Since the earliest days of agriculture, children have helped their families on farms. Rapid industrialization in the 19th century, however, created a demand for very young factory workers — triggering a decades-long struggle to set and enforce age limits and basic standards for factory work in Ontario.
“The machines of the early industrial revolution, operated by relatively unskilled labourers, opened factory doors to children,” writes Lorna F. Hurl in a 1988 essay in the journal Labour/Le Travail. “Among the cheapest of the unskilled, child workers proved attractive to many employees. The majority of child labourers came from early teenage or adolescent age groups. Smaller children, however, were employed in non-demanding tasks or tasks which required small and nimble hands or small statures.”
In 1871, children (defined as anyone under 16 who was working full-time) made up 8.1 per cent of the labour force in Ontario industrial establishments. Leading occupations for juveniles included rope and twine making, cotton manufacturing, button manufacturing, and trunk and box making, with children accounting for 43.5 per cent, 42.8 per cent, 38.2 per cent, and 33.3 per cent of these respective workforces.
Labour groups and some newspapers strongly criticized the use of child employees. In 1881, a branch of theKnights of Labor (a 19th-century movement based in the United States that attempted to organize skilled and unskilled workers alike) was inaugurated in Hamilton.
“Among the first of its resolutions was the abolition in factories of child labour under the age of 14 years,” Hurl notes. “The Trades and Labor Congress, formed in 1883, as another attempt at national organization, adopted positions similar to those of the Knights, calling for the abolition of child factory labour under the age of 14.”
Child Labour in the Industrial Revolution
The Globe took a similar stance and published a series of blistering articles attacking child labour. An article from December 14, 1881, excoriated the Canada Cotton Company of Cornwall for employing “200 girls and boys under the age of fifteen years.”
“Fully fifty of them are mere babies, not more than 10 years old,” it states. “The working hours of the children are from 6:30 a.m. to 6:30 p.m., with an hour out at noon. The small children earn from 25 to 30 cents a day in the spinning room; the larger ones 60 to 90 cents. On Saturdays they leave work at 3.30 p.m. in the winter and at noon in summer. In the Stormont mill there are from fifteen to eighteen children of about ten or twelve, earning 20 to 25 cents; and about fourty to fifty others under fifteen making about 50 cents a day.”
Excerpt of an article from the May 5, 1879, edition of the Globe and Mail.
Politicians had begun to respond to such horror stories. In 1879, Darby Bergin, the MP for Cornwall, introduced a private-member’s bill to ban child labour in factories and mills. The bill didn’t passed the House, but Bergin submitted it year after year, picking up media support along the way.
“What we would like to see effected would be the absolute prohibition of the employment in factories of very young children,” editorialized the Globe in a January 6, 1881, article backing Bergin. “No child under fourteen or fifteen should be allowed to work in a factory unless the employer can give satisfactory evidence that the child has attended school for at least twenty-six weeks of the preceeding year.”
A Royal Commission on Mills and Factories was struck in 1882 to investigate child-labour conditions. The commission reported that children were extensively employed in Canadian industries, working long hours in deplorable conditions. Some kids had virtually no education, even though legislation such as the Ontario School Act of 1871 mandated free public schooling for children age seven to 12.
Motivated by the commission’s findings, the federal government of Prime Minister John A. Macdonald introduced a bill that incorporated many of Bergin’s proposals. Unfortunately, this reformist bill ran into opposition from business leaders and was bogged down by legal debate. One bone of contention: whether it was the federal or provincial governments that had jurisdiction over labour laws.
Article from the February 22, 1882, edition of the Globe and Mail.
The bill was withdrawn and tweaked. It was submitted again in 1883 and then again the following year but kept falling victim to business and legal objections.
As the feds dithered, Ontario acted. In early 1884, the Liberal government of Premier Oliver Mowat introduced “An Act for the Protection of Persons Employed in Factories” (short title, “The Ontario Factories Act, 1884”). The Liberals were looking to garner working-class support while asserting provincial authority over an important aspect of the economy. The groundbreaking act passed in the spring of 1884.
The act regulated working conditions for children (defined as “a person under the age of fourteen years”). Factories could no longer hire boys younger than 12 or girls younger than 14. Boys between 12 and 14 could work only if their employer had a signed certificate from their parents or a physician attesting to their age. Other gender disparities abounded: children and female workers, for example, were guaranteed one-hour lunch breaks and a 60-hour maximum work week.
