what techniques did these groups use to showcase the issue of child labor to the public
Child Labor
The American Era of Child Labor
Photo: Library of Congress
Digital ID cph 3b03532
Child Labor Defined: Historically, "child labor" is defined as piece of work that deprives children of their childhood, their potential and their dignity, and that is harmful to physical and mental development. However, not all work done by children should be classified equally child labor. Children or adolescents' participation in work that does non affect their wellness and personal evolution or interfere with their schooling is generally regarded as existence something positive. This includes activities such as helping their parents around the domicile, assisting in a family unit business or earning pocket money outside schoolhouse hours and during school holidays.
Abusive Child Labor: What is to be prevented is kid labor in its most extreme form: Children being enslaved, separated from their families, exposed to serious hazards and illnesses and/or left to fend for themselves. Forms of farthermost child labor existed throughout American history until the 1930s. In particular, child labor was rife during the American Industrial Revolution (1820-1870). Industrialization attracted workers and their families from farms and rural areas into urban areas and mill work. In factories and mines, children were often preferred as employees, because owners viewed them as more manageable, cheaper, and less likely to strike.
Historical documents revealed American children worked in large numbers in mines, glass factories, textiles, agriculture, canneries, home industries, and as newsboys, messengers, bootblacks, and peddlers. In the latter function of the nineteenth century, many labor unions and social reformers advocated aggressively for state and local legislation to foreclose extreme child labor. Past 1900, their efforts had resulted in state and local legislation designed to foreclose extreme kid labor; nevertheless, the condition in states varied considerably on whether they had child labor standards, their content and the degree of enforcement.
The lucky ones swept the trash and filth from metropolis streets or stood for hours on street corners hawking newspapers. The less fortunate coughed constantly through ten-hour shifts in dark, damp coal mines or sweated to the point of dehydration while tending fiery glass-manufacturing plant furnaces – all to stoke the turn a profit margins of industrialists whose ain children sat comfortably at schoolhouse desks gleaning moral principles from their McGuffey Readers. By and large, these child laborers were the sons and daughters of poor parents or recent immigrants who depended on their children'southward meager wages to survive. But they were also the offspring of the rapid, unchecked industrialization that characterized large American cities as early as the 1850s. In 1870, the first U.S. demography to written report child labor numbers counted 750,000 workers under the age of fifteen, not including children who worked for their families in businesses or on farms. Past 1911, more than two meg American children under the age of 16 were working – many of them 12 hours or more, six days a week. Often they toiled in unhealthful and chancy weather condition; always for minuscule wages.
Young girls connected to work in mills, notwithstanding in danger of slipping and losing a finger or a foot while standing on elevation of machines to change bobbins; or of beingness scalped if their hair got caught. And, equally e'er, later on a day of angle over to choice bits of rock from coal, billow boys were yet stiff and in pain. If a billow boy fell, he could all the same exist smothered, or crushed, by huge piles of coal. And, when he turned 12, he would still be forced to go downwards into the mines and confront the threat of cave-ins and explosions.
Photo: Library of Congress
Gift of the National Kid Labor Commission, 1954 (55B.13, 55B.14)
Kid Labor Reform: In the early decades of the twentieth century, the numbers of child laborers in the U.S. peaked. Child labor began to decline as the labor and reform movements grew and labor standards in general began improving, increasing the political power of working people and other social reformers to demand legislation regulating child labor. Union organizing and kid labor reform were often intertwined, and common initiatives were conducted by organizations led by working women and heart class consumers, such as state Consumers' Leagues and Working Women'south Societies. These organizations generated the National Consumers' League in 1899 and the National Child Labor Committee in 1904, which shared goals of challenging child labor, including through anti-sweatshop campaigns and labeling programs.
