Both of the children work and sleep with the mother.
]
There are more than 23,000 licensed “home factories” in New York City
alone, 23,000 groups of workers in the tenements licensed to manufacture
goods. How difficult it is to protect children employed in these
tenement factories can best be judged by the following incident: Two
small Italian children, a boy of five and his sister aged four, left a
West-side kindergarten and were promptly followed up by their
kindergartner, who found that the children were working and could not,
in the opinion of their mother, be spared to attend the kindergarten.
They were both helping to make artificial flowers. The truant officer
was first applied to and asked whether the compulsory education law
could not be used to free them, part of the time at least, from their
unnatural toil. But attendance at school is not compulsory before the
eighth year, so that was a useless appeal. Then the factory inspector
was applied to, and he showed that the work of the children was entirely
legal; they received no wages and were, therefore, not “employed” in the
technical sense of that term. They were working in their own family. The
room was not dirty or excessively overcrowded. No law was broken, and
there was no legal means whereby the enslavement of those little
children might be prevented.[130]
This kind of child labor, be it remembered, is very different from that
wholesome employment of children in the domestic industry which preceded
the advent of the system of machine production. Then there was hope in
the work and joy in the leisure which followed the work. Then
competition was based on human qualities; man against man, hand against
hand, eye against eye, brain against brain. To-day the competition is
between man and the machine, the child and the man,—and even the child
and the machine. Children are employed in the textile mills because
their labor is cheaper than that of adults; boys are employed in the
glass factories at night because their labor is cheaper to buy than
machinery; children in the tenements paste the fancy boxes in which we
get our candies and chocolate bonbons for the same reason. Such child
labor has no other objective than the increase of employers’ profits; it
has nothing to do with training the child for the work of life. On the
contrary, it saps the constitution of the child, robs it of hope, and
unfits it for life’s struggle. Such child labor is not educative or
wholesome, but blighting to body, mind, and spirit.