The act also introduced occupational health and safety standards — a radical innovation at the time. Children were banned from cleaning machinery in motion, fire escapes could not be locked during work hours, and factories were ordered not to endanger the health or safety of staff. Anyone violating the act could face a fine or prison term.
Due in part to bickering between federal and provincial authorities, the act didn’t come into force until December 1, 1886. Problems soon emerged: the legislation was full of loopholes (it stated that youthful workers could be forced to toil longer than 60 hours a week if the “customs or exigencies of certain trades” required longer shifts) and applied only to factories with more than 20 workers. Also, few offenders were punished.
Boys with wheelbarrows in the streets of Amherstburg, ca. 1895. (Archives of Ontario, I0027816/Alvin D. McCurdy fonds/Reference Code: F 2076, Box D-4)
“While the legislation was passed quickly, its enforcement was quite a different question,” notes an April 2017 article in the Waterloo Historical Review.
Three inspectors were appointed to enforce the law across the entire province. Their work commenced on July 1, 1887. Between 1888 and 1900, only 35 charges were prosecuted, most of them concerning child-labour violations. During the same period, more than 200 fatal industrial accidents were reported in Ontario. Clearly, the low level of prosecutions didn’t reflect a sudden improvement in working conditions.
Critics said the system was biased toward business owners, but there were other reasons inspectors were sometimes reluctant to press charges. In an era when social services were minimal at best, every able-bodied member of some low-income households had to work or the family would starve. Inspectors recognized this reality and sometimes overlooked infractions to enable young children to stay employed.
In 1886, Ottawa introduced another royal commission to look into labour conditions. When the Royal Commission on the Relations of Labor and Capital submitted its findings in 1889, it echoed earlier critiques regarding child workers. It also noted that the Ontario Factories Act had “so far accomplished little or no good … The Act does not include places where less than twenty people work and it is notoriously winked at by employers of labor.”
Article from the September 23, 1886, edition of the Globe and Mail.
Following this unpromising start, conditions did slowly improve in Ontario. Loopholes were closed, and new legislation was introduced. In 1889, child-labour regulations were expanded to cover any Ontario factory with at least five workers. During the 1890s, the minimum age for factory work was raised to 14 for both genders, and shops were banned from hiring kids under 10 (although working at home — doing piecework under “sweat shop” conditions — was still permitted).
The combination of better legislation, tougher enforcement, improved economic conditions for adults, and school-truancy laws led to a steep decline in child-labour rates. By 1911, kids made up less than 2.5 per cent of Ontario’s full-time industrial workforce — a drastic reduction at a time of massive industrial expansion. Seven years later, the province repealed a previous exemption under which children could be hired to can fruits and vegetables.
In 1919, the Ontario government enacted legislation to further restrict child labour. Boys under 12 could no longer “engage in any street trade,” such as delivering telegrams or hawking newspapers (having a paper route was still okay), wrote the Windsor Star. The cut-off age for girls doing the same work remained 16.
“Small newsboys” from a 1919 pamphlet by J.J. Kelso. (TPL/Baldwin Collection of Canadiana/1911-NEWSBOYS-SB )
That same year, the province mandated school attendance for “every adolescent between fourteen and sixteen” and banned daytime employment of kids the same age. These actions were a milestone in the fight to protect children from economic exploitation.
Today, some American states seem to be going in the opposite direction: “Already in 2023, eight bills to weaken child labour protections have been introduced in six Midwestern states (Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, Ohio and South Dakota) and in Arkansas, a bill repealing restrictions on work for 14 and 15-year olds has now been signed into law,” states a report by the Economic Policy Institute.
Such moves would return these states to the kind of child-labour standards that 19th-century Ontario reformers hoped to eliminate with imperfect but purposeful legislation.
Sources: The September 30, 1887, edition of the Brantford Weekly Expositor; the January 6, 1881, December 14, 1881, February 22, 1882, October 6, 1886, October 16, 1886, and July 15, 1887, editions of the Globe; the November 28, 1887, edition of the Kingston Whig-Standard; the Spring 1988 edition of Labour/Le Travail (Volume 21); the October 9, 1884, edition of the Ottawa DailyCitizen; the 2017 edition of the Waterloo Historical Review; the June 21, 1919, edition of the WindsorStar.
Donate