The Rationale For Using Child Workers
Prior to the onset of the industrial revolution children were often involved in economic and industrial activities. Children were needed in such activities to enable their families to earn enough money to survive. In the primarily agricultural societies that existed in most countries before the beginning of the industrial revolution children were particularly useful as workers during and directly after harvest times as they could speed up the collection as well as the storage of crops.
Poverty And Exploitation
However it is not surprising that young children were used as workers in the industrial revolution. In Great Britain poverty was widespread in the working or lower classes, with every able bodied member of every poor family having to find paid employment or face live in the workhouse. In the poorest families grandparents, parents, and children would all have to work from the earliest possible age right through to the oldest possible age. A failure to work meant either starvation, or the workhouse.
During the industrial revolution employers would often prefer to employ young children in textile factories, cotton mills, down coalmines, and as chimney sweeps. Children were cheaper to employ than adult men were, and they could work in confined spaces or on faster machines that would be dangerous or difficult for adults to have used.
Children often had no other choice than to work, the majority had little or no formal education, families that could not afford to support them, or they had no families at all. Aside from the dreaded workhouse there was no means of social support for those people young or old that were not able to work at all, or who underemployed or on extremely low wages.
Child Protection Measures
Moves to prevent children from becoming workers did not begin until the industrial revolution was well underway. In Great Britain there were no efforts to prevent children working until the 1870s, and even then British children would only receive a state education until the age of eleven, after which they could find paid employment as soon as possible,
Over all children became workers during the industrial revolution out of necessity and when were exploited by employers and factory owners keen to achieve high productivity rates at the lowest possible costs.
Bibliography
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Roberts J.M, (1996) A History of Europe, Penguin, London
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