Democratic Sentinel, Volume 19, Number 29, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 26 July 1895 — CHILDREN WHO TOIL. [ARTICLE]

CHILDREN WHO TOIL.

Shocking Conditions Found In Wisconsin' Factories. Ethelbert Stewart, special agent of the United States Labor Department at Washington, who is looking up labor strikes from 1887 down to and including the American Railway Union Strike of last summer, in an interview with the St. Paul) (Minn)., Dispatch, said : “You talk about the sweatshops and homes in the big cities, but I have seen places over in villages of Wisconsin that are about as bad in every particular. 1 was amazed in the first place to learn of the immense number and variety of factories in Wisconsin. They had every kind of factory of which I know anything and the number of children employed is something wonderful. In the town of Oshkosh they had more children employed in proportion to the population than in any city I have visited in the East or South, and In many factories the condition is simply awful. “The children are crowded into poorly ventilated and unsanitary rooms, and the long and short of it is their lives are coined into dividends for the company that employs them. Then there are the cotton mills, where they employ little children and compel them to work eleven hours a day—a custom which was abolished years ago in every other community. The factory inspection law of that State is a howling farce.

“At the big work* at K3wmkee they have 900 boys and girls, ranging in age from 11 to 19 years, employed, and that is the toughest sight of all, for the roughness comes right out on the surface. The children are employed at bottling beer, and there is no limit to the amount they are allowed to drink. “The match factories are just as bad. though of course the employees are not half drunk all the time and not so much of the rottenness appears on the surface. “I aim to get both sides of a story when a complaint is made, that of the employees as well as of the employer. Besides I made some personal observations, and the conditions were worse in the Wisconsin factories than anywhere else I have been.”