Hi, my name is Jacob P. of Mr. Salvucci’s 1st period 20th century class. Back in the early 1900s child labor was a problem that went by with out much sympathy. Child labor was when some people would hire little children to do work for them with very little to no pay. It was borderline slavery. There are many examples of child labor. One of the examples are that children would work as miners. This was a very dangerous job and it would affect their health mainly their lungs. Another example of child labor is that children would often work as newises. A newise is somebody who walks around to sell news papers. They had kids as little as 8 years old selling from sunrise to sunset. Once again they were paid very little and would often be severly punished if they did not sell a decent amount of papers.
Everybody knew that child labor was wrong, so action was taken. It started state by state. Some states decided to make laws against children under a certain age could not work, or only work limited hours. Many states followed in these actions and now all states have these laws against child labor. For the most part these laws are abided by, but there are still some people out there who use child labor illegally to get work done.