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Child labor during the industrial Revolution
Child labour in examples
Child labor during the industrial Revolution
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The dangers of the factories to working children were very real. In document one it outlines the life a child worker from the perspective of William Cooper. In his testimony it was said that he had been working since he was ten years old. Their working hours were five in the mornings to nine at night. It also states that out of the many hours the now eighteen year old had been working, only one forty minute period in those sixteen hours were used as a free meal time. In document one it states “At times we were frequently strapped.” This was used as a response when Cooper was asked if there were steps taken to keep them awake and attentive. In document two it states that there were frequent accidents happening due to the large and intricate
machines. In one quote it states “At the L___Mill where I worked last, a boy was caught in a machine and had both his thigh bones broke and from his knee to his hip the flesh was ripped up the same as it had been cut by a knife. It also states “ There were about a dozen died during the two years and a half that I was there.” Which supports how dangerous the environment was for children.
The lives of large section For the first time in history children were an important factor of the economic system, but at a terrible price. The master of the factories employed children for two reasons. One, because of their small body which can get inside the machines to clean it and use their nimble fingers. Second, the masters use to pay low wages to the children who could be easily manipulated. The average age for the parents to send their children to work was ten.
Factories were utilizing children to do the hard work. They employed children as young as five or six to work as many as twenty hours a day. According to Document C, children worked in factories to build up muscles and having good intellect in working rather than getting an education. They became a different person rather than conventional children. There were additionally health issues due to child labor: rapid skeletal growth, greater risk of hearing loss, higher chemical absorption rates, and developing ability to assess risks. Progressive Era reformers believed that child labor was detrimental to children and to society. They believed that children should be protected from harmful environments, so they would become healthy and productive adults. In 1912, Congress created the Children’s Bureau to benefit children. The Keating-Owen Act was passed in 1916 to freed children from child labor only in industries that engaged in interstate commerce. However, it was declared unconstitutional sinc...
Child labor is nothing but cheap labor. The big companies loved cheap labor because then they could make an item for not very much money, and make a huge profit margin. Fried continues to state how cheap the labor was, “One glass factory in Massachusetts was fenced with barbed wire ‘to keep the young imps inside.’ These were boys under 12 who carried loads of hot glass all night for a wage of 40 cents to $1.10 per night.” Unlike, children today who are in bed sleeping by 8 pm each night, these children had to stay up all night working to make just enough income for their families.
Now first there is Child Labor, child labor is where you have children and you have them work a full time job and usually it is an inhumane job. So what companies would do is that they would have these kids working in the factories with no shoes no protection horrible conditions and payed them $1 - $3 dollars a week. Many kids would die in the factories and the and the families didn’t
The working conditions in the mills and and mines were horrible, nasty, and disgusting. Elizabeth Bentley who started to work at a factory when she was only six years old said that she would work from 5 in the morning all the way to 9 at night. Imagine waking up that early to go to work for more than 12 hours. She also said that she didn’t have any time to get breakfast. When workers didn’t claim their food “the overlooker took it, and gave it to his pigs” (253, Bentley). This shows how much the owners cared about their workers. If people working at factories were late to work, they were beaten and she says that was a common thing at the factories. One view that caught me off guard was of Hannah Richardson, a mine employee that said she said
Many children came to work with their families to helped support the family. Child labor began because factories and mills needed people to work for them that accepted decrease wages, increased hours, and people with small hands to work the mills. By 1880, 32.5% of males (ages 10-15) and 12.2% of females (ages 10-15) were in the labor force. By 1910 nearly 2 million children were in the work force. Employers relished having children on their payrolls, as they were cheap unskilled labor. Children often worked in hazardous occupations under appalling working conditions without any advocate to speak on their behalf. Child were often beaten and deliberately denied an education for fear that once educated they might strike for higher wages. The Keating-Owen Act was one of the most influential child labor laws, establishing important standards regarding child labor. As a result, no child under the age of 16 could work in mills or factories. Other advocates like the National Child Labor Community (NCLC) also helped to establish child labor reforms (Child Labor,
well as many archaic provisions that are both unnecessary and contradictory, stemming from the fact that the law was written in 1915. It is safe to say that the work environment for our minors has changed dramatically since child labor laws were originally written in Pennsylvania.As a state representative, I have listened to numerous complaints from small business and large industry employers who are frustrated with the confusion between state and federal laws. Employers must already be extremely cautious when scheduling and assigning duties to employees under the age of 18. Deciphering inconsistent standards can create more confusion for both employees and employers and result in less compliance with the state's laws.
