Lewis Hines: The Impact Of Child Labor

Joselin Reynoso

May 1, 2016

Swk 239

Sanjiri is a 10yr old boy from India who has been working for 2 yrs now gathering crops. Sanjiri has never attended any school because his family needs him to work so he could help financially. All over the world for centuries now we have children just like Sanjiri, who cannot attend school because they come from families who are very poor. Not only does child labor apply to those children who are working in factories or in agriculture but also to girls who are taken as wives or for prostitution and boys who are taken as soldiers. Around the world there is about 168 million children employed, according to the international Labour Organization. These children must work instead of getting and education

Since man and woman were both concern with the amount of children that were working at such a young age everyone agreed to form the committee. This committee that was created years ago has been one of the most beneficials in creating changes in society when it comes to child labor. The NCLC used muckrakers as Lewis Hines, to take pictures of the children that were working so that the public could see what was going on and join in to make a change. Lewis Hines was a professional photographer and a sociologist who used his pictures as a form of advocacy. In return he was hoping that his pictures would educate America of what was going on with child labor. After all this was going on and many people started to see the reality of child labor many laws were trying to be pass which would limit the age and the work hours that a child could work. In 1938 president Franklin D. Roosevelt passed the fair labor standards act, which allow federal laws to regulate minimum age of employment and the hours that a child may work. At the end of the nineteenth century the International Labour Organization made the minimum age convention of 1973 (No.

In Child labor: A Global view it states “ The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), International Labour Organization (ILO), the World Bank, and other children’s and human rights groups are working together to develop a strategy to prevent child labor from interfering with the education and childhood of children and from placing children in danger of bonded labor (Human rights Watch, 2003, Siddiqi and Patrinos, 1995; World Bank, n.d. ).” Even thought we have all these programs there is still children that are being taken advantage in the work place today. In an article in The New York Times called When a doorman is under age by Ronda Kaysen, we see the story of a boy who is only 16yrs old and is working a 12 hour shift which is against the law because he is still considered a school age child. In the article it states “New York City does not allow teenagers to quit school until 17. So, he should not work a double shift until 11 p.m. on a school night, and the manager that scheduled him should know this. (Even when school is out of session, 16-year-olds are generally not allowed to work more than an eight-hour shift, according to state labor