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Child labor is stringently regulated in the United States. Children under the age of fourteen do not work. Some eleven-year-olds may work if their parents own a farm, but not for very many hours per day.
The federal government passed laws specifying the hours that children of appropriate age may work: Children can’t work during school hours. During the school year, work hours can’t exceed three hours per day, or eighteen hours per week. This seems reasonable to Americans, but it wasn’t always that way. It isn’t normal now for many children in third world countries.
In the late seventeen hundreds and the mid-eighteen hundreds, power-driven machines replaced hand labor. Since these machines produced quickly, factories started to appear everywhere. More factories meant that companies needed to hire more employees to fill jobs and work the machines.
Immigrants worked cheaply, and then companies realized that it was even less expensive to hire the immigrant’s children. There weren’t enough adults willing to work in the factories, and they could pay the children much lower wages, which meant more money for the company. Children as young as the age of seven worked for cheap wages, just so that their families could afford to survive.
Girls would often work in the factories while the boys of these poor families would go to school. That way, the boys could get an education and perhaps a good job when they grew up. But many boys couldn't go to school, and the conditions in the factories were appalling.
One company in Massachusetts put a barbwire fence around their glass factory to keep the young children inside. Children carried loads of hot glass all night inside the factory. Deaths often occurred because the children were exhausted from overwork.
Those children working in mines had even worse conditions to contend with. They were chained and harnessed like horses to a mine cart, and sometimes they crawled to pull the heavy vehicle through narrow spaces.
The mines were hot, so they worked half-naked and they emerged at the end of their shift black with dirt, wet, and exhausted. They grew up with a hump on their backs, and they inhaled so much mine dust that it congested their lungs and made them unable to breathe. They often died early in life of black lung and other diseases, because of the hazardous conditions that they worked in.
A great number of people were appalled at the conditions that children worked in, and about the hours per day that they put in at their jobs. They said that child labor was wrong, and these people campaigned for reforms.
In the United States, numerous organizations worked to eliminate child labor, including the National Child Labor Commitee, lauched in 1904 by social workers. Public support came when journalists exposed the horrible conditions children worked in.
Eventually, cities and states set forth guidelines limiting the number of hours that children could work. In 1916, President Wilson passed the Keating-Owen Act through Congress. This banned articles produced by child labor from interstate commerce. A 1918 Supreme Court ruling declared it unconstitutional.
It was not until 1938, when the Fair Labor Standards Act was passed, did any attempt at child labor legislation succeed. This requires employers to pay child laborers the minimum wage. It also limits the age of child laborer to age 18 if the occupation in hazardous. Gradually conditions improved, but child labor has still not been wiped out.
Children in the rural U.S. and Mexico work alongside their parents on farms. Their salary depends on how much that they can do each day. The average wage of a child laborer in Mexico is between two and three dollars a day. They generally work about twelve hours each day.
Children of poor families in Pakistan are often apprenticed at the age of seven: This means that their parents receive money for them to go to work for as long as fourteen hours each day. They live at their jobs, sometimes crowded in with other children, four and five to a tiny room. They are often underfed, mistreated, and in poor health.
Many countries that have child labor laws do not enforce them. Charitable organizations have begun to strenuously campaign to improve the lives of children around the world. They publish the names of companies that use goods made by child labor, and ask that consumers boycott these companies.
Many children around the world work lengthy hours in horrifying conditions, and these organizations are bringing this situation into the spotlight. They want child labor to cease.
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