The case of Hammer v. Dagenhart has its roots steeped in the U.S. industrial revolution, and its heavy use of child labor. Children worked in textile mills, cotton mills, and even mines to help provide for their families, these young children suffered three times as many injuries as their adult counter parts. They earned much less than adults and often worked sixty to seventy hour weeks, because of this they were unable to attend schools or simply enjoy their childhood. It wasn’t until around the year 1902 that committees and groups started forming to limit and ultimately end the use of child labor. In response to groups like the National Child Labor Committee, state legislatures tried to place restrictions on the child’s age and the hours that they worked. These were, unfortunately, wildly ineffective, manufactures were quick to complain about the unfairness of having to compete against those other manufactures whose production numbers weren’t hampered by child labor laws. Finally in order to try and but more lasting and far reaching restrictions on the use of child labor the Keating-Owen Child Labor Act of 1916 was proposed to Congress by Edward Keating and Robert Latham Owen.
“In the United States, labor unions led the opposition of child labor even before the civil war. Given the rural population and the laissez-faire attitude of the government, however opposition to child labor did not generate much non-union support until decades later.”(Holzka) There were many different views about child labor in some ways it was necessary for working class families so they could be fed on the other hand child labor reduced the wages of the adult workers (Holzka). Also children were expected to work on their family's farm as soon as they were able (“Seven Years of Child Labor Reform”). Children also had dangerous jobs in the factories, they spent hours in hot and humid mills, sometimes unable to see because of all the dust. There were employed children as young as five years old (Ellis, Esler 308). Children who worked in mines had the toughest days of all, they had to do things like haul coal carts in the uncomfortable heat and some had to sit in the dark opening and closing
As you can tell from the pictures, many people were going through poverty, violence, greed, racism, class warfare, etc. Families, as well as children, had to work for less than they deserved in order to provide for their needs. Back in this era, child labor was a huge problem. Progressives conjecture was that the government was the way out of the social and activism problems. The factory was one of the jobs that had many children working. Children started working at an earlier age compared to this century. In one of Lewis Hine's photographs, they were being used in the factory because they were smaller and could get it done faster. For most struggling families, they earned so much little money from their jobs, since almost the
Child labor helps the kids by teaching them how to work with machines. They helped get materials that were stuck in the machines out of them. In the first document, Sadler interviewed an eighteen-year-old boy named William Cooper. Cooper said that he is able to read. In the picture on “Child Laborer in Cotton Mill, ” it shows a boy working at the mill. He looks about ten or eleven and Cooper started to work at the age of ten. Cooper was able to have some work experience. For child labor, there are negatives too. Cooper never got to go to school so he does not know how to write. He does not get paid a lot of money, he gets paid about a quarter of what the man make and women make. Cooper only has 40 minutes to eat at that is at noon so his health
Starting with no laws or regulations on working conditions, new industries would hire 7-8 year old children boys and girls and send then out into the coal mines and factories. Little boys were used more for the coal mines because they were small and their hands were small enough to work in that
child labor was horrible in this time period because back then many companies would have children working because they knew they could get away with paying them less, and they liked doing that due to that fact they get to keep more money, but they also had children stick limbs into machinery if it was clogged because they were smaller and able to do it better than adults, that was when bad working conditions came in because the machinery was horrible, how dirty, rusty, and old it was, so this would often cause children to lose arms, legs, and fingers so they could keep working and doing so if they would get to hurt, and not be able to work for a week, or do the specific job
For Mother Jones, child labor is mentally, socially, physically dangerous because they are working at their you age. Children are obliging them to leave school prematurely. The children go out early dawn into the factory, maddening noise, lint filled rooms. During the lunch half-hour, the children would fall to sleep over their lunch. They are going to lie on the bare floor and fall asleep. Because sleep is their only way of having a recreation, a release, a time where they can play.
Child Labor Laws today are very strict on what children of certain ages are allowed to complete, and what they are not allowed to do. Labor laws have not always been around, and often children had to work hard jobs, for long hours of the day. Back in time you would catch children, black, with dirt on their face, and under their finger nails. Their clothes were poor for the conditions they were working in, and their pay was terrible for the type of work. The article that was provided above, explains first hand some of the issues that one these child workers had to endure. Along with the article that was written, pictures were provided along. The three pieces of evidence, mostly work together to explain the same message, but can be a little confusing, when looking at all the details.