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Summary Of Child Labor In The Jungle By Upton Sinclair

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“Child labor and poverty are inevitably bound together and if you continue to use the labor of children as the treatment for the social disease of poverty, you will have both poverty and child labor to the end of time” (Grace Abbott). The issue of child labor has been around for centuries. Its standing in our world has been irrevocably stained in our history and unfortunately, our present. Many great minds have assessed this horrific issue and its effect on our homes, societies, and ultimately, our world. The Jungle, a novel written in 1906, by Upton Sinclair is a harsh and very real account of what child labor looked like during the time of the Industrial Revolution. This work particularly looks at the lives of Lithuanian immigrants funneling into the United States and the work they are forced to do to maintain their meager existences. The immigrants are in such a degraded state that so many are forced to have their children employed to help the family survive. The key word for these immigrants and their children was survival. Sinclair states throughout the novel that education for these immigrant children was purely a bonus, as so many had to give up schooling to help the family make ends meet. He tells his audience what laws were in place at the time only forced people to lie about the ages of their children. “The law made no difference except that it forced people to lie about the ages of their children” (Sinclair). He also tells that priests would often certify the

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