During Industrialism, many of the workers in factories were children. They worked in dangerous working conditions for long hours and little pay. Some children started working as young as 4 years old. Writers such as Commissioner S.S. Scriven and Annie Beast wrote about how children were taken advantage of during Industrialism because they were paid less than men, worked long hours, and are mistreated by their employers. Many factory owners “preferred to hire women and children, who worked for even less money than men” (Greenblatt 1581). , In “The White Slavery of London Match Workers,” Annie Besant describes how young girls are paid 4s a week and can have fines deducted from their pay. “Out of the earnings 2s is paid for the rent of one room; the child lives on only bread-and-butter and tea,” which leaves them with 2s to use for buying food (Besant 1604). A girl working as a child miner said that she would “rather set cards for 5d. A-day than go into the pit” (Scriven 1589). “Children as laborers appealed to owners because they were cheap,” this allowed owners to hire more children because they knew they would work for low wages (Pelz 58). …show more content…
A girl named Peggy describes her work day as “[coming] in the morning sometimes at seven o’clock, sometimes half-past seven, and [she goes] sometimes home at six o’clock, sometimes at seven when [she does] overwork” (Scriven 1588). She works 12 hours a day to make just enough money to buy herself food to eat. In “The White Slavery of London Match Workers, “the hour for commencing work is 6.30 in summer and 8 in winter, work concludes at 6 p.m” (Besant 1604). They would start work at the early hours in the morning, even earlier depending on the season. It was recorded than some children had worked “more than 3,200 hours per year” (Voth). That means the child was working at least 10 hours every day or more if they had off
These women, including mothers, and young girls worked extremely hard for long periods of time. “On weekdays she began work in the factory at 5:30 am, and finished at 8 pm. Included in this period were a thirty-five minute break for breakfast and a fifty-five minute break for dinner.” (Document 5: Douglas A. Galbi) On an average weekday in England the women and young children worked around thirteen-and-a-half hours and additional hours on the weekends. “On weekends she worked another nine hours.” (Document 5: Douglas A. Galbi) One of the young girls, Ellen Hooton, was working in an English factory and only nine years old. “She worked the same amount of hours as adult workers.” (Document 5: Douglas A. Galbi) Adults would tire after long days at work, but a children tire more easily because they are still growing. These ridiculous hours were also similar in the Japanese factories. “Normal working day in a plant in Okaya was thirteen to fourteen hours.” (Document 5: Noshomusho Shokokyoku and Shokko Jijo) “Given fifteen minutes for breakfast, and sent back to work by 6:15. They were allowed fifteen minutes for lunch, between 10:30 and 10:45, and ten-minute break from 3:30 to 3:40.” (Document 5: Noshomusho Shokokyoku and Shokko Jijo) Obviously, these approximately fifteen-minute breaks were barely enough time to eat a snack not to mention a bathroom break or a moment of quiet
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. Although, Conventional wisdom dictates that the age at which children started work was connected to the poverty of the family. Griffith presents two autobiographies to put across her point. Autobiography of Edward Davis who lacked even the basic necessities of life because of his father’s heavy drinking habit and was forced to join work at a small age of six, whereas the memoir of Richard Boswell tells the opposite. He was raised up in an affluent family who studied in a boarding school. He was taken out of school at the age of thirteen to become a draper’s apprentice. The author goes further and places child employees into three groups, according to the kind of jobs that were available in their neighbourhood. First group composed of children living in rural areas with no domestic industry to work in. Therefore, the average of a child to work in rural area was ten. Before that, farmers use to assign small jobs to the children such as scaring birds, keeping sheep
These comforts and conveniences included better and more developed homes, cheaper clothes, more tools and utensils to work with, and faster and cheaper travel. One of the most important concerns of this time period is the effect of child labor. Document 7 states: Large machines and rising demand for products quickly led to the growth of the factory system. The building of these factories led to the hiring of massive numbers of child workers, the youngest at 11 to 12 years old.
