Child Labor
19th Century England, Birtian R.Phillips
The jobs of the Children in Factories
- Theh small size of the children allowed them to have theh job of moving into small spaces in the factories because aduts could not fit, They crawled into small spaces to to fix a machine that has brokedown.
- Some kids could have the job of the crack-off boy thier job was to remove finished peices of hot glassware from the end of the gaffer's blowing iron, They removed it buy easliy cracking it off
- Young children could sometimes have the job of traveling through mines with no light at all and offten carrying loads through water that came up to their calves
- Kids in the factories had the job of the "scavenger" walking around the factories looking on the floor and under machines for loose cotton that had fallen
Hours, Food, and Working conditions
- The hours that lids had to work where different for each factory the lids worked for but the usual times a day where around 13-16 hours daily with some work starting as early as 5:30 in the morning
- The kids usually started the morning working with no breakfast then for lunch they had a hour the food was not so pleasant sometimes in some factories the lunch was oatcake with very little to no flavor at all it was often very hard and was boiled with milk and water.
- Some factories had potato pie with no flavor but with a bit of bacon here and there but it had so much fatty fat cooked in with it, kids could barley stand to eat it, And once a year they had cheese and brown bread.
- The working conditions where terrible, sometimes factories had twice as many worker 's than the capacity of the building called for the factories where unsafe and unhealthy. These conditions made it easier for more accidents to occur
Accidents that often happened
- One accident that often happened was kids that worked large machinery would often lose a finger and sometimes even a arm from accidentally falling in to the running machinery
- Sometimes the kids that had the job of crawling under the machinery to fix a broken part ended up either with a missing limb or dead, this would often happen because the kids did not get out form under the machines fast enough and the factory runners turned the machine back on.
- Very often the clothes that workers wore got sucked in by running machines and pulled them in like little kids pulling off limbs often the arms.
- Sometimes factory owners pushed some kids to hard to work and this caused the kids to eventually lose their mined or turn severely ill and need to be hospitalized.
Punishments Children Faced
- If the kids where late to work they where often beat severally bad sometimes beat with a whip
- If kids slowed their production or acted up in any way they would be beaten and most people in the factories saw kids being beat as a normal thing
- Why some kids where trying to catch up with work their over lookers would beat them till they caught up or until they where black and blue all over
- If some kids got tired on the job over lookers would pull then over to the corner throw them in a bin of water and send them back to work.
Efforts to improve/stop Child Labor
- One way people tryed to improve child labor was by saying that kids under the age 15 could not work and that they had to have an education.
- Another way was by taking pictures and printing them and stories in to news papers for people all over the country/ world to see
- To improve this people also demanded higher wages and didn't accept anything under that.
- And fought for lower working hours, not to work the kids 13 to 16 or 18 hours a day, limited a work day to 8 hours