Picture the breaker boys, rank on rank in the coal fields, sitting all day in the cold and the unrelenting coal dust, using their bare hands to sort through the coal to take out the slate and anything that would detract from the profits of the coal companies.

Slate is sharp and it cut their fingers and hands and they worked in the cold and they breathed in the dust and, often, they lost fingers and other parts in the inexorably turning wheels of the coal industry. On occasion, according to reports of the social workers at the time, a boy would be caught up in the machinery, but his body would not be removed until the end of the day when the machines stopped.

Every minute of every day, exposed to this kind of treatment, the boys knew the value of their lives to the society into which they had been born. They were 10 or 12 or 14 years old, but they were old beyond their years. Many of them smoked, no doubt many of them drank, and one 14-year-old told Lewis Hine, the famed photographer of working Americans and child laborers, that he regularly frequented brothels.

Such was the world of working children. It wasn’t just the breaker boys, but it was children in every conceivable occupation in America at the time. To be sure, they were not the children of the moneyed class. They were mostly the children of immigrants who came from many countries where they had lived in poverty and were seeking a better life. Here, they and their children worked in textile mills, glass factories, lumberyards, mines, and farms, doing everything that any farmer would do except make a decent wage.

Perhaps, some of the worst conditions were in “homework,” in which immigrants took home textile work and continued their day’s work in their cramped tenements until late at night. At a time when children should have been sleeping, they, too, were working on the garments. The airless, often cold apartments were breeding grounds for diseases such as tuberculosis. The child workers suffered along with the parents.

All of the children worked for pennies a day. That’s why the industrial magnates hired them…they worked cheaper than their parents, no matter what the job. They contributed mightily to the economy of their new country and they never received a fair wage, or even the acknowledgement that they had made vital contributions to their fellow Americans. The country was still reeling from the after effects of the Civil War and the purported end of slavery, but former slaves for a long, long time were treated little differently than they were in bondage. The child laborers were treated similarly and, in fact, their condition was sometimes referred to as “child slavery.”

The country’s child labor laws were passed in the early part of the 20th Century and they were challenged immediately by the Robber Barons and others who owned the machinery of industry. The first few attempts to regulate child labor, starting in about 1916, were declared unconstitutional. It took until 1938 with the Fair Labor Standards Act to protect children from the brutal exploitation of American industry. The FLSA withstood a court challenge in 1941 and, since then, many forms of child labor have been outlawed.

In the first half of the last century, the worst kinds of child labor practices were eliminated, including the six-day week, 10 hours a day, with, perhaps, only eight hours on Saturday. It was pretty much the same as for their elders.

Yet, today’s Robber Barons, the captains of Corporate America, can’t quite accept the interference of the government in such things as labor standards or labor laws, which set limits to how they can use and abuse workers. Their minions in politics have set out to weaken or destroy protections for workers, so we have the spectacle of the Republican governor of Wisconsin eliminating collective bargaining for most public workers in the Badger State. Other Republicans are doing the same, or attempting to do the same, in other states.

It is ironic that Lewis Hine, probably the foremost photographic chronicler of American workers in U.S. history, was born in Oshkosh, Wis., in 1874, about two years before the first stirring of American revulsion over the condition of child workers. That revulsion turned into a movement, led by unions, resulting in the formation of the National Child Labor Committee in 1904 in New York City. New England unions had condemned child labor as early as 1832.

Now that Republicans and their Tea Party wing and other right wingers have made their move to destroy collective bargaining for American workers, they seem to be pondering ways to take the country back to the time when child labor was routine and the boys and girls of the working class were not allowed to enjoy a childhood or an education.

U.S. Senator Mike Lee, R-Utah, reportedly a constitutional lawyer, newly sworn in after his election last fall, recently pronounced federal child labor laws “unconstitutional.” That, he said, should be up to the states to decide. He must know that the 1941 decision on the constitutionality of the FLSA (which included limits on the employment of children) is settled law, so what he is implicitly saying is that we should return to an earlier time, when states could decide whether children could be used. Of course, he may have just been throwing a bit of raw meat to his fellow Tea Partiers when he made the comment. It’s the kind of thing they like to hear and he delivered.

Lee is young, so he may not remember a time much earlier than the disco era of the 1970s. Along the way, he should have read and studied about the condition of the country when some vital issues were largely left to the states to decide. He might be too young to recall states’ rights and what it meant for African-Americans. It took a monumental effort to overcome the drag that was placed on civil rights by that fight over “states’ rights,” but civil rights were gained after a very long and bloody struggle.

Overall, though, he is just another in a long line of Tea Party Republicans who want to “take the country back.” That is, take it back to another time, when the working class and minorities and their children knew their place, which was providing profits for those with the power.

Today, you will not see pictures of breaker boys or cotton mill girls at work in this country, but, if there were a Lewis Hine at work in scores of other countries, you would see the similar pictures of children, hard at work this very day, giving up their lives to commerce and being compensated very little, if at all.

Lee knows that it isn’t likely that child labor laws will be rescinded in this country, so his statement to a Tea Party gathering simply is a demonstration of his cynical view of child protecting laws. Corporate America has accomplished what Lee appears to favor: child labor. In our globalized economy, transnational corporations have taken millions of children back to the days of the breaker boys and the girls in the textile mills. It’s just that now, the child workers are of another nationality and, in today’s high-tech world, the children are exposed to the added dangers and toxic elements of the production of electronic devices, which run the world.

Whether child labor laws are constitutional or unconstitutional can be debated any day of the week, but Republicans and the Tea Partiers have to answer just one question: What about the child workers and what about common decency?

BlackCommentator.com Columnist, John Funiciello, is a labor organizer and former union organizer. His union work started when he became a local president of The Newspaper Guild in the early 1970s. He was a reporter for 14 years for newspapers in New York State. In addition to labor work, he is organizing family farmers as they struggle to stay on the land under enormous pressure from factory food producers and land developers. Click here to contact Mr. Funiciello.