BABIES MADE TO WORK.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXI, Issue 18664, 21 March 1924, Page 6

BABIES MADE TO WORK.

A NEW YORK SCANDAL.

Witnesses at the public hearing of the New York State Welfare Commission stiffed '.that babies, two and three years of age, are employed in the crowded insanitary tenements of the city on home work for the factories. Mrs. Jean Herr, of th© National Child Labour Committee, skid that she had seen "babies as young as two years of age" employed in manufacturing articles in the tenements.

Mrs. Dorothy Knote arid Margaret Roarty, visiting teachers of .the Board of Education, corroborated Mrs. Herr's testimony. The parents' greed for money, not actual necesssity, was given as the reason for the employment of the infants. The teachers said that children who worked at homo could be easily detected by their tendency to sleep in the classrooms, and by the marks on their hands. "I have seen some of the children making dolls and toys," said Mrs. Knote. "They go at recess to their homes and work, during the noon hour, grabbing a piece of bread to cat in the street on their way back to school." "A little old man, four years of age," •was Mrs. Knote's description of one off the children sho found at work.

Mrs. Hert said that in her investigations she had seen many children of four years and under at work in tenements, She declared she saw a baby, aged two, employed in pulling apart petals for the manufacture of artificial flowers.