In the history of humanity, there were many huge changes which changed the world forever. One of these was the industrial revolution. The Industrial Revolution was a period of great change from about 1760 until 1840, when many new machines were invented and introduced into much bigger-scale factories. This allowed people to more effectively do work with the arms of a machine instead of human arms. This was a positive change for many people. But kids were not one of these people. At that time, many kids had to work in a huge factory to earn money for their family. The goal of the factory is to make things quickly, so they do not care that their worker is a child. This is the act of child labor, or having children do more work that adults do and having to work in more dangerous conditions. This continued on for one hundred years, until people finally realized that doing so is not right. This brings us to the question, is child labor acceptable, or is it not?
There may be some benefits to using child labor in factories. One of the biggest reasons that business owners use kids is that kids are basically the same as adults, except for the fact that kids have quicker fingers and they are much faster and flexible in doing many things. Some tasks that require delicacy would be much better off in a kid’s hands rather than having an adult do it. Also, because the kids were still small, they did not understand how the society works, meaning that even if the business owners were underpaying them, the kids would most likely not notice that they were receiving less money than they were supposed to. And that was what happened, exactly, except for the fact that as the kids who worked in factories got older, they began to realize that they were being mistreated, and went on a strike. Therefore, there can be many upsides to having children work in the factories.
With these benefits, there are also many bad things about child labor. One of these things is that as the business owners were using the hands of the kids to do what they wanted to do, they did not realize that kids should be treated the exact same way that adults are treated. Missing such an important fact, they also decided to use kids’ lack of knowledge to their advantage, and pay them an amount that is much smaller than what they should be paid. When we treat others, we try to treat them with our respect, so that they will respect us as well. But this is not what the business owners did to the children. Instead of giving them the respect that they truly deserve, they completely basically disregarded that they are humans and should be respected just like any other person. Another thing is that the business owners do not care, for whatever reason, or might not have even realized what the children were going through. While the children were suffering, they were living great. Clearly, there are many drawbacks to child labor.
Though child labor can seem very good at first, the drawbacks still outweigh the benefits of using child labor inside of factories. It might have been okay to use child labor, if only the business owners had not been so disrespectful to the children and had decided to take advantage of their developing minds. This is very bad because the children are humans as well, and they should be respected just like any other grown up, if not to a greater degree, because they are at a smaller age. It is definitely not right and should not be accepted that they are being mistreated to such a degree that they are working in conditions that are even more dangerous and work longer hours than an adult. Even if child labor is used, it will not last long. This is because once the kids get older they will realize they have been mistreated and will most definitely start up a rebellion of some kind, which they did in reality. As you can see, child labor is very unacceptable and should not be accepted to any degree.
In our world that we live in right now, though we are developing more and more no matter in technology or in production of goods or most everything else, there are still many problems standing in our way that we have to face as humanity. This brings us to remember the problems of society in the past, which some are small, and others are big. One of these problems of the past is the problem of child labor, which is when children are being put to work when they are not ready for work yet. At the time when child labor was legal, business owners took advantage of the fact that kids were their workers by using their lack of knowledge as well their quickness and liveliness as children. This was very sad, and for a period of time, no one caught this problem until a long time after. It is extremely important and vitally necessary for us to reflect on the past mistakes of humanity so we don’t make such mistakes again in the future.
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