Some of you are probably thinking about getting a part-time job when you're a
little older and you may already know that by law you can't work until you're
14. But did you know that, in the early 1900's, there were no laws against kids
working? You could go to work as soon as you could do the job.
Georgia's largest
industry is textile manufacturing and some of the mills of an operating since
of the century. These children worked in those mills.
They worked long hours from low wages at jobs that were often boring and sometimes
dangerous. Today we'd say these kids are too young for industrial work but that's
not the way it used to be.
After the Civil War, Georgia is very poor because
of the Civil War. The cotton prices fall and the rural, the rural areas poor
farmers who can't make it on cotton farms, who have fallen so far in debt
they will leave the land and they will come to the cities or come to the mills
to work in the mills. And quite often it's the women who come
first. The men will cling to the land longer and with the women will come the children.
Children followed their parents into the mill. Times were hard families
needed the money. There was no question who collected the children's paychecks.
My daddy. We, we had to help keep everything goin' and
you know well he didn't draw much more than I did, I don't imagine, cuz you know
they just didn't make much money back to those days. And everything you made
you had to contribute to the family.
These men and women began working in
cotton mills when they were very young and they remember.
I started working in
Lynette mill then, yeah, I was 14 and I just worked part time. What we call part
time and that was six hours a day. But I did start at 14 and I made about a
dime an hour.
Jeannette is 80 years old. When she was 14 she worked part time
because she was going to school. But many child workers dropped out.
It was unusual
to graduate from high school in the, in the years that we graduated. It's not
like now. You go to school and you graduate but back then you wasn't. You, if
you could work, you work didn't you?
And we didn't have required attendance,
school attendance back then. You know you could go to school or not go to school
and you know yeah and a lot and a lot of them didn't ever go beyond some of them
beyond sixth grade.
Children who didn't go to school worked
full-time, which was a 12-hour day, but even a part-time shift of six hours was
long for kids who also went to school.
The children would go to school. Then
they'd go work in the mill at night. And they wouldn't necessarily work 12 hours
but they would go in at night and do some work. So the the work suffers, their
schoolwork suffers, and they're tired.
When we look at photographs of child
mill workers taken from 1905 to 1915, we see young children with dark circles
under their eyes. They look weary and much older than their years and there's
something else we notice. Even though they work around heavy machinery, many
don't wear shoes.
There's a story out of the mill up the river from Columbus from
Langdale. They were it was pine flooring and he had these big carts that they
pushed around that carried various things from one loom to another and he's
the wheels on the cart were metal and they would tear up the floor so every manager,
every superintendent, inside the mill carried a knife so they could cut the
splinters out of the children's feet.
*Old Country Song*
Even the air was bad. The lint that covered millworkers clothes also clogged
their lungs. People who worked for years in the mill sometimes had a condition
called brown lung. There was so much lint in their lungs that couldn't breathe
normally. Brown lung could be fatal. The mill was
not a place for children.
Some of them, they'd child up in there of about it six or seven
years old and put them to work in the mill and if they didn't do a good job,
they both take them out there and spank them.
Whip them.
I don't know if that's true or not but I've heard that all my life.
It's true
They didn't have them child labor laws.
Georgia was slow
to pass child labor laws. In fact, by 1911 Georgia was the only
state that allowed children under 12 years old to work in factories. And some
parents wanted it that way.
When reformers in the early 1900 try to
pass laws to limit child labor, many of the parents will send petitions
to say don't limit child labor. We need them to work.
Mill owners also oppose child labor laws.
I think overriding is the fact that
child labor was was cheap. It doesn't cost much to have children work and
there are a lot of tasks they could do very well.
Today, state and federal laws
are aimed at keeping children in school and safe in the workplace. You must be at
least 14 years old to get a job. You must be at least 16 to work in a mill. You can
only work three hours a day on school days and eight hours a day on non school
days, and you can't work before 7 a.m. or later than 7 p.m. A lot has changed
since Jeanette Scales and her friends started work at the age of 14.
When you work six straight hours, you worked. It was work, it wasn't play and even that six
hours at 14 was a long time.
*End Screen Music*