Forced Labour Dbq Essay

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Forced Labor or Intense Job? You wake up, it is dark. You rush to get to the hot, muggy factory, knowing you will be there for the next fourteen hours. By the time you get your first break you are worn out for the day. You finally make it through the day, it is dark already. You go home, catch a few hours of sleep and do the same thing over again. If reading that made you miserable, you would not survive as a silk factory worker. Most girls were sold, by their parents, to the silk factories to help with the financial situation. These jobs required long, hard workdays for little pay and break time. Even though the conditions were so harsh people wonder, did the cost outweigh the benefits?Although it might seem like it wasn’t that bad, working …show more content…

On a normal day they only received 35 minutes of break total, and could work up to 17 hours per day. There was about 61 girls per factory, making the working spaces cramped and hot (Doc A). Due to the miserable conditions and high stress, contracting diseases and sickness was very easy among silk factory workers. In fact, 39% of girls were either released from the job or died due to a work related illness. Also, since there was no electricity at the time, the factory owners needed to use every minute of daylight they could. This meant that the girls were working, on their feet, from dawn to dusk everyday. When surveyed, 40% of the women said that the treatment when sick was poor (Doc F). There is no real way to argue that any of these working conditions sounded the least bit pleasant or worth the little bit of pay received by the …show more content…

How about when you leave work, is the sun still up? For silk factory girls, they started and ended work in the dark. Most weeks a girl worked an average of 81 hours (Doc B). The individual days were usually 13-14 hours long with two 15 minute breaks for breakfast and lunch. A lot of girls worked a 4am-4-pm day as their normal working hours. Imagine working seventeen hours, getting to go to bed for a few hours and having to wake up and do it all again. Most teenagers thrive on being able to hangout with their friends, and just social interaction in general. Most of the girls in these factories were teens but, all they got to do was work and sleep. That sounds miserable and would greatly affect how a person develops mentally and

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