Business Math in Action

The Workplace Is No Place for Children

When you start looking for your first job, you may wonder if you’ll get paid minimum wage or more, how many breaks you’ll get, or where you’ll eat lunch. If you’re under 14 years old, most states won’t allow you to work, and if you’re 15-17, you can’t work during school hours. These child labor laws are there to protect you from being exploited. They were enacted because, just 75 years ago, children as young as seven toiled all day in U.S. factories, mills, and mines.

Throughout history, children have always helped their families work on farms and in shops. But the Industrial Revolution, which began in the late 1700s, changed the way people worked. Huge factories were built, with assembly lines that required thousands of unskilled laborers. In the U.S. the working poor, especially immigrants, were hired at poverty-level wages to keep the machines of industry producing at top speed. Companies often hired whole families-men did the heavy labor, while women and children did lighter work or jobs that required sharp eyesight and nimble fingers.

In the mid-1800s, a typical workday lasted from dawn until sunset, and longer in the winter. A workweek would last 68-72 hours, often with no day off. In rural areas, where mills and mines were located, workers lived in “company towns.” They rented a ramshackle house from the company and had to buy all their goods at an overpriced company store. Their lives differed very little from the lives of medieval serfs, except that it was harder. The work schedule of employees in the 1800s was the most intense in the history of labor.

The children fared worst of all. Denied an education, they were given tasks that were both dangerous and mind-numbing. For 12 to 16 hours a day, they shucked oysters, rolled cigars, spun thread on giant spinning machines, canned fish, sorted pieces of coal, picked fruit. In the cities, boys as young as five hawked newspapers on the streets, often working until midnight. They earned between 25 and 45 cents a day.

By 1900 many states had enacted child labor laws, but they were routinely ignored by business owners and often did not apply to immigrants. In 1908 a photographer named Lewis Hine took his camera to the mine shafts, fields, and factory floors, documenting the plight of child workers. His photo essays stunned the public and aroused them to action. Finally, in 1938, Congress passed the Fair Labor Standards Act, which established a work week of 40 hours and a minimum wage of 40 cents an hour-more than ten times what many children had been earning. Most important, the law prohibited businesses to hire anyone under the age of 16. As a U.S. citizen, you reap the benefits of our labor laws, but elsewhere in the world more than 250 million children still work under equally appalling conditions.