Child Labor
Child LaborChild labor was and is still an existing practice in the world today. Manuel, a five-year old worked at a seafood cannery in Biloxi, Mississippi, with a shrimp pail in each hand and a mountain of oyster shells behind his back. He is typical for thousands of working children in the years before the civil war, especially the turn of the century. America's army of child laborers had been growing steadily for the past century. The nation's economy was expanding. Factories, minds and mills needed plenty of cheap labor. Around 1911, more than two million American children under the age of 16 years of age were a regular part of the work force. Many of them worked twelve hours or more a day, six days a week, for pathetic wages under unhealthy and hazardous conditions.
Thousands of young boys descended into dark and dangerous coal mines every day, or worked aboveground in the dust of coal breakers, picking slate from coal with torn and bleeding fingers. Small girls tended noisy machines in the spinning rooms of cotton mills, where the humid, lint-filled air made breathing difficult. They were actually kept awake by cold water being thrown in their faces. Three-year-olds could be found in the cotton fields, and twelve-year-olds on factor night shifts. Across the country, children who should have been in school or at play had to work for a living.
By the early 1900's, many Americans were calling child labor "child slavery" and were demanding an end to it. They argued that long hours of work deprived children of an education and robbed them for useful lives as productive adults, child labor promised a future of illiteracy, poverty and continuing misery.
Besides, reformers said, children have certain rights. Above all, they have the right to be children and not breadwinners. Lewis Hine, a schoolteacher and photographer, was one of those early reformers. He felt so strongly about the use of children as industrial workers that he quit his teaching job to become an investigative photographer for the National Child Labor Committee (NCLC).
Hine carrying a simple box camera traveled back and forth across the country, from sardine canneries of Maine to the cotton fields of Texas. He took pictures of kids at work, listened to their stories, and reported on their lives.
His obvious goal was to reveal to the world the horrors of child labor and move people into action. There is a big difference between children who worked at odd jobs after school or did chores around the house or the family farm. No one could object to youngsters working as trainees and apprentices, merely learning skills they would use for the rest of their life. The campaign against child labor was not directed to them. It was aimed at the exploitation of boys and girls as cheap labor. The object, Hine points out, of employing children is not to train them, but to get high profits from their work.
Because children could be hired cheaply and were too small to complain, they were often employed to replace adult workers. In industries when large numbers of children were employed, their low wages pulled down the earnings of everyone else, so that grown-ups could not earn enough to support their families. As a result, poor families needed their children's wages just to survive.
As criticism of child labor grew, a number of states passed laws regulating working hours and wages for children. But more often that not, those laws were filled with loopholes and favored manufacturers. A lot of the states failed to even enforce the weakest child labor laws.
The National Child Labor Committee was fighting for strict laws and effective enforcement. Founded in 1904, it was a militant organization made up of men and women who believed that a healthy, happy, normal childhood was the rightful heritage of all children.
The NCLC wanted to ban the employment of children under fourteen years of age in most occupations, and under sixteen in dangerous trades such as mining. For all children, the NCLC demanded an eight hour day, no night work and mandatory work permits based on documentary proof of age. The NCLC also wanted compulsory school-attendance laws, but they didn't put much effort into it. It was hard enough to get honest child-labor laws passed and obeyed.
Lewis Hine once entered a textile mill to find thirty-five boys who appeared to be from nine to fourteen years of age. Some of the smallest boys said to have been working in the mill for several years. Hine discovered that they employees reported to work before dawn, hours before the manager arrived.
Textile mills were big offenders, especially in the South, where one mill worker in every four was between the ages of ten and fifteen. No one knew how many workers were actually younger than ten because they weren't counted.
Throughout the segregated South, mill work was reserved for whites, blacks were seldom hired. Most mill hands were white share-croppers and tenant farmers who had abandoned worn-out farms for the promise of steady employment in the mills.
Entire families left their farms to work in the mills. Many of the children, in fact most, quit school at an early age, or never went at all. Their parents, who often lacked education themselves, didn't want their kids "wasting time" by attending school. They felt that youngsters should work to help support the family.
Children toiled in cotton mills as spinners, doffers, and sweepers. Girls were usually employed as spinners. They walked up and down the aisles, brushing lint from the machines and watching the whirling spools or bobbins for breaks in cotton thread. Girls had to be on their feet nearlyall the time, working eleven or twelve hours a day, six days a week.
Boys began working as doffers when they were seven or younger. It was their job to remove the whirling bobbins when they were filled with thread and replace them with the empty ones. Most of the children worked barefoot. That made it easier to climb onto the huge machines so they could reach the bobbins. If they weren't careful, they could fall into the moving machinery or be caught by it. The accident rate for children working in mills was twice as high as it was for adults.
In one mill, Hine reported "A twelve-year-old doffer boy fell into a spinning machine and the unprotected gearing tore out two of his fingers.
Since heat and moisture helped keep the cotton threads from breaking, the mill windows were always kept closed. The hot, steamy air was filled with dust and lint that covered the workers clothes and made it hard to breathe. Mill workers frequently developed tuberculosis, chronic bronchitis, and other respiratory diseases. A boy working in the cotton mill was only half as likely to reach twenty years of age as a boy outside the mill. Girls had an even less chance.
