Child Labor During The Industrial Revolution In Europe

Child labor is any work that interferes with a youth’s childhood in a mental or physical way or any work that may harm one under the age of eighteen. During the Industrial Revolution in Europe during the late eighteenth century sparked the rise towards modern laws against child labor. Since ancient time children completed hard jobs with little no pay and before the Industrial Revolution many children were working in sweatshops or other means to help their family earn money. The number of working youth has lowered significantly since then, yet there still remains millions of children age five to seventeen in factories around the world. In the 1990s the United Nations exposed many companies who based the production of their sales on child labor;
Europe was among the first to support the rights of youth under the age of eighteen and enstate the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child after the European Industrial Revolution between the eighteenth to mid-nineteenth century. The revolution was a disaster for children who were pushed past maturity in the sense that many were forced to work with little to no pay to reprimand the cost of living. Wealthier families often depicted children in portraits as parental looking with the same clothes and hairdos as their own father and mother. The responsibilities the grown adults were accounted for was also an expectation for children. In 1938 the Fair Labor Standards Act was passed which helped the workforce as a whole concerning “national minimum wage and maximum hour standards for workers in interstate commerce, [and] also placed limitations on child labor”. This new law was the first of its kind and outlawed the employment of youth under age sixteen in manufacturing and mining which had the largest concentration of child laborers at the time. However, many children were still employed in transportation and agricultural work which posed a high risk of safety as well. Under the umbrella law known as the National Industrial Recovery Act, which served to reduce child labor, Europe reformed the act of 1938 in 1946 to ban all work of
Beginning in 2001 France ratified new laws that “bans all labor by children under 18 which, by its nature or the circumstances in which it is carried out, is likely to harm their health, safety or moral”, which supports the nations strong opposition to the involvement of children within the workforces. However, even with this, the presence of child labor lies in other forms regarding a country's armed forces along with “slavery, child trafficking, [and] prostitution”. The International Labour Organization (ILO) recognizes sexual abuse and military combat as the worst form of child labor as it actively promotes fear within the child and puts them at a high risk for physical harm. France makes strong efforts to prohibit all forms of child labor and the country’s involvement in trade with reputations for using children in their manufacturing process. To combat the need for child labor within families France has made many efforts to help families with child support including a woman's paid maternity. Social status and employment have no effect on a families child support including “children under six receive free and mandatory preventive health services in a widespread network of thousands of health-care facilities”, by school age each child’s respective school will mandate the child’s health. The presence of so many laws to protect minors (those under the age of 18), is