If you’ve never been inside of a commercial poultry barn you should consider yourself fortunate. Upon opening the door you would immediately be assaulted by a swirling wall of ammonia, dust, feathers, and chicken manure from 50,000 birds. It quite literally takes your breath away. Your eyes will water and itch. Your nostrils clog. That said, the most disturbing part is how quickly you adapt to the noxious and dangerous air and are soon moving through the barn as if nothing were amiss. Imagine being in that barn for hours each and every day,
When I first heard that some states are dismantling the nation’s child labor laws, I flashed back thirty-five years to this barn and this particular young worker. I wonder what his young, immature lungs must look like after doing this work for an untold number of years. I wonder if he is still alive, or if he suffers from a debilitating respiratory disease.
One of my photographic heroes is Lewis Hine, who spent most of his career photographing workers. His early work exposing the danger, unfairness, and cruelty of child labor in America was partially responsible for the passage of our early Child Labor Laws, which have been on the books for close to a hundred years. It’s disheartening to see our country returning to a time when children were valued as beasts of burden, an extra paycheck, another set of hands on a production line. Children should be allowed to be children.