Children's Rights Movement
by TaylorM803MS266 from Park Place MS 266 Child Labor, in , on April, 10th 2008

          There were many injustices that took place during the Children’s Rights Movement. One of the economical injustices was when the Lawrence Mill factory sped up machines and decreased workers’ salaries. They did this to increase the products they made and when they did this, money had to be deducted out of workers’ pay.
          There were many methods of resistance. When the workers got laid-off, 23,000 of them went on strike. They wouldn’t go back to work until they received what they asked for. Workers demanded higher wages and better working conditions. Instead, to end the strike Lawrence Mill offered higher wages and a shorter workweek. The method of resistance that was being used was successful because factories were not able to produce any goods without their workers. As you can see this method (striking) was most effective in getting workers what they wanted. 

        One of the achievements that came out of the Children’s Rights Movement was the Fair Labor Standard Act of 1938. The FLSA established a national minimum wage, guaranteed time and a half for overtime in certain jobs and prohibited most employment of minors in “oppressive child labor”. The October 26,1949 FLSA included changes to overtime compensation, defined “regular rate”, redefined “produced”, raised minimum wage from 40 cents to 75 cents per hour and extended child labor coverage.

           Child labor is the employment of children under an age determined by law. Child labor was exercised to varying extents through most of history, but public arguments developed about the concepts of workers and children’s rights. Child labor started from the beginning of the Industrial Revolution (1870’s) and ended in 1938. Jacob Riis, Lewis Hine, Presidents Roosevelt and Hoover all contributed to the Children’s Rights Movement. With the participation of these and other people, the Children’s Rights Movement became successful.

The Children’s Rights Movement is important to study because it shows how far we as children have gotten in life to where we are now, what children had to go through in the past and how they lived. The movement’s struggles make me feel like I have been taking advantage of the rights I have now. For example in the morning of school days I feel like just laying in bed or doing something else rather than going to school. But when I think about what children my age or younger had to do just to go to school, it urges me to stop being lazy and take advantage of what I have now.

 


 



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