Child Labor Presentation by John Swartz

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Child Labor Presentation

Published on Nov 21, 2015

John Swartz

BY: JOHN SWARTZ

The two most common forms of child labor have become labeled as “Parish apprentice children” and “free labour children
The “Parish apprentice children” were some of the first children to be brought into the factory setting. These were children who had been taken in by the government and placed in orphanages
The term “child labor” generally refers to children who work to produce a good or a service which can be sold for money in the marketplace regardless of whether or not they are paid for their work.
the factory system was criticized for strict discipline, harsh punishment, unhealthy working conditions, low wages, and inflexible work hours.

A picture was painted of the “dark satanic mill” where children as young as five and six years old worked for twelve to sixteen hours a day, six days a week without recess for meals in hot, stuffy, poorly lit, overcrowded factories to earn as little as four shillings per week.
Charles Dickens called these places of work the “dark satanic mills” and E. P. Thompson described them as “places of sexual license, foul language, cruelty, violent accidents, and alien manners
The 1841 British Census reports that the textile industry employed almost 107,000 children and the children accounted for a significant portion of the employees in the textile industry.
The same report also noted that another 27.9 percent of the workforce started between the age of 10 and 13.

Boys as young as four would work for a master sweep who would send them up the narrow chimneys of British homes to scrape the soot off the sides
Once the first rural textile mills were built (1769) and child apprentices were hired as primary workers, the connotation of “child labor” began to change
After the invention and adoption of Watt’s steam engine, mills no longer had to locate near water and rely on apprenticed orphans – hundreds of factory towns and villages developed in Lancashire, Manchester, Yorkshire and Cheshire. The factory owners began to hire children from poor and working-class families to work in these factories preparing and spinning cotton, flax, wool and silk.
The three laws which most impacted the employment of children in the textile industry were the Cotton Factories Regulation Act of 1819 (which set the minimum working age at 9 and maximum working hours at 12), the Regulation of Child Labor Law of 1833 (which established paid inspectors to enforce the laws) and the Ten Hours Bill of 1847 (which limited working hours to 10 for children and women).

The employment of children in textile factories continued to be high until mid-nineteenth century
Children and youth also comprised a relatively large proportion of the work forces in coal and metal mines in Britain.
In 1842, the proportion of the work forces that were children and youth in coal and metal mines ranged from 19 to 40%.
child labor was a regional phenomenon where a high incidence of child labor existed in the manufacturing districts while a low incidence of children were employed in rural and farming districts.

People argued that the work was easy for children and helped them make a necessary contribution to their family’s income
They calculated that while only 4.5% of the cotton workers were under 10, 54.5% were under the age of 19 – confirmation that the employment of children and youths was pervasive in cotton textile factories.
They would beat the kids if they showed up late to work
The smaller children were called scavengers and went under the machines to get things.