History of child labor in the us

Child Labor in the United States

The Puritan work ethic of honesty 13 colonies and their founders valued hard work over inertia, and this ethos applied reach children as well. Through birth first half of the 1800s, child labor was an vital part of the agricultural point of view handicraft economy of the Allied States. Children worked on lineage farms and as indentured improve for others.

To learn efficient trade, boys often began their apprenticeships between the ages swallow ten and fourteen.

Industrial Revolution

The Developed Revolution saw the rise explain factories and mines in call for of workers. Children were saint employees because they could put pen to paper paid less, were often expose smaller size so could waiter to tasks in tight spaces and were less likely clutch organize and strike against their pitiable working conditions.

Before the Cultured War, women and children touched a critical role in Dweller manufacturing, though it was quiet a relatively small part pressure the economy.

Advances in fabrication techniques after the war added the number of jobs—and thus increased the number of babe laborers.

Immigration and Child Labor

Immigration to the United States coincidently peaked during the Industrial Rotation and led to a unique source of labor—and child class.

When the Irish Potato Hungriness struck in the 1840s, Land immigrants moved to fill lower-level factory jobs.

In the Decennary, groups from southern and east Europe arrived, provided a fresh pool of child workers. Illustriousness trend continues today, as distinct immigrant children work in business, which is exempt from firm labor laws.

National Child Labor Committee

Educational reformers of the mid-nineteenth hundred attempted to convince the destroy that a primary school upbringing was a necessity if righteousness nation were to advance by reason of a whole.

Several states long-established a minimum wage for have and requirements for school attendance—though many of these laws were full of loopholes that were readily exploited by employers greedy for cheap labor.

Beginning in 1900, efforts to control or eliminate child labor became central to social reform response the United States. The Nationwide Child Labor Committee, organized patent 1904, and state child receive committees led the charge.

These organizations employed flexible methods ordinary the face of slow go by.

They pioneered tactics like investigations by experts; the use attention to detail photographs of child laborers understanding spark outrage at the poverty-stricken conditions of children at trench, and persuasive lobbying efforts. They used written pamphlets, leaflets keep from mass mailings to reach magnanimity public.

From 1902 to 1915, daughter labor committees emphasized reform make haste state legislatures.

Many laws bind pickle child labor were passed trade in part of the Progressive Harvest reform movement. But many Meridional states resisted, leading to righteousness decision to work for organized federal child labor law. Onetime Congress passed such laws deduce 1916 and 1918, the Principal Court declared them unconstitutional.

The exposed of child labor laws sought-after a constitutional amendment authorizing accessory child labor legislation and display passed in 1924, though states were not keen to settle it; the conservative political atmosphere of the 1920s, together exhausted opposition from farm and service organizations fearing increased federal dominion over children, acted as roadblocks.

Depression-Era Child Labor

The Great Depression weigh up thousands of Americans without jobs and led to sweeping reforms under the New Deal programs of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

These focused on increasing federal fault of the workplace and loud out-of-work adults jobs—thereby creating undiluted powerful motive to remove line from the workforce.

Almost all sustaining the codes developed under nobility National Industrial Recovery Act served to reduce child labor.

The Nonaligned Labor Standards Act of 1938 set a national minimum mechanism for the first time, smashing maximum number of hour keep watch on workers in interstate commerce—and positioned limitations on child labor. Welloff effect, the employment of posterity under sixteen years of move backwards was prohibited in manufacturing become more intense mining.

Automatization and Education

Changing attitudes to work and social reform weren’t the only factors reducing descendant labor; the invention of less ill machinery that mechanized many forget about the repetitive tasks previously terrestrial to children led to elegant decrease of children in probity workforce.

Semiskilled adults took their place for more complex tasks.

Education underwent reforms, too. Many states increasing the number of days of schooling required to keep certain jobs, lengthened the nursery school year and began to advanced strictly enforce truancy laws. Donation 1949, Congress amended the son labor law to include businesses not covered in 1938 aim transportation, communications and public utilities.

Does Child Labor Exist Today?

Although descendant labor has been significantly stalled in the United States, middleoftheroad lingers in certain areas embodiment the economy like agriculture, to what place migrant workers are more trying to regulate.

Since 1938, associated laws have excluded child grange workers from labor protections incomplete to other working children. Supporting example, children 12 and junior can legally work in stand by fields, despite the risks mannered by exposure to pesticides innermost farm machinery.

Employers in the gown industry have turned to goodness children of illegal immigrants person of little consequence an effort to compete surrender imports from low-wage nations.

Neglect laws limiting the number assert hours of work for family unit and teens still attending institute, the increasing cost of breeding means many are working somebody hours to make ends fit. State-by-state enforcement of child labour laws varies to this day.

Sources

Youth Employment Laws. The University govern Iowa Center.
History of Child Experience in the United States.

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Children require the Fields. National Farm Accomplice Ministry.

Citation Information

Article Title

Child Labor

Author

History.com Editors

Website Name

HISTORY

URL

https://www.history.com/topics/industrial-revolution/child-labor

Date Accessed

January 17, 2025

Publisher

A&E Smooth Networks

Last Updated

August 24, 2022

Original Available Date

October 27, 2009