Photo: Courtesy of VCU Libraries Special Collections and Archives
HD 6250 .U3 A5 1920
Since 1900, there have been several efforts to regulate or eliminate kid labor. I of the primary leaders in this effort was the National Child Labor Commission, which was organized in 1904. The National Child Labor Committee and diverse land child labor committees were gradualist in philosophy, preparing them to accept whatever was achievable fifty-fifty if information technology was non sufficient. They used flexible tactics and were resilient in the face of defeat and slow progress. Furthermore, these committees pioneered the usage of mass political action, including skilful investigation, photography, pamphlets, leaflets, mass mailings, and lobbying. However, their success was dependent on the political climate of the nation overall, likewise every bit developments that reduced the need or desire for child labor.
The National Child Labor Committee campaigned for tougher state and federal laws confronting the abuses of industrial child labor, and Lewis W. Hine was its greatest publicist. A teacher who left his profession to piece of work full-time as investigator for the committee, Hine prepared a number of the Committee'due south reports and took some of the most powerful images in the history of documentary photography. The Library of Congress holds the papers of the Committee, including the reports, field notes, correspondence, and over five,000 of Hine'due south photographs and negatives. This album depicts children at work in canneries and is accompanied by a follow-upward report for a group of canneries previously investigated by Hine.
From 1911 to 1916, Hine traveled across southern and eastern states capturing thousands of unflinching images that exposed the heartless treatment of children. By and large, Hine had to resort to trickery to gain access from resistant, even hostile, employers. He posed variously every bit a Bible salesman, industrial photographer, burn inspector and insurance agent to go candid shots, sometimes with a subconscious camera. Children might be removed from view before he arrived or he might be barred from the premises birthday. When Hine couldn't find a mode in, he waited outside the gates and photographed the children equally they entered and exited.
The tireless efforts of reformers, social workers and unions seemed to pay off in 1916 – at the height of the progressive movement – when President Woodrow Wilson passed the Keating-Owen Act banning manufactures produced by child labor from beingness sold in interstate commerce. The act was struck down as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court only two years later.
Between 1902-1915, child labor committees emphasized reform through land legislatures and, as a event, many laws restricting kid labor were passed. Still, gaps remained, specially in the south. This led to a push for a federal child labor law, which Congress passed in 1916 and 1918, simply the Supreme Court alleged them unconstitutional. Opponents of child labor and then sought a constitution amendment to qualify federal kid labor legislation. Congress passed the subpoena in 1924, only many states failed to ratify this amendment due to the conservative 1920s political climate and opposition from some church building groups and farm organizations that feared increased federal power.
The Great Depression catalyzed changes in political attitudes in the U.s.a., specially surrounding child labor. President Franklin D. Roosevelt'south New Bargain sought to prevent extreme child labor, and nearly all of the codes under the National Industrial Recovery Act significantly reduced child labor. The Public Contracts Act of 1936 required boys to be xvi and girls to be 18 to work in firms supplying goods under federal contract. The Beet Sugar Human activity required children to exist 14 to piece of work in cultivating and harvesting sugar beets and cane. The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 (FLSA) ready the minimum working age at fourteen for employment outside of school hours and xvi during schoolhouse hours. Furthermore, not-agronomical work in interstate commerce required a minimum age of sixteen during school hours and 18 for positions designated as "hazardous" by the secretarial assistant of labor.
Overall, these laws were successful, not only to the generally widespread disapproval towards child labor, but also because many previously unemployed adults became employed once children were express in the workforce.
Photo: Library of Congress
Digital ID nclc 00189
Sources:
University of Iowa Labor Center & Center for Human Rights. (2011). Child labor public didactics project.University of Iowa.Retrieved from https://www.continuetolearn.uiowa.edu/laborctr/child_labor/
Yellowitz, I. (2009). Child labor.History.Retrieved from http://www.history.com/topics/kid-labor
How to Cite this Article (APA Format):Hansan, J. (2011). The American era of child labor.Social Welfare History Projection. Retrieved from https://socialwelfare.library.vcu.edu/programs/child-welfarechild-labor/child-labor/
Resources related to this topic may be found in the Social Welfare History Paradigm Portal.
See besides the Child Labor Discovery Gear up.
Source: https://socialwelfare.library.vcu.edu/programs/child-welfarechild-labor/child-labor/
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