Minimum Age and Minimum Wage                                                            Skyla Lowe 707
                                                                    
           This article Minimum Age and Minimum Wage by Joseph Berger is very important to teach you about the sad lives of young children and adults in the 1900's which sounded very devastating. These kids suffered badly, they had to breathe in cotton dust and risk fingers also limbs working with the powerful looms. Majority of these kids had no education and worked from the age of about 8  till whenever.

            Sally Greenburg of the National Consumer's League noticed that child labor "perpetuated a cycle of poverty". What Sally Greenburg is actually saying is they made an actual cycle of how people lived an unbelievable cycle of poverty. These people worked twelve hours , six days a week being scorched by hot machines or suffering lung disease even mangled arms which is very sad. Although doing all of this hard work, they were only making twenty-five cents per hour , so everyone was getting basically $1.50 in a days worth of hard work. In a standard week they worked 20 hours and if you worked beyond that you had to pay time-and-a-half. Today this cycle is still in affect because now jobs still have young kids 16 and below can only work for a certain amount of hours per week. Another change now is our minimum wage, which is $7.25 or higher depending on jobs which increased twenty times more since 1938. Including the fact that kids under 14 that have jobs can only work with safe non hazardous materials unlike machinery or shoveling coal in the early morning cold. Lastly I think it will take a huge amount of United State employees to come together and fight for their rights to earn enough money to support themselves or  their families. I think by 2020 people will begin to realize how important minimum wage and minimum age really are.

       Some people I think are arguing for the fact that these young kids had to wake up at three o'clock a.m, and spend the day till almost sunset working in coal mines, taking the shells off of ice shrimp, also working in glass and garment factories. What I find most persuasive is how they explain the daily lives of these kids and how they had to survive just to keep there families in good condition. Also how the factory owners enjoyed hiring young workers for their nimble fingers and because when they complained they were able to pay them less; they called these kids the "breaker boys". These are some of the reasons that make this article very persuasive and easy to compare; how the work we do now to earn money does not compare to how hard it was for these people back then. They worked even harder just to make $1.50/ per day on a regular basis.