juvenile labour

In the nineteenth century there was a need to protect children from exploitation by parents as juvenile labour.

It covered predominantly skilled and organized workers while the casual labour problem and that of juvenile labour was untouched.

In this respect they are the forerunners of the juvenile labour exchanges with their affiliated services of vocational guidance and after-care.

Notwithstanding these criticisms there are five reasons which explain why the ASEA was important in the origins of the juvenile labour exchange system.

Both Reports proposed that the problem of juvenile labour could be lessened, as R. H. Tawney recommended, by compulsory part-time education.

Very little was done about juvenile labour, she says, with no attempt being made to raise the school-leaving age or to make further technical education compulsory until the age of 17.

Mantoux, on the basis of the enquiry of 1816, instances fourteen, sixteen, or even eighteen hours with a dinner break of forty minutes for the largely female and juvenile labour force.

Copper ores needed a considerable labour force to break and sort the ores, and by the 1780s the ratio of female and juvenile labour to adult males had reached 2: 5.

She started an early juvenile labour exchange, and was one of the founders of the Papworth Village Settlement for sufferers of tuberculosis, a forerunner of Papworth Hospital.

Similarly, the significance of friendship as a means of exercising influence was appreciated by youth workers, as it would be after 1910 in the working out of the juvenile labour exchange, vocational guidance and after-care schemes.

The fundamental answer to the 'boy labour problem', however, lay in state action to prohibit employers from exploiting juvenile labour, just as the State had acted in the past in 'the case of children and women'.

This shows that from the earliest days of government interest in organizing the labour-market, Beveridge at least saw juvenile labour as a separate category which would require the formulation of a joint approach by the exchanges and local education authorities.

The problem for Liberal politicians was a fundamental one: how to combat the economic and social consequences of juvenile labour without interfering with, and effectively undermining, one of the principles of political economy, namely, the free market in labour.

The fact that responsibility for the juvenile labour exchange system was divided forced LEAs to choose between either administering their own scheme (with Board of Education approval), or accepting the Board of Trade JAC.

This not only involved the SCCs in vocational guidance and after-care in a formal sense prior to the creation of juvenile labour exchanges, but also it provided an influential role for the ASEA, certainly for its practice.

While denying the importance of industrial training as the 'principal' remedy for unemployment, he looked to technical education to raise the general level of skill 'from which men start', as well as to divert juvenile labour (which he described as 'adaptable') into new and growing trades.

We have shown that the objectives of the youth movement, the juvenile labour exchanges and the proposed continuation schools were not so much the creation of conformist youth as of the adaptable, efficient citizen, motivated by service, mediated by humanism, and morally conscious.

Moreover, the distance was exaggerated by the educational character of their proposal, which employers recognized would restrict their freedom to use juvenile labour at their own discretion; and, given employers' traditional suspicion of further education, they regarded the whole idea as unnecessary, potentially expensive and disruptive of production schedules.

Before he became President of the Board of Trade and before the Royal Commission Reports were published, he advocated a package of social reforms including labour exchanges, training of juvenile labour, decasualization, counter-cyclical intervention by the state in industry and military service to absorb some of the unemployed.

All in all, the juvenile labour exchange legislation served to institutionalize the transition from school to full-time employment, and in so doing provided it with priests and rituals; the transition became a rite de passage and, therefore, brought this aspect of the adolescent's life into a formal arena where it was subject to critical scrutiny.

While they might find 'delinquent' behaviour, in its many manifestations, irritating, as the role of juvenile labour in the production process was always either peripheral or auxiliary, the 'delinquency'was more than compensated for by the advantages of using young workers who were cheap, malleable, non-unionized, easy to recruit and just as easy to dismiss.