Child labour

Early 1900s
In the early 1900s, thousands of boys were employed in glass making industries. Glass
making was a dangerous and tough job especially without the current technologies. The process
of making glass includes intense heat to melt glass (3133 F). When the boys are at work, they
are exposed to this heat. This could cause eye trouble, lung aliments, heat exhaustion, cut, and
burns. Since workers were paid by the piece, they had to work productively for hours without a
break. Since furnaces had to be constantly burning, there were night shifts from 5:00 pm to
3:00 am Many factory owners preferred boys under 16 years of age.
[25]

Children as young as three were put to work. A high number of children also worked
as prostitutes.
[26]
Many children (and adults) worked 16-hour days. As early as 1802 and
1819 Factory Acts were passed to regulate the working hours of workhouse children in factories
and cotton mills to 12 hours per day. These acts were largely ineffective and after radical
agitation, by for example the "Short Time Committees" in 1831, a Royal Commission
recommended in 1833 that children aged 1118 should work a maximum of 12 hours per day,
children aged 911 a maximum of eight hours, and children under the age of nine were no longer
permitted to work. This act however only applied to the textile industry, and further agitation led
to another act in 1847 limiting both adults and children to 10-hour working days.
An estimated 1.7 million children under the age of fifteen were employed in American industry
by 1900.
[27]

In 1910, over 2 million children in the same age group were employed in the United
States.
[28]
This included children who rolled cigarettes,
[29]
engaged in factory work, worked as
bobbin doffers in textile mills, worked in coal mines and were employed in canneries.
[30]
Lewis
Hine's photographs of child labourers in the 1910s powerfully evoked the plight of working
children in the American south. Hines took these photographs between 1908 and 1917 as staff
photographer for the National Child Labour Committee.
Household enterprises
Factories and mines were not the only place where child labour was prevalent in the early 20th
century. Home-based manufacturing across the United States and Europe employed children as
well.
[10]
Governments and reformers argued that labour in factories must be regulated and the
state had an obligation to provide welfare for poor. Legislation that followed had the effect of
moving work out of factories into urban homes. Families and women in particular preferred it
because it allowed them to generate income while taking care of household duties.
Home-based manufacturing operations were active year round. Families willingly deployed their
children in these income generating home enterprises.
[31]
In many cases, men worked from home.
In France, over 58 percent of garment workers operated out of their homes; in Germany, the
number of full-time home operations nearly doubled between 1882 to 1907; and in the United
States, millions of families operated out of home seven days a week, year round to produce
garments, shoes, artificial flowers, feathers, match boxes, toys, umbrellas and other products.
Children aged 514 worked alongside the parents. Home-based operations and child labour in
Australia, Britain, Austria and other parts of the world was common. Rural areas similarly saw
families deploying their children in agriculture. In 1946, Frieda Miller - then Director of United
States Department of Labour - told the International Labour Organisation that these home-based
operations offered, "low wages, long hours, child labour, unhealthy and insanitary working
conditions."
[10][32][33][34]

Percentage children working
in England and Wales
[35]

Census Year
% Boys aged 1014
as child labour
1881 22.9
1891 26.0
1901 21.9
1911 18.3
Note: These are averages; child labour in
Lancashire was 80%
Source: Census of England and Wales
Colonial empires
Systematic use of child labour was common place in the colonies of European powers between
1650 to 1950. In Africa, colonial administrators encouraged traditional kin-ordered modes of
production, that is hiring a household for work not just the adults. Millions of children worked in
colonial agricultural plantations, mines and domestic service industries.
[36][37]
Sophisticated
schemes were promulgated where children in these colonies between the ages of 514 were hired
as apprentice without pay in exchange for learning a craft. A system of Pauper Apprenticeship
came into practice in the 19th century where the colonial master neither needed the native
parents' nor child's approval to assign a child to labour, away from parents, at a distant farm
owned by a different colonial master.
[38]
Other schemes included 'earn-and-learn' programs
where children would work and thereby learn. Britain for example passed a law, the so-called
Masters and Servants Act of 1899, followed by Tax and Pass Law, to encourage child labour in
colonies particularly in Africa. These laws offered the native people the legal ownership to some
of the native land in exchange for making labour of wife and children available to colonial
government's needs such as in farms and as picannins.
Beyond laws, new taxes were imposed on colonies. One of these taxes was the Head
Tax in British and French colonial empires. The tax was imposed on everyone older than 8 years,
in some colonies. To pay these taxes and cover living expenses, children in colonial households
had to work.
[39][40][41]

In southeast Asian colonies, such as Hong Kong, child labour such as the Mui Tsai (), was
rationalised as a cultural tradition and ignored by British authorities.
[42][43]
TheDutch East India
Company officials rationalised their child labour abuses with, "it is a way to save these children
from a worse fate." Christian mission schools in regions stretching from Zambia to Nigeria too
required work from children, and in exchange provided religious education, not secular
education.
[36]
Elsewhere, the Canadian Dominion Statutes in form of so-called Breaches of
Contract Act, stipulated jail terms for uncooperative child workers.
[44]

Proposals to regulate child labour began as early as 1786.
[45]

Soviet Union and Russia
Although formally banned since 1922, child labour was widespread in the Soviet Union, mostly
in the form of mandatory, unpaid work by schoolchildren on Saturdays and holidays. The
students were used as a cheap, unqualified workforce on kolhoz (collective farms) as well as in
industry and forestry. The practice was formally called "work education".
[46]

From the 1950s on, the students were also used for unpaid work at schools, where they cleaned
and performed repairs.
[47]
This practice has continued in the Russian Federation, where up to 21
days of the summer holidays is sometimes set aside for school works. By law, this is only
allowed as part of specialised occupational training and with the students' and parents'
permission, but those provisions are widely ignored.
[48][49]

Out of former Soviet Union republics Uzbekistan continued and expanded the program of child
labour on industrial scale to increase profits on the main source of Islam Karimov's income,
cotton harvesting. In September, when school normally starts, the classes are suspended and
children are sent to cotton fields for work, where they are assigned daily quotas of 20 to 60 kg of
raw cotton they have to collect. This process is repeated in spring, when collected cotton needs to
be hoed and weeded. In 2006 it is estimated that 2.7 million of children were forced to work this
way.
[50]