The labor world. [volume] (Duluth, Minn.) 1896-current, 1902-09-27


IS cents. Child labor is paid 10 to 40
cents a day. The hours that these chill
dren must keep are such as no worker
in Northern mill would for one min
ute tolerate. The customary days work
is from 5 As in the morning to 6: 80 in
the evening, but the system of benevo-
lent paternalism maintained in the
mills, which is unqualified by an inter-
ference by labor unions, and which af-
fords the finest illustration ia man
managing his own business to suit
himself frequently adds two hourA
more to the schedule"
Mrs. Irene Ashby- Macfayden was
specially sent into the Southern states
labor and the facts she brings in re-
cent article in the Federationist are
startling in the extreme. She says:
Twenty thousand little children are
toiIing out their lives in tho textile
mills of tho south.
Mrs. Macfayden does not blame the
Southern people so much as the New
England capitalists who own the mills
and machinery and consequently the
workers..
Many of the little toilers work for
ten cents day and she knows "of
babies working for: five and six cents
a day" The day. is often from 6, a.
m. to p. M, or worse, from 6 p. m.
to 6 a. M, when she found little chill
dren working from dark until long past
dawn, kept awake by cold water being
dashed into their faces" She says, on
the subject of night-work:
without regulation of hours there
is no rea son to prevent the mills work.
ing at night, and when they can do so
profitably they avail themselves of this
permission. I have talked with a lit
tie boy Of seven years who worked for
40 nights in Alabama and another child
not nine years old, who at six years old
had been on the night shift II months.
"A clerk in a cotton mill told me
that little boys turned out at two in
the morning for some trivial fault,
afraid 70 go home, would beg him to
allow them to go to sleep on the Of
flee floor.
TN Georgia it is a common sight to
see the children of cotton operatives
stretched on the bed dressed as they
came from the mills in the morning,
too weary to do anything but fling
themselves down for rest.
TN South Carolina Miss Jane Adams,
Of Chicago, found a child of five work.
ing at night in the fine, large new mills
Only a few weeks ago I stood at 10:3 80
at night in a mill in Columbia, S. c.,
controlled and owned by northern ca
pital, where children who did not know
their own ages, were working from
p. m. to s a. m. without moment for
rest or food or a single cessation Of the
maddening rack of the machinery, in
an atmosphere unsanitary and clouded
with humanity and lint
The health of the children is not i'm
proved by this treatment. She says, in
fact:
"The physical, mental and moral ef-
feet Of these long hours of toll and con-
f1nement on the children is indescriba-
bly, sad. Mill children are so stunted
that every foreman, as you enter the
mill will tell you that you cannot Judge
their ages. Children may look, he
says, to be 10 or II, and be in reality
II or Is.
"A horrible form Of dropsy occurs
among the children. A doctor in the
city mill, who has made special study
OF the subject, tells me that ten per
cent Of the children who go to work
before IL years Of age, after five years
contract active consumption The lint
forms in their lungs perfect culti-
waiting me dunn for tuberculosis, while
the change from the hot atmosphere
of the mill to the chill night or morning
air often brings on pneumonia, which
frequently, If not the cause of death,
is a forerunner of consumption.
How sternly the pound of flesh is
insisted on by the various employers
is illustrated by the case of two little
boys of and II, who had to walk three
miles to work on the night shift for IL
hours. One night they were five min
utes late and were shut out, having
to tramp the whole three miles back
again. The number of accidents to
the dangers of machinery, is appalling.
I'm Huntsville, Ala, in January, just
before 1 was there, a, child of eight
years, who had been few weeks in the
mills, lost the index and middle finger
of her right hand. A child Of seven
had lost her thumb d year previously.
In one mill city in the South q doc
tor told a friend that he had personally
amputated more than a. hundred ba-
Rbies' fingers uanyled in the mill. a