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More children are employed in factories and mills under sixteen years of age in Pennsylvania than in any other state. For years efforts have been made to get better legislation to protect child workers, but every step has been won only after a determined fight.
This year the Pennsylvania Child Labor Association and the National Child Labor Committee have worked together to get a law that would put Pennsylvania on a par with the more advanced industrial states. The Walnut child labor bill drafted by the Pennsylvania Child Labor Association and sponsored by the Republican State Committee is based upon the uniform law adopted by the American Bar Association. The principal new features of this act are that no child under sixteen is permitted to work more than eight hours a day; all night work is prohibited for children under sixteen, whereas at present glass factories are exempt; provision is made for the regulation of street trading; and the age limit for night messenger service is put at twenty-one years. The age at which children may go to work still remains fourteen, but certain dangerous occupations are prohibited for children under sixteen.
So powerful has been the pressure to eliminate important features of the proposed law, that the Pennsylvania Child Labor Association has felt compelled to appeal for popular support. Herschel H. Jones of the National Child Labor Committee has spent most of the last two months traveling throughout the state, holding public meetings and interesting individually the influential people of the larger cities. With few exceptions the newspapers have taken up the campaign enthusiastically.
The opposition has come chiefly from two industries. The textile manufacturers complain that eight hours a day for children will disorganize their plants and compel the discharge of those under sixteen. This they assert would put them at a disadvantage with Massachusetts. In the Legislature in Massachusetts they are saying the same thing about Pennsylvania. The experience of New York, the largest manufacturing state and the third in textile production where no child under sixteen has been permitted to work before eight in the morning or after five in the evening since 1907, does not bear out this claim. In both Ohio and Illinois children are being used in certain industries in groups or shifts so as to keep the maximum amount of machinery in operation the full working time. The eight-hour provision in Illinois has been in force since 1903; in Ohio since 1908.
In the textile industry alone in Pennsylvania there are over 15,000 children under sixteen. Of this number, two-thirds are girls. Pennsylvania permits girls of fourteen and fifteen to work fifty-eight hours a week, or longer than most states permit adult women to labor.
The glass manufacturers assert that they must have boys on the night shifts else the men can not work. Advocates of the proposed law point out that in Ohio, Illinois, New Jersey and every other glass manufacturing state except West Virginia older boys and men are employed for the night work.
In an investigation of glass factories in western Pennsylvania made by Mr. Jones for the National Child Labor Committee in 1912 it was found that in many towns large numbers of boys between sixteen and eighteen were loafing until they grew big enough to work in the mines or coke ovens. At the same time the glass factories were taking boys of fourteen and using them on both night and day shifts.
Effort is being exerted to weaken the bill before it gets out of the Judiciary Special Committee of the Senate. This committee held a public hearing on May 14 on three important labor bills: the Bigger minimum wage bill which establishes a board to determine on a minimum wage for women; the Walnut woman’s bill drafted by the Consumers’ League and restricting employment of women to nine hours a day and fifty hours a week; and the Walnut child labor bill. Over 2,000 manufacturers came to Harrisburg for this hearing. The State Federation of Labor came to Harrisburg in a body to urge the passage of these bills.
In addition to the efforts to get better laws a step toward better enforcement has been taken by the passage of the law which establishes a new department of labor and industry. It resembles closely the law passed by the New York Legislature this year. The Bureau of Factory Inspection comes under the department. An industrial board is established to make rules and regulations and the inspectors are graded and required to have special qualifications.
Once more the May meetings of the New York City Conference of Charities were divided between Manhattan, Brooklyn and the country. The Colored Orphan Asylum at Riverdale was chosen this time for the final session.
Municipal needs was the first topic of discussion, and the speakers were O. F. Lewis and Frederick C. Howe, chairman of the committee appointed to study this subject. The latter dwelt particularly on the use of the school as a center for leisure. Edward M. Bassett and George B. Ford, lecturer on city planning at Columbia University, spoke on subways as a factor in distributing the population of a city. Mr. Ford suggested as a substitute for subways on some thoroughfares the noiseless elevated railroads found in Paris and Berlin. These, he said, should be placed only in the center of streets from 130 to 180 feet wide. Trees could be planted on either side to screen the structures.
