Child Labor: 1900-Present
Museum-in-a-Suitcase Program
American Labor Museum/Botto House National Landmark
83 Norwood Street, Haledon, NJ 07508
Phone: 973-595-7953
american-labor-museum.org
Child Labor: The Shame of the Nation
(Jackdaw Photo Collections, twelve posters)
1. The Littlest Laborers: The Cranberry Pickers
This child, Salvin, age 5, toiled in the New Jersey cranberry bogs, toting two pecks of berries at a time. Workers such as this little one were endangered by doing work that was too hard for them, and by drudging for long hours in the hot sun without enough food or sleep. Tired and weak, they frequently fell ill. They suffered, too, psychologically. Deprived of education and recreation, their young lives were stunted.
1. The Littlest Laborers: The Cranberry Pickers
2. Working in Canneries: Preparing Beans
These children and women performed deadeningly monotonous labor preparing beans for canning. Toiling for very little pay in dark, crowded, and airless rooms, these workers frequently contracted contagious diseases, or suffered crippling pains in their hands from repeating the same motions over and over again. The canning machinery also posed a danger, especially to the youngest workers.
2. Working in Canneries: Preparing Beans
3. At Work in the Fields: A Toddler Picking Cotton
Young children, often as young as Edith, age 5, toiled along with their parents for long hours in the hot sun, gathering cotton and other agricultural products. Wages were as low as 45 cents a day. Children such as these often had no opportunity to attend school, enjoy leisure play time, or rest or eat regularly enough to maintain their health. In the early 1900s, two million children under the age of 15 worked.
3. At Work in the Fields: A Toddler Picking Cotton
4. Safety is Not a Concern: Boy at Work in a Glass Factory
Ignoring the danger of broken glass, children like this one worked on alternating day and night shifts. Tens of thousands of workers died each year in accidents in mills and factories. Hundreds of thousands more were injured. Those who could not work were fired, and there was no health insurance or workers’ compensation to help them. As factories grew larger and more mechanized, workers were viewed as easily replaceable.
4. Safety is Not a Concern: Boy at Work in a Glass Factory
5. Slaving in the Coal Mines: Breaker Boys in a Coal Chute
Thousands of children like these—some as young as six years old—spent full days as “Breaker Boys,” painstakingly picking slate out of piles of coal. Laws prohibiting the hiring of children under 14 were widely ignored. The work was extremely hazardous. Youngsters often fell to their death down the chute, or burned or smothered in mine fires. Children were hired in droves to satisfy the needs of the mine owners.
5. Slaving in the Coal Mines: Breaker Boys in a Coal Chute
6. Factory Labor: Boys in Front of a Manufacturing Plant
The boy holding his coat began working at 10 years of age, for 50 cents a day. Children worked in factories near large and dangerous machinery, in dingy, poorly lit, and inadequately ventilated rooms, breathing in noxious fumes. Paint factories, for instance, contained arsenic fumes. Flouting public opinion, many factory owners took advantage of the fact that children were available for work at low pay, and hired them.
6. Factory Labor: Boys in Front of a Manufacturing Plant
7. Home is No Haven: Doing Piece Work at Home
Mary Mauro and her children, ages 8—11, sewed feathers in their home for $2.25 a week. The father of the family worked as a street cleaner. Families like these toiled in dim light, in airless apartments, often ruining their eyesight and health. Such work kept mothers from tending their children, and kept the children from their studies. Employers could evade rules about labor conditions when families worked at home.
7. Home is No Haven: Doing Piece Work at Home
8. Entertaining Adults: Setting Pins in a Bowling Alley
This photo was taken at 3 a.m. in a subway bowling alley. Young as these boys were, three even younger boys were kept out of the picture by the boss. Children’s morals, as well as their minds and health, suffered as they mingled late into the night with criminals, prostitutes, and drunkards. They breathed in tobacco smoke and often smoked themselves, were offered drinks, heard lewd stories, and witnessed violence.
8. Entertaining Adults: Setting Pins in a Bowling Alley
9. Dignity in Poverty: Barefoot Girl in Cotton Mill
This child, too poor to buy shoes, worked as a thread spinner using a dangerous spinning frame with many fast-moving sharp parts. Children often lost limbs, fingers, or feet in the trade, and breathed in lung-damaging dust and fibers from the mill. Some children spent 48 hours a week over a sewing machine, resulting in spinal curvature. Forty thousand of the nation’s poorest children under 16 worked in the cotton mills.
