(To be concluded)

HELEN C. DWIGHT

Publicity Department, National Child Labor Committee

The beginning of the Mississippi cannery story, so far as the National Child Labor Committee is concerned, was an investigation of Gulf Coast oyster and shrimp canneries by Lewis W. Hine in 1911. At that time he said, "I have witnessed many varieties of child labor horrors from Maine to Texas, but the climax, the logical conclusion of the 'laissez faire' policy regarding the exploitation of children is to be seen among the oyster-shuckers and shrimp-pickers of the Gulf Coast." He told of children, aged 3, 4, or 5, earning perhaps five cents a day at oyster shucking, and he told of older children, 11 or 12 years old, who could earn as much as a dollar a day if they worked 10 or 11 hours. He said that the children went to work with their parents at four or five in the morning and worked until four in the afternoon, or as long as they could, in damp, cold sheds. Summarizing his investigation he said, "By actual count of the children at work, I found 125 boys and girls from 3 to 11 years of age; and at least half the canneries were working either a small crew or none at all on the days I visited them." When you consider that those 125 children were working the best part of 11 hours a day, beginning at 4 a. m. each day, and that they were working for five or six months in the middle of the school year, you can appreciate, perhaps, the meaning of the opening chapter of the cannery story.

The Mississippi legislature furnished the next chapter the following year (1912) when, largely as a result of the first chapter, it passed a law prohibiting the employment of boys under 12 or girls under 14 in canneries, and prohibiting the employment of boys under 16 or girls under 18 for more than 8 hours a day or between the hours of 7 p. m. and 6 a. m. The county sheriffs were made responsible for the enforcement of this law.

One might suppose that the third chapter of this story might be considerably more cheerful than the first, because of the hopeful

* Based on investigations by Lewis W. Hine.

† Proceedings of Seventh Annual Conference on Child Labor, Birmingham,. Ala., March, 1911, p. 118.

character of the second, but anyone who has read the Child Labor Bulletin more or less carefully during the past five years will remember that in 1913 a reinvestigation of Mississippi canneries by the National Child Labor Committee brought to light the fact that children of 5 or 6 and up were still working there during the oyster and shrimp season, on the same time-schedule as before, from 4 or 5 a. m., to 4 or 5 p. m., or until they were tired out. It was evident that to ask a county sheriff, who had plenty of other duties and who probably disliked to bother his neighbors by inspecting their canneries, to see that no little children were employed there was simply asking too much.

So, hard on the heels of the third chapter, came another addition to the story by the Mississippi legislature. This time, in 1914, they created the office of state factory inspector and ordered the inspector to visit the canneries and enforce the child labor law. At the same time, although they reduced the age limits for children working in cotton mills, they carefully added a clause to the new law to the effect that the reduction of age limits for mills did not in the least affect the age limits for canneries.

And now we come to the latest chapter which, unfortunately, seems not to be the last but merely the forerunner of more activities in Mississippi by the National Child Labor Committee, the Mississippi authorities, and all the friends of the children. In February of this year Lewis W. Hine returned to the Mississippi oyster canneries to see how the law was enforced. He found that many of the canneries were closed because of a shortage in oysters, or were working only a small force, but nevertheless, in the eight canneries he found running, there were 158 clear violations of the child labor law. There were 73 violations of the age limit and 85 violations of the hours law. The complete tally of the ages (according to the parents) of the children violating the age limit follows:

Forty-two of these children were also violating the hours clause of the law by working long before 6 o'clock in the morning. And besides these there were 9 boys of 12, 7 boys of 13, and 27 children of 14 and 15, working in violation of the hours limit, making a total of 158 violations of the law in eight canneries.

These children earn from 25 cents to $1 a day for shucking oysters. They are paid 5 cents a pot and even the youngest children can shuck at least five pots. A good shucker can make as much as $1.25 a day if the oysters are running large. But this means working from four in the morning to four or five in the afternoon, and most of the children work as long as the adults do. Mr. Hine was careful to go back to each cannery at intervals during the day and at closing time at night, and at each visit he found the children working away beside their parents and older brothers and sisters. Of course the smallest children can not work steadily for 11 hours, but they work off and on through the day, and their parents say hopefully, "Nex' year she be able to work steady."

One of the most interesting features of Mr. Hine's 1916 visit to the canneries was that he found two children there with whom he had become acquainted in his earlier visits. In 1911 he ran across a little chap named Bill who was making 15 cents a day in the canneries just then although he was only five years old. His mother said of him, "He kin make 15 cents when he wants to work, but he won't keep at it." This year Mr. Hine found Bill still at it. He is earning more this year and when you ask him how old he is he replies, "Twelve," for he has learned that there is such a thing as a child labor law which will not let a 10-year-old work but has no terrors for a 12-year-old. But he is the same little Bill, and probably through these five years he has been going to the oyster canneries with far greater regularity than he has gone to school. The other old friend that Mr. Hine met was a little girl whom he found in a South Carolina cannery in 1913. She was then 7 years old and had worked in the canneries one year before that. But now at the age of 10 she has given up working and goes to school regularly because her mother is "afraid of the child labor law."

Naturally, this latest chapter of the Mississippi cannery story will have significance only in so far as it results in a bettering of the conditions. There is very little use in investigating the canneries year in and year out if the investigations cannot be made to bear

fruit. And happily the Mississippi situation does not appear to be hopeless. The state law, so far as canneries are concerned, is good, but apparently its enforcement is weak. So the most obvious step to be taken in Mississippi seems to be to strengthen factory inspection and to insist on the prosecution of violators of the child labor law. That must come through the people of Mississippi itself.

But there is another hope for the cannery children, and that is the Keating child labor bill. Under that law, if Congress passes it, no child under 14 may work in a cannery shipping its goods in interstate commerce, and no child between 14 and 16 may work in such a cannery more than 8 hours a day, or between the hours of 7 p. m. and 6 a. m., and so it is very unlikely that Mississippi canners will find it profitable to employ little children if the federal child labor bill is passed. It may be that there will be just one more chapter in the cannery story and that will be the passage and enforcement of the Keating bill.

EXPERIMENTS IN INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION IN

NEW YORK CITY

(Based on an investigation by SOPHIE D. WHITE, Special Agent, National Child Labor Committee, in February and March, 1916)

It so happens that most of the plans under discussion in this country for industrial education are on trial just now in New York City. For that reason a statement of what is being done there is of more than local interest.

But in considering this subject it should constantly be borne in mind that practically every phase of it is still in the experimental stage. The systems of industrial education with which New York City is experimenting have some of them been tried elsewhere and some originated there, but none of them may be considered more than an attempt to find the best method. None of the teachers interviewed in New York would make any statement as to the permanent form the different plans may assume. Changes and adaptations are constantly being made so that this report can not in any sense be taken as defining what industrial education in New York should or will be: it is quite possible that since the investigation in February and March the systems studied have changed. considerably. But as a descriptive statement of the forms of industrial education actually on trial during the current year this report may be valuable.

Certainly New York City, where at least 35,000 children between 14 and 16 have been receiving work permits each year, furnishes a tremendous field for experimentation in industrial training. Until this year the New York State law has required all children between 14 and 16 who go to work to obtain permits on evidence that they have reached the age of 14, are physically fit, and have completed the sixth grade. The majority of children receiving such permits have left school before entering the eighth grade, as the following table shows.