Families, public institutions and the sick were the subjects on the following day. The chairman of the committee on families, Mrs. William Grant Brown, recommended the removing of one great cause of family pauperism by “following in the path already blazed by some of our western states, and legally restraining the marriage of those mentally deficient, delinquent or tainted by hereditary disease or crime.” One of the other speakers, Porter R. Lee, gave a good illustration of overlapping in relief work in a story of a poor woman in Chicago, who after receiving her fourth consecutive visitor in one afternoon went to the nearest settlement to express her gratitude because no one had called from there, remarking: “There doesn’t seem to be anything for the poor to do but to have office hours!”
On the live subject of widows’ pensions there was no discussion this year beyond the statement in Mrs. Florence Kelley’s address, which was read in her absence:
“Private charity having cut off public outdoor relief has never been able to accomplish the task which it rashly undertook. We have a monument to its failure—38,000 children in New York state institutions paid for out of taxes because their natural guardians have, through death or disability, failed to meet the requirements which the law establishes for children in this city. Few of these institutions are schools in the true sense. They are in the main free municipal boarding-houses. They are communist institutions in which the city attempts, chiefly through the intervention of various religious sects, the task of bringing up children away from their mothers, by wholesale, out of the public funds.”
The discussion of public institutions centered around those for the sick. Sidney E. Goldstein, chairman of the committee on this subject, dwelt especially on the fact that while government, church and school are more and more affected by the social movement, the hospital and dispensary are as yet but dimly aware of the larger work that society can rightfully expect of them. Mr. Goldstein questioned whether the dispensary is organized and administered with the needs of the community foremost in mind, and stated that the time is not distant when neither hospital nor dispensary will be reception houses for the sick, experiment stations in medicine or apprentice shops for medical students.
After care and the prevention of insanity were treated in a paper by Everett S. Ellwood of the State Charities Aid Association. Fred M. Stein of the Montefiore Home showed by statistics that the large percentage of “graduates” of tuberculosis sanatoria die or become worse, and urged after care of patients in their homes by social workers connected with sanatoria as an essential part of the work of such institutions.
The session on the sick carried on the same themes. Louis C. Ager, chief of the medical staff of the Brooklyn Home for Consumptives, showed the inadequacy of present hospital facilities, especially those for contagious diseases. Richard C. Cabot discussed the “efficiency and deficiencies” of the hospitals and dispensaries, and Isabel Stewart of Teachers College spoke of the social service work in the homes done by these institutions, as a logical and necessary supplement to their indoor work. She recommended courses on the “sociology” of disease as part of a nurse’s training.
In her report for the Committee on Children Carolena M. Wood, president of the Colored Orphan Asylum of Riverdale, called attention to the fact that of the 25,000 city children in institutions, many are kept there for years so as to be near their parents when often their parents show no interest or are unsuitable because of health or morals to exercise any influence over them. The committee advised that such children be given a fresh start by being placed with families that can train them to be worthy members of the future state, even though this involves the dissolving of the family tie. Charles D. Hilles, president of the Board of Managers of the New fork Juvenile Asylum, and Robert W. Hebberd spoke on various aspects of education as a preparation for life. The report of the Committee on Delinquency, read by Patrick A. Whitney, commissioner of corrections, was an appeal for more and better institutions.
Throughout the sessions the subject of recreation came up, as when, for instance, Mrs. Brown supplemented the usual recommendation for recreational use of the school house by the suggestion that the armories could be used as music centers. Ernest A. Coulter, formerly clerk of the Children’s Court, held that the failure to provide opportunities for play was largely the cause of juvenile delinquency.
One method of treatment of adult delinquency, the farm colony, was the subject of a paper by Franklin H. Briggs, superintendent of the New York Training School for Boys at Yorktown. Said Professor Briggs:
“The farm colony treatment substitutes an appeal to the best that is in a delinquent. It seeks to develop self control in the individual. It endeavors to build up, not break down, the delinquent’s self respect. In large masses delinquents must do the things which they are ordered to do, while in the small group of the farm colony, the individuals are encouraged to do things upon their own initiative. One most important feature of farm colony life is the almost numberless healthful interests with which it surrounds those for whom it cares.”
PROF. HENDERSON NOW HEADS CHICAGO’S UNITED CHARITIES
The United Charities of Chicago has made a strong rejoinder to the persistent attacks of the “investigating” committee of the Illinois Legislature which have included other philanthropic agencies and institutions as well as prominent individuals. In an editorial, How Not to Investigate, the Chicago Evening Post describes the methods pursued by this committee:
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