When the New York Child Labor Committee secured the enactment of a law making it mandatory for the schoolboy who desired to sell papers to obtain the consent of his parents before receiving the permissive badge from the district school superintendent, we sent a visitor from the settlement to the families of one hundred who had expressed their intention to secure the badge. Of these families over sixty were opposed to the child’s selling papers on the street. The boy wanted to “because the other fellows did,” and the parents based their objections, in most cases, on precisely those grounds urged by social workers,—namely, that street work led the boys into bad company, irregular hours, gambling, and “waste of shoe leather.” Some asserted that they received no money from the children from the sale of the papers. On the other hand, a committee of which I was chairman, which made city-wide inquiry into juvenile street work, found instances of well-to-do parents who sent their little children on the streets to sell papers, sometimes in violation of the law.
The three chief obstacles to progress in protection of the children are the material interests of the employers, many of whom still believe that the child is a necessary instrument of profit; a sentimental, unanalytical feeling of kindness to the poor; and the attitude of officials upon whom the enforcement of the law depends, but who are often tempted by appeals to thwart its humane purpose. A truant officer of my acquaintance took upon himself discretionary power to condone the absence of a little child from school on the ground that the child was employed and the widowed mother poor. Himself a tender father, cherishing his small son, I asked him if that was what he would have me do in case he died and I found his child at work. Oddly enough, he seemed then to realize for the first time that those who were battling for school attendance for the children of the poor and prevention of their premature employment, even though the widow and child might have to receive financial aid, were trying to take, in part, the place of the dead father.
To meet cases where enforcement of the new standards of the law involves undeniable hardship, another form of so-called “scholarship” is given by the New York Child Labor Committee. Upon investigation a sum approximating the possible earnings of the child is furnished until such time as he or she can legally go to work. An indirect but important result of the giving of these scholarships has been the continuous information obtained regarding enforcement of the school attendance law. Inquiry into the history of candidates disclosed, at first, many cases in which, although the family had been in New York for years, some of the children had never attended school, and perhaps never would have done so had they not been discovered at work illegally. The number of these cases is now diminishing.
Allusion to these two forms of “scholarships” should not be made without mention of one other in the settlement, known as the “Alva Scholarship.” The interest on the endowment is used to promote the training of gifted individuals and to commemorate a beloved club leader. The money to establish it was given by the young woman’s associates in the settlement, and small sums have been contributed to it by the girls who were members of her own and other clubs.
CHAPTER VIII
THE NATION’S CHILDREN
Few people have any idea of the extent of tenement-house manufactures. There are at present over thirteen thousand houses in Greater New York alone licensed for this purpose, and each license may cover from one to forty families. These figures give no complete idea of the work done in tenements. Much of it is carried on in unlicensed houses, and work not yet listed as forbidden is carried home. To supervise this immense field eight inspectors only were assigned in 1913. Changing fashions in dress and the character of certain of the seasonal trades make it very difficult for the Department of Labor to adjust the license list. This explains, to some extent, the lack of knowledge concerning home work on the part of officials, even when the Department of Labor is efficiently administered. Nevertheless, home work has greatly decreased.
Twenty years ago, when we went from house to house caring for the sick, manufacturing was carried on in the tenements on a scale that does not exist to-day. With no little consternation we saw toys and infants’ clothing, and sometimes food itself, made under conditions that would not have been tolerated in factories, even at that time. And the connection of remote communities and individuals with the East Side of New York was impressed upon us when we saw a roomful of children’s clothing shipped to the Southern trade from a tenement where there were sixteen cases of measles. One of our patients, in an advanced stage of tuberculosis, until our appearance on the scene, sat coughing in her bed, making cigarettes and moistening the paper with her lips. In another tenement in a nearby street we found children ill with scarlet fever. The parents worked as finishers of women’s cloaks of good quality, evidently meant to be worn by the well-to-do. The garments covered the little patients, and the bed on which they lay was practically used as a work-table. The possibility of infection is perhaps the most obvious disadvantage of home work, and great changes have been wrought since the days when we first knew the sweatshop; but we are here discussing only its connection with the children.
