The Pennsylvania Child Labor Bills.
NEWS AND COMMENTS. Three child labor bills introduced into the Pennsylvania Legislature by Mr. Walnut, of Philadelphia, will be of interest to readers of the Clinic. These bills, which were prepared by the Pennsylvania Chi Labor Association, differ somewhat from the ordinary child labor bills, for they do not touch the general age limit?fourteen years for eginning work. But for certain occupations which are extra-dangerous, either morally or physically they establish a somewhat higher age limit. Thus for work in the damp of coal mines and for work during the night, involving necessarily sleep during the day, these bills establish the sixteen year age limit. It is for moral reasons that the night messenger bill requires that a boy in first and second class cities is not to be allowed to deliver messages at night before he has reached the age of twenty-one.
The Child Labor Association has made extensive investigations into the morally degrading influences which surround night messengers and its evidence, most of which i? is quite impossible to print, will, it is hoped, convince the Pennsylvania Legislature that the night messenger in the large cities of Pennsylvania ought to be, as he is in New York City by law, a messenger man. The fact that coal mining is about the most dangerous occupation in the world is given as justification for the sixteen year limit in that occupation. More than 1100 boys under sixteen are now employed underground in Pennsylvania. More than 1200 boys under sixteen are at work in Pennsylvania at night, nearly all of these being employed in glass factories, beginning their work at five each evening, ending their work at three in the morning, sleeping until noon and returning again at five to the factory. On alternate weeks they are put upon day shifts because the men who also work during these hours insist upon the alternating system. Tweny-six states have forbidden night work under the age of sixteen. Pennsylvania forbade it in 1905, but the glass industry has been powerful enough to have itself exempted. The proposed bill abolishes that exemption.
A nine hundred page report from the Bureau of Labor of Washington, issued March 10th, shows vividly the injury to young boys which results from this ignoring of Nature’s order for sleep and work. The Child Labor Association has also published a pamphlet giving the opinions of neurologists and other medical experts on this subject.
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