The pay of these boys varies from sixty cents to a dollar
for eight hours’ work. About a year ago I gathered particulars of the
pay of 257 boys in New Jersey and Pennsylvania; the lowest pay was forty
cents per night and the highest a dollar and ten cents, while the
average was seventy-two cents.
[Illustration:
NIGHT SHIFT IN A GLASS FACTORY
]
In New Jersey, since 1903, the employment of boys under fourteen years
of age is forbidden, but there is no restriction as to night work for
boys of that age. In Pennsylvania boys of fourteen may work by night. In
Ohio night work is prohibited for all under sixteen years of age, but so
far as my personal observations, and the testimony of competent and
reliable observers, enable me to judge, the law is not very effectively
enforced in this respect in the glass factories. In Indiana the
employment of children under fourteen in factories is forbidden. Women
and girls are not permitted to work between the hours of 10 P.M. and 6
A.M., but there is no restriction placed upon the employment of boys
fourteen years of age or over by night.[119]
The effects of the employment of young boys in glass factories,
especially by night, are injurious from every possible point of view.
The constant facing of the glare of the furnaces and the red-hot bottles
causes serious injury to the sight; minor accidents from burning are
common. “Severe burns and the loss of sight are regular risks of the
trade in glass-bottle making,” says Mrs. Florence Kelley.[120] Even more
serious than the accidents are those physical disorders induced by the
conditions of employment. Boys who work at night do not as a rule get
sufficient or satisfactory rest by day. Very often they cannot sleep
because of the noises made by younger children in and around the house;
more often, perhaps, they prefer to play rather than to sleep. Indeed,
most boys seem to prefer night work, for the reason that it gives them
the chance to play during the daytime. Even where the mothers are
careful and solicitous, they find it practically impossible to control
boys who are wage-earners and feel themselves to be independent. This
lack of proper rest, added to the heat and strain of their work,
produces nervous dyspepsia. From working in draughty sheds where they
are often, as one boy said to me in Zanesville, O., “burning on the side
against the furnace and pretty near freezing on the other,” they are
frequently subject to rheumatism. Going from the heated factories to
their homes, often a mile or so distant, perspiring and improperly clad,
with their vitality at its lowest ebb, they fall ready victims to
pneumonia and to its heir, the Great White Plague. In almost every
instance when I have asked local physicians for their experience, they
have named these as the commonest physical results. Of the fearful moral
consequences there can be no question. The glass-blowers themselves
realize this and, even more than the physical deterioration, it prevents
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