9. Dignity in Poverty: Barefoot Girl in Cotton Mill
10. A Life of Misery: A Young Boy in the Coal Mines
Coal mines were cruel workplaces for children, who labored 12 hours a day, 6 days a week, picking stones out of coal. Deprived of sunlight and fresh air, they risked being crushed by heavy equipment and mine collapses, being run over by coal cars, being deprived of limbs by axes and falling debris, and developing lung diseases from inhaling toxic particles. Uneducated, many spent their entire lives mining.
10. A Life of Misery: A Young Boy in the Coal Mines
11. No Time for Rest: A Newsboy Asleep on the Job
Toiling long, late hours delivering large stacks of heavy papers for a dollar a day, young newsboys worked to the point of exhaustion. Many tried to attend school during the day and work at night or in the early morning; many failed. Like young messengers, they often found themselves sharing the streets with other nighttime habitués—prostitutes, gamblers, drinkers—being exposed to moral as well as physical dangers.
11. No Time for Rest: A Newsboy Asleep on the Job
12. Trying to Better Themselves: Night School
After a full day of work, it is hard to concentrate on studies. Although overcrowded night schools like this one had problems, they were better than no school at all. Attendees of such schools (many sponsored by the Children’s Aid Society) were often immigrants, whose families came penniless from countries where they were unable to find work, or excluded because of their religion, race, or social position from good jobs.
12. Trying to Better Themselves: Night School
The posters numbered 1 through 12 present photos by Lewis W. Hine (1874-1940), an investigative photographer for the National Child Labor Committee (NCLC) from 1908 until around 1918. Using a simple box camera, Hine traveled across the country to photograph children, listen to their stories, and report on the exploitation of children as cheap labor. The goals of Hine and the NCLC were to expose the horrors of child labor to the public and to move people to action.
Child Labor: The Shame of the Nation (Jackdaw Photo Collections, twelve posters)
Bobbin Girl, Paterson, New Jersey, circa 1900 (courtesy of the American Labor Museum/Botto House National Landmark)
Children were hired in large numbers because they could be paid low wages. As one mill owner remarked, “Why hire a man for a dollar, when you can get a kid for a dime?” In Paterson, New Jersey, bobbin boys and girls earned between $2.50 and $5.00 per week and worked 10 hours each weekday and five hours on Saturdays. The labor was monotonous.
Bobbin Girl, Paterson, New Jersey, circa 1900 (courtesy of the American Labor Museum/Botto House National Landmark)
Breaker Boy song, Glen R. Plummer, 1985
Breaker boys worked in coal mines, their job being to pick out rocks and other impurities from the coal. Their work conditions were poor and they faced a high risk of injury. This song criticizes the nature of the job and how children were forced into these poor conditions in order to help feed their families, who often worked similarly dangerous jobs in the mines, mills, or factories.
Breaker Boy song, Glen R. Plummer, 1985
Rugmark Label, Rugmark Foundation, 1999 (Poster)
Rugmark Foundation certified that hand-knotted carpets are not made with child labor. Independent inspectors performed on-site investigations of overseas carpet factories prior to issuing a Rugmark certification. Producers that passed inspection were issued Rugmark labels that are permanently affixed to the carpet, making it easy for consumers to identify child labor-free carpets.
According to the U.S. department of Labor, the use of child labor in the carpet industry is widely documented in India, Nepal, and Pakistan. Children work in confined, dimly lit workshops, and many develop respiratory illnesses, spinal deformities, and cuts and wounds from sharp tools. Rugmark, endorsed by child welfare organizations worldwide such as UNICEF, attempts to reverse these illegal and abusive labor practices, not only by taking children out of factories, but also by sending them to school. Today, Rugmark has rebranded to GoodWeave International and continues this mission.
Rugmark Label, Rugmark Foundation, 1999 (Poster)
United Farm Workers of America Flag, 1962-Present (Replica)
Children may have harvested the fruit and vegetables that you buy in your supermarket. Many migratory workers in agriculture today are children. The United Farm Workers of America (UFW), a labor union formed in southern California in 1962, has ceaselessly battled on behalf of farm workers, including child laborers. Picking crops can expose children to harmful pesticides and can disrupt school attendance. The symbol of the UFW is an Aztec eagle. The flag symbolizes the strength and unity of the farm workers in their struggle for a better life. The flag has a white background if a worker is mourning the passing of a loved one. When the workers strike, picket, demonstrate, or attend a parade, the eagle is black against a bright red background.
United Farm Workers of America Flag, 1962-Present (Replica)
Picket Signs of Striking Mill Children, 1903 (Replicas)
Mary Harris Jones (1830-1930), better known as Mother Jones, an active supporter of workers, was age 73 when she organized the March of the Mill Children. She was deeply disturbed that there were 10,000 children who worked long hours and had been injured by mill machinery among the striking textile workers in the Kensington section of Philadelphia in 1903. The young strikers carried banners with slogans calling for justice on their march to see President Roosevelt at his summer home on Long Island.
