Child Labor In The 1800s

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“Child labor is work that harms children or keeps them from attending school.” Back then in the U.S., children were working between ages 5 to 17. Between the 1800s and 1900s, many children worked in agricultural fields, fishing, mining, manufacturing, and even drug trade and prostitution. Even though child labor laws are still avoided around the world, the effects on child labor in the US, before, was unbelieveable. Children were suffering from health issues, reform movements grew and other countries followed enforced child labor too. Most children who worked; suffered health related issues. “Many of the industries that employ large numbers of young workers in the United States have higher-than-average injury rates for workers of all ages, …show more content…

Some weren’t supervised, they might’ve been too short to do the work or didn’t want to do the work. When children worked over 15 hours a day, they suffered with either malnutrition, fatigue and anemia. With that said, the risk increased of having permanent disabilities and death. Once again due to their long hours of work, kids dealt with aggression, substance use, sleep deprivation and misconduct. Most people didn’t care and that proved how morally wrong they …show more content…

Many states were involved and enacted laws by the 1920s. Overall 36 states set laws against children, under the age of 16, working in factories at night or over eight hours. As a result, a lot people began to see the negative sides of child labor and advocated for children. More kids went to school for free and worked until they were 16. Thanks to the International Labor Organization, they’ve kept an eye out to regulate work since the twentieth century. There were only a few attempts of child labor but the more and more they tried, the more states banned children working underage. That made a huge impact in the US but still not in any other

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