Bootleggers, Baptists, and Child Labor

As you know, I’ve paid a lot of attention to child labor in British factories during the Industrial Revolution. Child labor was a big issue back then; public agitation probably started in 1796, when the Manchester Board of Health issued a devastating paper about the health of families in that increasingly industrial city.

But it wasn’t until 1833 that Parliament passed a law that was effective in limiting the hours young children worked. Earlier acts  had no method of enforcement. The Factory Act of 1833 (also called “Althorp’s Act) did have teeth: it required inspectors.

Why did a genuinely strong bill pass in 1833? The answer may surprise you.

The conventional wisdom is that the 1833 act reflected a greater public sensitivity to the harms of working children long hours. For example, Encyclopedia.com says, “This was the culmination of intensive lobbying on the part of working-class organizations and humanitarian individuals.”[1] After years of effort, the public and their representatives finally “got it.”

But if the public and Parliament had become more humanitarian why, just one year later, did it enact a tough poor law—the Poor Law of 1834? That law attempted to do away with “outdoor relief” altogether, requiring recipients of aid to live in unpleasant workhouses.

One big event preceding those two laws was the Reform Act of 1832, which expanded the franchise, got rid of “rotten” boroughs, and made Parliament more representative. But how could a broader franchise explain both a “humanitarian” law (1833) and a “tough” law (1834)?

In 1977 economist Howard Marvel came up with an explanation. He argued that the 1833 Althorp’s Act was passed by and for textile manufacturers themselves! Not all of them, just the biggest ones and those  least dependent on child labor. “Its purpose was to increase the cost of production of many of the smaller textile mills, thereby causing them to curtail their output.” [2]

The reforms of 1832 had brought in many Whigs, who were often businessmen. Tories, the more traditional landowners, lost some of their members. Among the Whigs were large textile manufacturers.

The big mills were, by and large, operated by steam power. The smaller water-powered mills relied more on children. These mills, located on rivers, often lost work-time from drought or flooding; they wanted children to work long hours to make up for that downtime. The big steam-powered mills were less dependent on child labor. Thus, they could afford stricter regulation, while some of their competitors could not.

“Althorp’s Act was thus passed because of the new political power granted to the textile industry, not in spite of it,” writes Marvel.

Marvel supports his argument by comparing the enforcement of the act once it was passed. He finds that the smaller mills were disproportionately penalized. Whether that was because of political clout of the big mills or because the small mills simply had more offenses, he is not certain. But it indicates that the big mills could easily have favored more child-labor regulation.

Marvel was getting at a broader problem that I have rarely, if ever, come across in historians’ writing. Economist Bruce Yandle called it the “bootleggers and Baptists” coalition. People or firms who benefit by a law or regulation can get it adopted by promoting a “public interest” argument (or letting others voice that argument for them). Yandle’s alliterative  phrase helps explain the success of Prohibition, for example.  Baptists (and other temperance advocates) argued against alcohol consumption for religious (or “public interest”) reasons, while the bootleggers wanted Prohibition because they could sell more illegal liquor.

In a chapter titled “Bootleggers and Baptists in the Theory of Regulation,” Yandle gives several modern examples of such a conflation of special and public interests. [3]  In 2000, the John Deere Company joined with environmental activists to promote tougher regulation of lawn-mowers. Public spirit? Well, maybe, but John Deere had a patent on new technology that could more easily meet the new standards.

Similarly, around 2006 Philip Morris, the largest cigarette company in the U.S., pushed for regulation of the “health claims of safe cigarettes” by the Food and Drug Administration. By raising the costs facing  smaller companies through regulation, Philip Morris would reduce its competition.[4]

Labor unions can be bootleggers, too. In 1977, Congress passed a law requiring electric utilities to use expensive devices called “scrubbers” to remove sulfur from their smokestacks, reducing pollution. Utilities that had been using cheaper low-sulfur coal to keep pollution down could no longer do so—the low-sulfur coal wouldn’t even operate in some of the scrubbers. Environmentalists  had pushed for the tough regulations, and so did the United Mine Workers  in the eastern United States. Those coal miners wanted to keep out low-sulfur coal, a newer, non-unionized mining sector in the West. For a long time, they did.

So, while I’m not sure Marvel definitively proves his case, such parallels give credence to his claim that big textile mills (“bootleggers”) joined with public humanitarians (“Baptists”) to regulate child labor.

[1] “Factory Act ” From the St. James Encyclopedia of Labor History Worldwide: Major Events in Labor History and Their Impact. Encyclopedia.com. (August 11, 2020), https://www.encyclopedia.com/history/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/factory-act, under “Synopsis.”.

[2] Howard P. Marvel, “Factory Regulation: A Reinterpretation of the English Experience,” Journal of Law and Economics 20, no. 2 (Oct. 1977), 379-402., at 387.

[3] Bruce Yandle, “Bootleggers and Baptists in the Theory of Regulation,” in Handbook on the Politics of Regulation, ed. David Levi-Faur (Cheltenhaam, U.K. : Edward Elgar, 25-33.

[4] Yandle, 29-32.

Image by Dominik Dancs from Unsplash.com.