What if someone told you that child labor laws discouraged shorter people from working?

The first national child-labor law, the Keating–Owen Child Labor Act, was signed by President Woodrow Wilson on September 1, 1916. It prohibited interstate shipment of goods from factories employing children under 14, mines employing children under 16, and establishments imposing excessive hours or night work on children under 16.

It was struck down by the Supreme Court a couple of years later, and it wouldn’t be until the New Deal that we got a lasting national prohibition on child labor—although many states had restrictions before that.

Imagine, for a moment, that someone claimed that laws against child labor were hurting businesses not because those businesses used a lot of child labor but because short people had stopped showing up to work for fear of being swept up in an anti-child labor law dragnet.

Of course, it should work the other way around. The exclusion of children from the workforce would potentially increase the demand for adult labor. And, in particular, it might increase the demand for labor by shorter adults for certain tasks in which diminutive stature was a particular advantage. That should draw more short people into the workforce.