Chloe Creel Trice Writing 5B 20 April 2023 Child Labor DBQ Did you know that kids used to have to skip school to work in very dangerous conditions? Kids need to learn, but in the late 1800s and early 1900s kids were skipping school to work and earn money for their family. During this time period, many children were hired to work in awful and dangerous sweatshops. Very often the kids were in threatening and horrific conditions. After people noticed the treacherous working conditions for kids in the U.S. in the late 1800s and early 1900s, many individuals took action to address this dreadful problem. During this time, the working conditions were dreadful. For example, Syble Filter had his finger cut off at the age of 17 when a machine started unexpectedly (Doc. 3). Another example of these terrible conditions is when very young children (boys especially) got caught in the machine or fell into a moving machine (Doc.2). The definition of sweatshops is “a shop or factory in which employees work for …show more content…
An example of someone taking action was when Samuel Gompers, a union leader organized national unions and a local union to help kids go to school. He also regulated the hours that kids could only work up to eight hours a day (Doc. 5). “Mother” Mary Jones encouraged children and adults to go on strike. She also made speeches on the circumstances and perils of child labor (Doc. 6). Several States established a minimum wage for labor and requirements for school attendance through many of these laws were full of loopholes that were readily exploited by employees hungry for cheap labor (OI/www.history.com). One last example is the law that was passed in 1874 by the New York State lawmakers created a law where eligible children must go to school 14 weeks a year or more (Doc. 7). Would you be one of these people who took action when you saw these dreadful working conditions for