OCR Text |
Show BABE FOUND AT WORK, The almost unbelievable statement was' made at the meeting of the Woman's Municipal Mu-nicipal league today that a child of 1 years had been found employed in a s eatshop. and that the little one's worth was calculated by its mother at 50 cents a week. Dr. A S. Daniel of the New York Infirmary In-firmary for Women and Children told the members of the league of coming in contact con-tact with the mother and the one-and-one-half-year-old child, and afterward, when questioned by an Evening Mall reporter, who expressed doubt as to whether he had correctly understood her. she repeated that there was no doubt about the age. Dr. Daniel addreesed the league on "II. legal Sweatshop Work." She said that children as young as 4 years of age were regularly employed In some of the thirty three trades which the law allows to go on in tenement-rooms. "Some time ago a child of 1 years was brought to the New York infirmary for treatment." said Dr. Daniel. "After some days the child's mother came for her and took her away. At that time the mother said that she needed the child's services in following her trade of passementerie making, ma-king, In her tenement home. She said that the child's services were worth 50 cents a week to her. The little one rolled tiny balls in paste, which the mother attached at-tached to form a variety of passementerie for millinery and trimmings. She said that If the baby did not help her she would have to do that detail of the work herself, and, of course, could earn but proportion, ately less." The assembled ' leaguers gasped with amasement. The law prohibits the employment em-ployment of children under 14 years of age. Dr. Daniel said that the laws enacted to bring about sanitary conditions In tenement-rooms where home work is permitted permit-ted are impossible of enforcement, and that tenement-room labor must be prohibited pro-hibited altogether, for the greatest good to the greatest number would thus be obtained, ob-tained, even if a few suffered. The city ought to provide day nurseries for children chil-dren if the mothers were forced to go to factories to work. "After Monday's raids upon the tenements tene-ments in Elizabeth street," said Dr. Daniel, "I visited the rooms, to find work going on as before, but in locked bedrooms, bed-rooms, and with lookouts posted at the buildings, who cried the alarm if a stranger stran-ger entered. "Those people only knew they were trying try-ing to earn money to buy bread. They were principally Sicilians and1 Italians, and the bolts and bars they used to guard their doors must have been in their families fami-lies since the middle ages. A resident inspector in-spector in every tenement could not prevent pre-vent sweatshop working." New York Mail. . |