The Pullman Strikes: Child Labor In The Late 19th Century

One of the main problems with strikes was that the unions and strikers were seen as the cause of the problems between employers and employees rather than the real issues. Because of this basic opinion when strikes turned violent or very disruptive, the unions were blamed. The blaming of the unions was part of the reason that two major unions quickly declined after an unsuccessful strike. Different strikes were centered on different causes that the workers and unions were fighting towards. The Haymarket Riot started out as a strike for a reduction in work hours to eight hour work days instead of what could sometimes be twelve hour work days. The Pullman strike started because of issues with wages. The people who lived in the company
Reformers such as Florence Kelley and Lewis Hine saw the child labor as a problem that needed to be addressed and fixed. However one reaction by a superintendent to the problem was that because the children were healthy it means that child labor was not a problem. Only pictures of sickly children would be viewed as documentation of a real problem. Parents of the children supported bringing their children to work. They, the parents, believed that they needed children to work because they needed as many members of their family bring in a wage as possible. The role of parents reveals a conflict of interests because it was parents that would bring their children with them to the factories. One mother expressed that it would have been preferable “. . . to give her smaller children some education, besides rearing them in a better environment.” But having the children work means there were more family members bringing in money to support the family. Even though photos revealed where children were working and what the conditions actually looked like, there was still debate about whether or not child labor was a problem because to the families it seemed necessary and to the superintendant the children appeared healthy