5 CHAPTER ONE Children worked long hours in a variety of jobs including shucking oysters and tending babies Have you ever wished you did not have to go to school Maybe you find it hard to sit indoors on a beautiful day Or you wake up tired and want to sleep in Today every state requires children to be educated for at least ten years But that has not always been the case In 1900 about 2 million kids did not attend school Working for a Better United States
Child Labor Those children did not stay home and play They were sent to work in factories mines and farms across the nation Imagine if you spent each day of the school year crowded in a dark coal mine instead of going to class Child workers in our nation’s past began work at dawn and finished at dusk Their work continued day after day Young farm workers picked cotton or sorted seafood in the hot sun In factories children spent their entire days running huge machinery or bending over a tabletop sewing clothes And child laborers were paid just a few cents per hour Poor families needed their children to work and make money to survive Businesses could save money by paying children far less than they paid adults And the United States had no laws preventing child labor The results were terrible for everyone Without an education millions of working young people had little hope of getting good jobs as adults Most would carry on the cycle of poverty 6
At the Gorenflo Canning Company in Biloxi Mississippi child workers would arrive at the factory as early as 5 a m Labor Laws Some states had child labor laws as early as the 1840s A law passed in Massachusetts in 1842 said children could not work for more than ten hours each day But the country as a whole did not put child labor laws in place until the 1900s In 1907 the US Congress authorized the National Child Labor Committee to investigate the child labor issue Photographer Lewis Hine began taking pictures of children at work Hine had worked in a factory 7