Often, children were forced to work due to money-related issues, and the conditions they worked in were terrible. Children worked in coal mining, such as at Woodward Coal Mining in Kingston, Pennsylvania (Doc. 7). Children were used to make the process of producing products cheaper, and they were paid low wages; the capitalists hired children just to keep the process of making products going and to make profit. One cause of child labor in harsh conditions was the unfateful fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company factory in New York City in 1911. Teenaged immigrant girls that were employed there worked under sweatshop-like conditions. The building they worked in was inadequately equipped in case of a fire, for the doors were locked, leaving no exit for the girls, and the single fire escape collapsed with the rescue effort; as a result, when the fire started, they were unable to escape. 145 workers were killed, but the company owners were not penalized harshly for this tragedy. This further demonstrates that capitalists were able to get away with the harsh conditions that they put their laborers, especially child laborers, through for their own benefit, which is making more money and using any means to get it, even if those means are low wages and harsh working
The poem “My Boy” shows how long the work hours were by saying, “[Before] dawn my labor drives me forth. Tis night when I am free; A stranger am I to my child; And he one to me.” (Document 2) From dawn to night was a normal time period that people would work and she would come home to her family where they were strangers. The long hours were not only tiring on the body, but also put a strain on the quantity and quality of time spent with family. The hours were not easy labor either, the testimony of Elizabeth Bentley shows that labor was difficult and the bosses worked the employees
Many businesses and factories hired children because they were easier to exploit; they could be paid less for more work in dangerous conditions. Plus, their small size made many children idea for working with small parts or fitting into small spaces. Children as young as four could be found working in factories, though most were between eight and twelve. Despite the economic gains made by the business that employed them, many children suffered in the workplace. The industrial setting caused many health problems for the children that, if they lived long enough, they would carry with them for the rest of their lives. Children were also more likely to face accidents in the workplace, often caused by fatigue, and many were seriously injured or killed. Despite efforts by reformers to regulate child labor, it wasn’t until the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 that children under 14 were prohibited from
Other examples of long working hours included these rules published in the Zachariah Allen Papers “From 20th March to 20th Septr the wheel starts at sunrise and stops at sunset” (Kulik et al.). In addition to long working hours, they were paid low wages per the Pomfret Manufacturing Company Records “Rhonda chooses to weave two wks by the wk at 12 (12 shillings = $2) then by the yard” (Kulik et al.). Other mills paid similar wages; Sally Rice wrote to her father about the wages in a letter dated Feb 23, 1845. She said, “James Alger’s sister makes 3 dollars per week” (Kulik et al.). Rice compares her wages in the mill to those of a house worker by saying “I think it will be better than to do housework for nine shillings” (Kulik et al.). The mills had other strict rules which included the inability to leave the floor without permission of the overseer, meeting their quota of work daily and few breaks during the often sun up to sundown days. The long hours, poor pay and strict rules took their toll on the women. As Sally Rice told her father in a letter dated September 14,1945 after seven months in a mill job “You surely cannot blame me for leaving the factory so long as I realized that it was killing me to work in it” (Rice). Factory owners and operators viewed the women as a dispensable workforce and did not invest in the employer-employee relationship. (Feller 121).
Children as young as young as five or seven years old worked in dangerous factories. Many times if the children fell asleep while on the job, they would slip and get stuck in the machines, resulting in death. Child labor in the late 1800’s was very unsafe and put the lives of young children in danger. The children worked in very dangerous conditions, most of the time it was factories. The conditions were very poor, the factories were dirty and unsafe for children. The children would work for up to sixteen hours with little to no pay.
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...
The labor conditions that children faced were very demanding for a human being from such a small age. For example “In the Manayunk district of Philadelphia, children as young as seven assisted in spinning and weaving of cotton and woolen goods” (Wolensky 2). The children working in the factories had their childhood freedom taken away from them. “In 1830 in a sample of 43 Manchester mills, 22.3% of the workforce was under 14 and 32.4% under 16” (Cunningham 412). This means that about 50% of the workforce in the mills were made up of children under the age of 16 and in today in the United States, a person cannot work until the age of 16. “And it is a hard thing for small children to be confined in a tight close room all day long. It affects their growth, makes them pale and sickly” (Nason). The time these children spent in the factories prevented them from spending time with their neighbors, friends, and family. The fact that young children had to work in these textile mills, created changes to American culture on how childhood years are supposed to be spent.
According to the article “A History of Child Labor” reviewed by Milton Fried, a child could work as long as six days a week for up to 18 hours a day, and only make a dollar a week. Child labor was 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. Sadly, the children had no choice but to work for very little pay. Their mothers and fathers made so little money in the factory system that they couldn’t afford to let their children enjoy their childhood: “Other working children were indentured—their parents sold their labor to the mill owner for a period of years. Others lived with their families and worked for wages as adults did, for long hours and under hard conditions” (Cleland). The child had no other choice, but to work for these big
The two factors led to a rise in the percentage of children ten to fifteen years of age who were gainfully employed. Although the official figure of 1.75 million significantly understates the true number, it indicates that at least 18 percent of these children were employed in 1900.(History)
Imagine waking up at five in the morning to walk over a mile to a factory where you work until noon where you get a half hour break for lunch, then it’s back to work until nine or ten at night, when you are finally allowed to go home and you are only eight years old. Today that seems unimaginable, but during the early 19th century it was the everyday life of thousands of children whose ages range from as young as five until you died. During the Industrial Revolution many children were required to work dangerous jobs to help their families.
The Industrial Revolution restructured the employer-employee relationship into an impersonal association exhibited by indifference to the quality of life of the worker. Children were especially exploited because they could be hired for lower wages and were made to work equally long days (Miller). Around the 1830s, children constituted about one-third of the labor in New England (Illinois Labor History Society). The conditions of workers as a whole necessitated action on behalf of the rights of laborers.
and it is not surprising that many women preferred factory work to this (domestic service work). The maid of all work had virtually no social life, as they were always “on - call” at all hours of the day and the evening. Often their employers could only afford a servant which meant that their wages and accommodation were low and poor. Servants and maids were often treated badly and some were even physically beaten. They worked from late nights and early hours, had continual fatigue and hurry, and they were even more anxiety about the future from the smallness of their wages.