sinclair's book The Jungle that scared everyone about industrialization was written for the fiction section. The guy was a journalist. If he wanted to write a compelling book based on facts alone he could have if the facts were there. They weren't so a journalist wrote a fiction to get his unsubstantiated point across.
So we are already post industrial in a lot of ways. Our industrial systems are if anything over engineered for safety anyway. Kids will likely not work in industrial settings. Most kids won't work at all because their parents aren't working 16 hour days like they used to. Even in the era that things were at their worst it was not a bad as it is hyped.
China uses child labor, and we cannot allow for a child labor gap.
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