When a strong child labor law was introduced in the Georgia state legislature in 1908, the state's mill owners made sure that the bill would be voted down. They produced long petitions from their workers, opposing the law. It was clear from looking at the petition that hundreds of the signers could not even write their own names. Anyone could sign the petition by marking it with an X..
Food canning was another industry that usually employed entire families, including young children. Children that worked in the seafood canneries and fruit and vegetable canneries were actually younger than those in the cotton mills.
Many cannery workers were recent immigrants from Europe. Every year, thousands of immigrant families were recruited in cities and shipped by train and boat to bleak cannery labor camps, where they remained until canning season ended. Some of these camps we quite unfit to live in. Families were crowded into filthy, company-owned shacks that had no running water and were often infested with insects and rats.
School-age children left their city homes before the summer vacation began, and returned long after the fall term had started. They lagged far behind in their studies, if they attended school at all. Some of these immigrant children never learned English. They grew up wandering with their parents, moving from cannery to cannery. Work in the canning sheds began long before daybreak, usually 3 in the morning. Boys and girls, six, seven and eight years old worked long hours right alongside with the adults.
Since there was no place to leave the children, even the youngest and the newborn were taken to the cannery sheds every day. On winter mornings, infants wrapped in blankets slept in baby carriages and boxes next to warm packing-house stoves. Toddlers wandered about the sheds sometimes cutting their little fingers on sharp oyster shells.
The Children stood by their parents, picking up clusters of oyster shells, prying them open, and dropping the meat into pails. When a pail was filled, it was carried off to be weighed. For a pail that held four pounds of shelled oysters, the worker received five cents. Children usually filled one or two pails a day and adults eight or nine.
The rough shells were hard on fingers, but raw shrimp was much worse. As the shrimp were peeled, they oozed acid so strong, it ate holes in workers leather shoes and even the tin pails they used. Children with swollen , bleeding fingers were a common sight. At night, they soaked their fingers in an alum solution to harden their skin and help heal their wounds.
In fruit and vegetable canneries, the hours were even longer during the peak of the season. Using sharp knives, children husked corn, snipped of the end of beans, peeled apples and tomatoes and sometimes some fingers.
Boys were worked a variety of jobs from mule drivers to gate tenders. Most of the younger boys were employed in the coal breakers out side the mines. As coal came pouring through the chutes, the boys bent over, reached down and picked out the pieces of slate and stone that could not burn.
Since coal and slate look so much alike they had to watch very carefully. Once in awhile a boy reached too far and slipped into the coal that was constantly flowing beneath him and would get mangled or killed. Hine visited a Pennsylvania mine and two breaker boys fell into the coal chute where they were smothered to death.
A foreman armed with a broom handle stood in front of the breaker room. He would watch the boys intently and used the broom handle to rap on the heads and shoulders of those who, in his opinion, were not working hard enough.
Many of the breaker boys suffered from chronic coughs, hardly any of them lived to be over the ages of 20 to 30. It was nine to ten hours a day in the absolute darkness of the caves, all expect for a little oil lamp.
Glass making was another industry that employed thousands of boys in tough and dangerous jobs. Most of these youngsters worked as blowers' assistants in glasswork furnace rooms. The intense heat and glaring light, where the glass was kept in a molten state, could cause eye trouble, lung ailments, heat exhaustion and a long list of other medical problems.
The temperature of the molten glass is 3,133 degrees Fahrenheit. The temperature inside the factories themselves ranged between 100 and 130 degrees. Broken glass littered the floors so it wasn't surprising that cuts and burns were the most common injuries. The boys were paid by the piece, so they had to keep moving fast for hours at a time without a break. Typically the boys made about 65 cents a day.
Since the furnaces were kept burning continuously, glass factories operated around the clock so many of the boys were required to work at night. Often they faced a transportation problem. The night shift started at 5'o clock pm and ended at 3 a.m when there was no streetcar service. A boy had the option of a nap on the factory floor, filled with broken glass ships dust, or a long walk home in the dark. In the winter this meant a sudden change from the hot air inside the factory to the frigid air outside.
Because of the unhealthy and hazardous work conditions, employees that started out in the glass industry had a life expectancy of only forty-one to forty-two years.
Factory owners claimed they couldn't operate without the labor of young boys, the workers over sixteen were too slow and clumsy to perform the boys' work.
Despite the pain and horrors of child labor displayed in Lewis Hine's photographs, including the harsh working conditions, long hours, low pay and cruel employers, his photographs captured the true humanity, dignity and strength in the children. Hine's photographs stirred American's conscience and helped change the nation's laws.
The Word of God never really comes right out and says that child labor is wrong, but anyone with a heart for the Lord would know that it is cruel and inhumane. Employing children was not to train, but to get high profits from their work. Children could be hired cheaply and were too small to complain. That is taking advantage of the na�ve and Proverbs 0:00(I'll find this before the final draft) says not to take advantage of the na�ve. A child working at an early age, isn't necessarily a bad thing. The problem with that, is the treatment they receive. Paul talks about treating your servant well and honorable. The employers rarely ever showed compassion for the children and they did not get paid what they should.