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Read the passage.

Where Do You Work? When Kids Had Adult Jobs

Imagine dragging yourself out of bed on a cold, dark morning before the sun has even risen. You dress quickly because you’re running late. But instead of a day filled with schoolwork, soccer practice, and a few chores around the house, you head over to the town’s mill where you will spend the next 10 to 12 hours. That’s what life was like for about 18 percent of American children ages 10 to 15 in the early twentieth century. Instead of going to school, they went to work.

Before the Industrial Revolution

From the early days of America until the late 1930s, there were few laws protecting children from work. In colonial times, children often worked alongside their parents. Girls worked with their mothers cooking, sewing, gardening, and milking cows. Boys worked on their fathers’ farms or in their shops. Boys from the ages of 10 to 14 often became apprentices. They worked under the care and direction of master craftsmen. In both farming and apprenticeships, children learned the skills of a job from beginning to end. Those in apprenticeships not only learned a trade from their masters, they were also taught basic arithmetic and how to read and write. Plus, they were given a place to live and a wage.

From Farms to Factories

By the time of the Civil War in the 1860s, however, the apprenticeship system had fallen by the wayside. The country was becoming more industrialized. Children worked to help support their families. Children were often hired to work in factories because factory owners found children easy to manage. They could be paid less than adults and were less likely to go on strike. An added benefit was their small size: children could easily move in tight spaces around machinery.

Factory workers, including children, generally learned one repetitive job. This made training fast and easy. Despite their age, children often worked in hazardous conditions. They worked in cotton mills in New England and in the South. The windows of the mills were kept shut to keep the cotton moist and warm so it wouldn’t break. Child workers would be covered in cotton lint that would fill their lungs. Towns grew around the mills. Families lived in houses owned by the mills. The mills provided a school. But the children usually didn’t have time to attend. A study done in the early twentieth century revealed that half the children under age 14 could not read or write.

In the early 1900s, children also worked in glass factories, canneries, cranberry bogs, and sugar beet fields. They went to work in the mines in Pennsylvania or West Virginia as a “breaker boy.” Breaker boys sat crouched over a coal chute. Their job was to pick out pieces of slate and rock as the coal rushed past them. The air was thick with coal dust, and many of the boys suffered from respiratory illnesses because of it. They earned 60 cents for a 10-hour shift of backbreaking work.

Champions for Change

Fortunately, some concerned citizens decided to stand up against child labor and to address the problems it created. In 1904, a group of reformers founded the National Child Labor Committee (NCLC) to abolish child labor. This committee hired investigators to gather evidence for their cause. One person they hired was Lewis Wickes Hine. Hine was a former teacher and photographer. He took pictures of children wherever they worked.

From 1908 to 1912, Hine snapped pictures of children at work. He would hide his camera and trick factory bosses into letting him get inside. Hine wrote notes on a pad hidden inside his pocket. He wanted to accurately describe what he saw without being caught. His photographs showed children working in coal mines, sweatshops, and mills and on farms. When many of Hine’s photographs were published, the public was shocked. People were finally motivated to address the issue of child labor.

Soon many states passed laws protecting children in the workplace. But despite these laws, children still worked hard. The NCLC pushed for a federal law for child workers. In 1916 and 1918, laws were passed. But those laws were overturned by the Supreme Court as being unconstitutional. In 1924, Congress passed an amendment to the Constitution. But not enough states ratified it, so it didn’t become law. In 1938, the Fair Labor Standards Act was passed. It set a national minimum wage and maximum hours to be worked in a day. More important, it set limitations on child labor.

Today, children are protected by child labor laws. The federal government has set the minimum working age at 14 for jobs other than babysitting or delivering newspapers. In some states the minimum working age may be higher. Children’s lives are much easier today than they were more than a century ago.