child labor laws - NOT about safety

Child labor laws would lose their anti-child labor basis of work-related injuries (the sweatshops of the old days) in favor of an education-based approach to support working children (intellectual labor).

We always hear the horror stories of young children having to work on machines as they continued to function, occasionally losing life or limb to an accident . . . but children also worked as clerks, shop assistants, runners (when telephones were uncommon and expensive), and so forth. These jobs were not especially dangerous.

The law could have simply outlawed the use of child labor for hazardous jobs, but all these other positions were also eliminated, which suggests another purpose for the law. One purpose was protection of adult jobs from competition. Another purpose might have been to push more children into formal education, where they could be better controlled and propagandized.