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child labour
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A young spinner in Yazoo City boy at Turkey Knob Mine child labour
Two young boys work barefoot at large textile machines inside a factory, illustrating child labor in the United States during the early twentieth century.
Children hauling coal up the slope of an English mine; from an engraving of the 1840s.
See illustrator Joel Millerchip commissioned by Parliament to commemorate the Factory Act of 1833 with a banner, speaking of an event leading to its passage
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A young spinner in Yazoo City
A young spinner in Yazoo City Overseer supervising a girl (about 13 years old) operating a bobbin-winding machine in the Yazoo City Yarn Mills, Mississippi, photograph by Lewis W. Hine, 1911; in the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

child labour

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•History

child labour, employment of children of less than a legally specified age. In Europe, North America, Australia, and New Zealand, children under age 15 rarely work except in commercial agriculture, because of the effective enforcement of laws passed in the first half of the 20th century. In the United States, for example, the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 set the minimum age at 14 for employment outside of school hours in nonmanufacturing jobs, at...

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