Courtesy of Penna. Child Labor Committee
Courtesy of Penna. Child Labor Committee
CHILD LABOR IN GLASS FACTORIES AND COAL MINES
“Atlanta, Ga., June 12—‘The sceptre of commercial supremacy is falling from the palsied hand of New England industry; apparently it is to be taken up by the South. Grasp it firmly. The whole country, torn by labour disputes, looks to the South to make the final stand against legislative encroachments on the liberty of the individual workman and the individual employer.’
“So Daniel Davenport of Bridgeport, Conn., spoke to the members of the Georgia Industrial Association, at their annual convention at Warm Springs, Ga., last week. This association was one of the earliest to recognise the depressing effect of restrictive labour legislation upon the cotton manufacturing of New England; its members fear that similar legislation in the South would be followed by even more disastrous consequences, and what has injuriously affected the more hardy and older establishments of the North, would, they believe, stunt the growth of the infant industries of the South, if it did not actually crush them.”
I made an effort in “The Jungle” to show what is happening to the wage earner in our modern highly concentrated industries, under the régime of a monopoly price and a competitive wage. I spent seven weeks in Packingtown studying conditions there, and I verified every smallest detail, so that as a picture of social conditions the book is as exact as a government report. But the reader does not have to take my word for it, there are any number of studies by independent investigators. Let him go to a library and consult the American Journal of Sociology for March, 1901, and read the reports of a graduate of the University of Chicago, who investigated the conditions in the garment-trade in that city. Here were girls working ten hours a day for forty cents a week. The average of all the “dressmakers” was but ninety cents a week, and they were able to find employment on the average only forty-two weeks in the year. The “pants-finishers” received a dollar and thirty-one cents, and they were employed only twenty-seven weeks in the year. The general average in the entire trade was less than two dollars and a half a week, and the average number of weeks of work was only thirty-one, making an average yearly wage for a whole industry of seventy-six dollars and seventy-four cents per year. Or let the reader get Mr. Jacob A. Riis’s pictures of conditions in the slums of New York. In his book, “How the Other Half Lives,” Mr. Riis states that in the block bounded by Stanton, Houston, Attorney and Ridge streets, the size of which is two hundred by three hundred feet, are two thousand two hundred and forty-four human beings. In the block bounded by Sixty-first and Sixty-second streets, Amsterdam and West End avenues, are over four thousand. Jack London, in his “War of The Classes,” quotes the Rev. Dr. Behrends, speaking of the block bounded by Hester, Canal, Eldridge and Forsyth Streets: “In a room twelve feet by eight, and five and a half feet high, it was found that nine persons slept and prepared their food. In another room, located in a dark cellar, without screens or partitions, were together two men with their wives and a girl of fourteen, two single men and a boy of seventeen, two women and four boys, nine, ten, eleven and fifteen years old—fourteen persons in all!” Apropos of this it may be well to add that an investigation conducted in Berlin established the fact that with families living in one room the death rate was one hundred and sixty-three per thousand, while with families living in three or four rooms it was twenty. What it was with three or four families living in one room does not appear. According to a recent report of the New York Tenement House Commission there were four hundred thousand “dark rooms”—rooms without any outside opening whatever. Mr. Riis has been so successful in battling with such conditions that he has been called by President Roosevelt “the most useful American.” Neither the President nor Mr. Riis understand economics, and so probably they are both perplexed at the result of his ten years of effort—which is that rents on the East Side have gone up about fifty per cent. in the last two years, and there have been riots and evictions—and a Socialist all but elected to Congress!
But Mr. Riis is a business man, and he can figure the social cost of these evil conditions. Of the New York tenements he writes:
“They are the hot beds of epidemics that carry death to the rich and poor alike; the nurseries of pauperism and crime that fill our jails and police courts; that throw off a scum of forty thousand human wrecks to the island asylums and workhouses year by year; that turned out in the last eight years a round half million beggars to prey upon our charities; that maintain a standing army of ten thousand tramps with all that that implies; because, above all, they taint the family life with deadly moral contagion.”
In his newly published discussion of social problems called “In the Fire of the Heart,” Mr. Ralph Waldo Trine writes of the country’s situation as follows: