“ In 1900, 18 percent of all American workers were under the age of 16.”(Foner) Child labor is a terrible thing that children have to go through. Although this was not considered a problem because of how normal it was.(Foner.). But due to the work of investigative journalist children today no longer have to worry about working in these dangerous environments.
The states have also restricted working conditions of school age children. A child must obtain an "intent to hire" form from the business they intend to work for and take it to the school to be approved. There are currently restrictions on the type of work as well as the number of hours worked and the lateness of the hours a child can work.
Hundreds of thousands of children under the age of 18 are working in agriculture in the United States. According to The Daily Transcript, “Many young people ages 13 to 16 work 70 to 80 hours a week and risk pesticide poisoning, heat illness, injuries and lifelong disabilities.” With this going on, children are being exposed to harm that they may or may not even be aware of. Child labor is more common in the United States (and all over the world) than one might think. There are laws currently in place dealing with child labor, “…which prohibit 12 and 13-year-olds from working most jobs, except on farms, and also say that youths aged 14 and 15 may not work in hazardous jobs, including construction.” (The Daily Transcript). Although these laws are in place, in 2010, 467 child-labor violations were found and
Kelley gives several examples of different laws in different states allowing children to work long hours at young ages. One example given describes even the lack of restrictions on child labor whatsoever. “In Georgia there is no restriction whatever! A girl of six or seven years…may work eleven hours by day or by
Presently there are laws to prevent child labor, but a century ago it ran rampad. Many factories had jobs that required children to fufill them, such as collecting cotton under large machines where adults could not fit. Also in the time period many families needed the children of the home to work in order to feed themselves. Often people forget that children working was not always frowned upon as it is now. When one examines objects from the past, one must realize that their opinion is a completely different perspective. The three sources given to represent 'child labour' both support and contradict eachother.
First of all, child labor laws should be regulated so that working conditions are safer. Children’s health is diminishing because of the terrible working conditions. According to the International Labour Organization (ILO), “23 percent of all children between 5 and 17 years of age were economically active in the year 2000,” and that “About half of these children are estimated to do work that is likely to harm their health, safety, or moral development” (Huebler 4). There is an enormous amount of children that are being harmed at work, and better regulations should be placed to stop this from happening. Children are suffering from injuries at work and the accidents end up unreported. England’s Health and Safety Executive says that there are, “31 reportable accidents involving under-16s at work over the past two years, including 16 major injuries and one fatality” (White 137). This is why accidents are being under-reported, and children that work in illegal industries are worse off. If there are no regulations and nobody is enforcing better and safer work conditions, there will be more children injured each year.
There are million of working children all around the world, for example, “Asia has the highest incidence of child labor (152.5 million), followed by Africa (80 million) and Latin America (17.5 million). Measured in proportional terms approximately 40 percent of African children work, while 20 percent of children work in Asia and Latin America respectively.” (Palley)”The worldwide population of children under fourteen who work full-time is thought to exceed 200 million”. Obviously if most children participate in child labor then there needs to be more laws regulating it and a better way of enforcing the laws. “The general minimum age was at first 14 years, later raised to 15, and 16 for specific dangerous environments and night work”. There are laws on the general age you can be to work but there are still many children who work.
If you were to go to a restaurant right now how old do you think your waiter would be? Twenty? Thirty? What if I told you that your waiter was an eight year old? What if the eight year wasn’t working in a nice restaurant but instead was working in a dangerous factory? During the Industrial Revolution, child labor was completely legal. In fact, many companies hired children on purpose because they didn’t have to pay them as much and also because they were more obedient than adults. Thankfully child labor is now illegal and you most likely won’t get a job until you’re about 16 years old if not older.
I would set age limits because you can’t have young children working in unsafe places especially since they don’t have the intelligence and are too young to develop skills to work. Most importantly it just heinous and very immoral. We can’t have young children working anywhere in the world, straight up. Depending on the work, the age limit will differ but won’t be too young. An example, in places such as garment factory, I could set the age limit at 16 and working at a railroad at 21. I would do this because by the time of both ages, they would have acquired the mental and physical strengths to work in both the
Some countries determine adulthood by the minimum age requirement for child labor. Unfortunately the minimum age varies among countries. In countries such as Syria or Bangladesh the minimum age requirement for child labor is twelve. However, in the United States it is 15-16 years old but they must have written consent from their parents.
Child labor laws prevent anyone under the age of 16 from getting a job, but they are still considered a child as they are a child until they reach the age of 18. Child labor laws are in place to prevent adults from taking advantage of children, but child labor laws don’t apply to people who are still children, according to the rule that you have to be 18+ to be an adult. These two rules contradict each other, child labor laws make it where you are a child until 16+ years old, while until you’re 18+ years old, you are considered a child. When you take on responsibility for your actions at age 16, you should be
Some children will work in very harsh conditions which could include drug trafficking, prostitution and sometimes in some countries the young children will work in types of military position for their country. A lot of children work in many types of commercial business if they can. You would never believe what these children work in and it is not safe at all for the these children to be working in it, cause it is not safe for adults sometimes also. What’s not safe for adults should not be safe for children you would think? A lot of the work that these children work in are extremely hazardous and the children that will work in these conditions come from extremely poor families and they may also live in a low economic state also. Sometimes these children will work with either no pay at all for their hard work or just little pay for the jobs that they complete. A lot of the commercial jobs that these children are involved have very extreme health risk and concerns to the children
Child labor is severely harmful to the children working. The definition of child labor is work done by a child (under 18 years old) that is harmful to the child’s health and development and probably interferes with their
Although children had been servants and apprentices throughout most of human history, child labor reached new extremes during the Industrial Revolution.There was a big impact on the daily life of a child labourer as poor children often worked full time jobs with minimal pay in order to help support their families. Young children worked long hours in factories under dangerous conditions. children were easier to manage and control than adults because their size was perfect as it allowed them to move in small spaces in factories or mines.The practice of child labor continued throughout much of the Industrial Revolution until laws were eventually passed that made child labor illegal.
“Child labor usually means work that is done by children under the age of 15 (14 in some developing countries) that restricts or damages a child's physical, emotional, social and/or spiritual growth.”1