The Gilded Age Essay

Child Labor was the most effective reform from The Gilded Age because it impacted most of the working children, and factories in United States. “Child labor began to decline as the labor and reform movements grew and labor standards in general began improving, increasing the political power of working people and other social reformers to demand legislation regulating child labor”. As the problem of child labor grew more and more attention, people started to make unions and reforms to help alleviate the problem. Because of the amount of attention and the hate for child labor the government gained knowledge of this problem and tried to do something about it. As more and more people came together including the government, child labor began to …show more content…
In the past, children were forced to work from an extremely young age and work for countless hours a day. They would be tired, and their growth would be stunted from the amount of labor they would do. Now that this law was place the whole view on child labor changed. They would now have a minimum age to work, so that they could still develop when they are young. Note that this law changed every single child, and that businesses couldn’t legally employ children younger than the age of 14. Because of this businesses with child labor would have to let go of their child workers or face the risk of being caught . The Keating-Owen Act was passed in 1916 and said that children in the ages of 14-16 cannot work more than 8 hours a day, or before 6:00 am and after 7:00 pm. This ensures that children cannot be mistreated and have elongated work hours. It forces any businesses to have fair work hours. This act was effective because businesses cannot have long work hours for children legally and they would have to do it illegally. If they were to be caught then there could be repercussions for their actions, ensuring the effectiveness of this