A young girl who has been shucking six years and earns a dollar a day;
a little mother who alternates baby tending and oyster shucking; a
ten-year-old worker has no time for school.
]
The wages of these workers vary according to their locality, and the
kind of season they find. The work on the shrimp is better paid than
oyster shucking, but it is much more irregular. On the latter families
frequently earn ten and fifteen or twenty dollars a week so when there
are several children, and the work is steady, there is a great
temptation to make them all help. Children of seven years earn about
twenty-five cents a day, and at eight and ten years of age often fifty
cents a day or more. At twelve and fourteen years they frequently earn
as high as a dollar a day and this is adult pay. The fastest adult
shucker seldom earns much more than a dollar a day after years of
experience. What then is the outlook for children beginning this
industry?
“What is your name, little girl?”
“Dunno.”
“How old are you?”
“Dunno.”
“How many pots do you shuck in a day?”
“Dunno.”
And the pity of it is that _they do not know_.
What then do they know? Enough to stand patiently with the rest picking
up one hard, dirty cluster of shells, deftly prying them open, dropping
the meat into the pot; and then go through this process with another and
another and another, until after many minutes the pot is full—a relief,
for they carry it over to the weigher and rest doing nothing a minute,
and walk back,—such a change from the dreary standing, reaching, prying
and dropping—minute upon minute, hour upon hour, day upon day, month
after month. Or perchance, for variety, the catch may have been shrimp,
and then the hours of work are shorter, but the shrimp are icy cold, and
the blood in one’s fingers congeals, and the fingers become so sore that
she welcomes the oysters again.
Are you surprised then to find that many children seem dumb and can not
understand our language?
“But we educate them” some canners tell us.
This is the way they do it. In the few places where I found any pretense
to education the children shucked oysters for four hours before school.
Then they went to school for half a day, returning at one o’clock for a
hurried lunch. They worked for four hours more, five days in the week.
On Saturday they put in an alleged half day consisting of eight or nine
hours work. Is it any marvel that the school principal told me “It isn’t
satisfactory, but at least we are giving them some help in learning the
language.” They need the help. At another place, with two canneries, but
two children were going to school, and the illiteracy of both adults and
children was appalling.
“There is no compulsion about schooling here,” the principal said.
The “vocational guidance” which most of them receive, year in and year
out, is seen in the sheds where under the eagle eye of the boss, who
watches to see that they do not shirk, and under the pressure of
parental authority, they put in their time where it will bring tangible
returns. One padrone told me:
“I keep ’em a-working all the year. In the winter, bring ’em down here
to the gulf. In Summer, take ’em to the berry fields of Maryland and
Delaware. They don’t lose many weeks’ time, but I have a hard time to
get ’em sometimes. Have to tell ’em all kinds of lies.”
So here we have a certain kind of “scientific management” of child labor
by means of which even the vacation time of the children is utilized.
“Why do they do it?”—that question comes to one over and over; what
keeps these little ones at their uninteresting task? In the first place,
their immigrant parents are frugal, even parsimonious, and every little
helps. Then they think it keeps the children out of trouble, little
realizing that they are storing up trouble when they grow up,
handicapped by lack of education, broken physically, and with a distaste
for work. Small wonder if they drift into the industrial maelstrom of
cheap, inefficient labor, and float on as industrial misfits.
If we look at it from the employer’s point of view, we find his chief
justification is that children are needed because the goods are
perishable, and must be put up immediately. You ask him if the children
are not perishable, and he says he can’t see that they are spoiled. “It
doesn’t hurt ’em. They’re tough. I began myself at their age,” and so
on. It will be long years before these employers will be looking at this
children’s labor with a long-range finder, a problem to be met along
with that of improved machinery. The children themselves are docile;
they do as they are told; they are imitative, like to do what the rest
are doing; they are easily stimulated by the idea of competing with
other children; and they are very sensitive to criticism and ridicule. I
do not, however, recall a single case of a child being whipped for not
working. It can easily be seen that with the parents, or employers, and
children against it, the task of liberation from this commercialized
family peonage of immature workers is not an easy one.
On the Atlantic Coast more Negroes are employed, than on the Gulf Coast,
and they do not work the children very much, except where they have come
under the influence of the immigrant workers. In almost every case, the
bosses and padrones agree that the Baltimore workers are much more
satisfactory than the Negroes. They say:
“There is no comparing them. The whites work harder, longer hours, are
more easily driven, and use the children much more.”
The chief advantage of Negro help is that it saves the cost of
transportation. Where it is necessary to get the work done promptly the
immigrants are imported.
That this exploitation of the children is absolutely unnecessary is
proven by the canneries that get along without them. It needs merely
more efficient planning on the part of the managers, and better
supervision on the part of the state. It is certainly a condition not to
be endured when we consider the hardships involved—the long hours, the
monotonous and tiring work, the irregular conditions of work and of
life, the exposure, the unsanitary surroundings, the moral dangers, the
lack of education, and the double exploitation of summer and winter.
One morning I found a little cannery worker setting about her endless
job. At the end of the day as I passed near, human nature asserted
itself. She asked me to photograph her dolly too, this oyster shucker.
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