Child Labor

A detailed Summary of Child Labor

Child 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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 2355
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: Miscellaneous