Anti-Child Labor
Child labor is immoral. It doesn't give the children the chance to play and have fun. Children cannot get an education when they are working, and therefore have no chance of rising in society.
"Child labor and poverty are inevitably bound together and if you continue to use the labor of children as the treatment for the social disease of poverty, you will have both poverty and child labor to the end of time."- Grace Abbott -“It happened one evening, when her apron was caught by the shaft. In an instant the poor girl was drawn by an irresistible force and dashed on the floor. She uttered the most heart-rending shrieks! Blincoe ran towards her, an agonized and helpless beholder of a scene of horror. He saw her whirled round and round with the shaft - he heard the bones of her arms, legs, thighs, etc. successively snap asunder, crushed, seemingly, to atoms, as the machinery whirled her round, and drew tighter and tighter her body within the works, her blood was scattered over the frame and streamed upon the floor, her head appeared dashed to pieces - at last, her mangled body was jammed in so fast, between the shafts and the floor, that the water being low and the wheels off the gear, it stopped the main shaft. When she was extricated, every bone was found broken - her head dreadfully crushed. She was carried off quite lifeless.”- John Brown |
Pro-Child Labor
Child labor teaches young children work ethic and economics. They can help support their families, and older siblings can help finance their younger siblings' educations.
"The child will become a very dominant factor in the household and might refuse perhaps to do chores before six a.m. or after seven p.m. or to perform any labor."- Senator Weldon Hayburn "You could argue that families that had workers there needed the children to work because they needed to get by unless there were more people working other than the parents."-Joe Manning, Lewis Hine Researcher -“Arkwright's machines require so few hands, and those only children, with the assistance of an overlooker. A child can produce as much as would, and did upon an average, employ ten grown up persons. Jennies for spinning with one hundred or two hundred spindles, or more, going all at once, and requiring but one person to manage them.” - Ralph Mather |