Picket Signs of Striking Mill Children, 1903 (Replicas)
Declaration of Dependence, National Child Labor Committee, 1913
The National Child Labor Committee (NCLC) is a private, non-profit organization founded in 1904 and incorporated by an Act of Congress in 1907 with the mission of promoting the rights, dignity, and well-being of children and youth as they relate to work and working.
Declaration of Dependence, National Child Labor Committee, 1913
A New Tool to Combat the Worst Forms of Child Labor, ILO Convention 182 (1974)
On June 17, 1999, a global consensus was reached to tackle and eliminate the worst forms of child labor. A new international human rights instrument, the Worst Forms of Child Labour Convention — No. 182, waa adopted by the International Labor Organization (ILO) in Geneva. It calls for immediate and effective measures to secure their prohibition and elimination as a matter of urgency.
A New Tool to Combat the Worst Forms of Child Labor, ILO Convention (1974)
World of Work: The Magazine of the ILO, pamphlets & poster, International Labor Organization
The International Labor Organization was formed in 1919 to bring government, employers, and trade unions together for united action in the cause of social justice and better living conditions everywhere. Many countries have modeled labor laws on ILO recommendations and codes of practice. Today the ILO is a specialized agency of the United Nations.
The ILO currently addresses issues such as protecting worker health, foreign competition, layoffs and plant closings, child labor, women’s rights, and new technologies.
World of Work: The Magazine of the ILO, pamphlets & poster, International Labor Organization
What is Made with Child Labor?, International Labor Organization, 2001 (Poster)
Created together with the League of Nations by the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, the International Labor Organization (ILO) became the first specialized agency associated with the United Nations (UN) in 1946. Ever since its creation, the ILO has devoted major effort to the elimination of child labor. Its International Programme on the Elimination of Child Labor (IPEC), created in 1992, is operational on three continents and in more than twenty countries.
What is Made with Child Labor?, International Labor Organization, 2001 (Poster)
Heating Coals (3 pieces)
Boys working at the breakers in coal mines in the early 20th century were badly hurt by their labor. Breaker boys, as they were known, sat over chutes that moved coal, and their job was to pick out the slate and rock that were mixed in with the coal. For long hours they would sit in clouds of coal dust. Often their hands were cut and fingers broken by the coal. Sometimes boys slipped into the chutes and were killed by the machinery.
Heating Coals (3 pieces)
Hand-Woven Jacket, Guatemala, 1988
Women in developing countries start businesses with small loans. Home industries, like weaving, provide regular incomes and improved standards of living. As a result, children can go to school instead of to factories. Poverty forces families to send children to work. Eliminating poverty is a powerful way to combat child labor.
Hand-Woven Jacket, Guatemala, 1988
The following objects and photographs were given to the Museum by Coffee Kids, which was an international non-profit organization established to improve the quality of life for children and families who live in coffee-growing communities around the world. The organization has since ceased operations, although founder Bill Fishbein has gone on to become the executive director of the Coffee Trust and the co-owner of the Coffee Exchange. The Coffee Trust has a similar mission of helping “indigenous coffee farmers improve their agricultural practices, diversify their incomes, and raise healthy families.”
Coffee Kids
Coffee Beans, Mexico, 2000 (Courtesy of Coffee Kids)
Coffee cherries contain the coffee beans that are familiar to us. The green beans, café oro (gold coffee) are exported. The brown, roasted beans are called Ethiopian Yirgacheffe.
Coffee Beans, Mexico, 2000 (Courtesy of Coffee Kids)
Boy Tying Bags of Coffee, Nicaragua, 2000 (Courtesy of Coffee Kids)
Child Picking Coffee, Mexico, 2000 (Courtesy of Coffee Kids)
Child Working in a Coffee Field, Mexico, 2000 (Courtesy of Coffee Kids)
Students of Hijo del Campo Program, Costa Rica, 2000 (Courtesy of Coffee Kids)
While millions of people in the industrialized world enjoy coffee or make their living from it, millions more whose lives center on growing, caring for, and harvesting coffee suffer the ills of abject poverty—many are children. Coffee Kids, a non-profit organization, helps coffee farming families in many ways. Coffee Kids and its partner organization in Costa Rica, Hijos del Campo (The Rural Children’s Education Foundation) give scholarships to Costa Rican children. The money provides for transportation, books, shoes, and school uniforms.
Students of Hijo del Campo Program, Costa Rica, 2000 (Courtesy of Coffee Kids)
Child Picking Coffee, Mexico, 2000 (Courtesy of Coffee Kids)