The Universalist. [volume] (Chicago [Ill.]) 1884-1897, 1896-02-08
IDS of Dealing with Child Labor.
SPECIAL ARTICLE.


that children are employed twenty hours
at stretch in the sweat shops of Chi
cago. 1t is under the protection of these
decisions that they are required in many
cases to work four weeks before receiv.
ing any pay. and further required to
leave one weeks pay always in the hands
of the employer, only too often losing it
wholly if they leave the place or are dis
charged
The vast manufacture of Illinois has
sprung so suddenly into being, and the
army OF 1924 children has been mustered
so silently into the ranks of it's indus
tries. that public opinion has not kept
pace with the change. Children are
employed all night in glass works in
Alton and Streator. as matter of
course, and there is no outcry against
the custom, Children are employed as
elevator boys from the age of twelve
years on, and no one protests. At the
Stockyards in Chicago over 200 children
are employed in the most brutalizing
surroundings that can be imagined.
Some of these children are little butch.
ers, sticking pigs, sheep and calves.
standing ankle deep in blood and refuse
as they do work which no child should
ever see. Other Stockyards children
sort entrails, or saw bones at buzz saws,
taking risks of mutilation which no man
would willingly take. There is no wide
spread indignation at this ruin of child
life, it is all a part of the hurry and rush
OF the development of manufacture in
the farming State.
Provisions for Safety.
The Illinois factory law contains none
OF the provisions for safeguarding life
and limb which characterize the code of
Massachusetts. Unguarded buzz saws
are the rule. except where guard oc-
casionally serves as monument to q
child injured, damage suit, and the ef-
fort to avoid repetition of such ex-
pense. Unguarded elevator shafts also
are the rule; and the Chicago papers
rarely fail to chronicle daily accident
from this source of danger to the work.
ing people of the community. But ev-
erything which is danger to the adult
employe is thrice a danger to the care
less boy or girl. And, SO long as care
lessness remains the prerogative and the
characteristic quality of childhood, so
long will the children furnish the heavi
est quota of the injured in the list of
accidents" consequent upon the neglect
of employers to provide safeguards for
life and limb, and the neglect of the leg
islatures and the courts to require en-
ployers to provide such safeguards.
Nowhere in the civilized world to. day
is the wage-earning child exposed to
such risks of ruin of body and mind as
in the nightly growing labor mar ket of
Illinois. For nowhere else is body of
nearly ten thousand children employed
an unlimited number of hours; or at
unguarded and unsupervised machinery;
or with no requirement that the child
shall be free from the charge of absolute
AiAAoOtoSy' AL tACbO tuE00
are found every day by the Illinois in
spectors in the performance of their
daily work.
In the course of the past year there
has been constant prosecution of en-
ployers who have been found with chill.
| dren at work in violation of the child
labor provisions of the Factory law. In
the course of these prosecutions, it has
been no rare thing to find children born
in Chicago, or brought here in infancy,
who could not understand such simple
questions as what is your manner"
Where doyou liver" "What is the name
of the man you are working for?" In
some of the cases tried it was shown that
the children had never attended a
school in which English was taught, but
had grown up in the foreign colonies of
Chicago, themselves as foreign as their
parents.
The Question of IlIiteracy.
The illiteracy of the wage earning
children is. to some extent, matter of
the action of the local authorities in
providing school accommodations, as is
shown in the case of the children in two
towns at opposite ends of Illinois. In
the Alton Glass Works. single estab
lishment in Southern Illinois, there were
found at work, last January, over 200
children under fourteen years of age,
illiterate, undersized, unintelligent, and
disgrace to any community. In the
same year, in Freeport. inspecting twen-
ty-three establishments. employing 1867
persons. the inspectors found but fifteen
children employed under the age of six.
teen years, all boys, and none of them
illiterate. The Freeport Board of Edu
cation had made the most of the feeble
Illinois Compulsory Education law, and
had supplied schools for all the children
who wished to attend school.
Indeed. the whole question of child
labor is very largely matter Of local
opinion. Where the trades unions are
strong and intelligent, they insist that
the children shall be kept out of the
factories and workshops and in the
oohO0lc. apd uyhara the oobool o,.AL.