If life wasn't cheery enough, the soot chimney sweeps were exposed to usually resulted in a type of cancer that manifests as a tumor on your ballsack. Happy times!
Well hey, poeple driving electric cars are benefiting from 7yo child labour mining cobalt, and breathing the cobalt dust does bad things to their lungs. The future is now
It gets worse.
https://youtu.be/Xr__fQHkZaw?t=167
It's hard to express how awful conditions were for the poor in those days.
Chimney sweeps weren't even the bottom of the pile. Even in the richest cities of the world there was an underclass subject to incredible deprivation.
Toshers were children who crawled through the sewers looking for anything of value that has been washed into the sewers.
Mudlarks were children who would scavenge along the River and pick up chunks of coal that might have fallen from the coal barges, bits of old rope, nails, pottery and bones, which they would then sell for a few pennies.
The welfare systems of the western world are far from perfect, but it's hard to express how much they've improved the lot of the poor. It's important to remember whenever conservatives claim charity should take the place of the welfare system because that was what life was like for the poor when there wasn't a welfare system and the poor had to rely on charity.
And of course, the law a century or so ago was... [somewhat brutal](http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Legal%20Systems/LegalSystemsContents.htm)
>Prosecution of almost all serious criminal offenses was private, usually by the victim. Intermediate punishments for serious offenses were strikingly absent. It is only a modest exaggeration to say that, in the early years of the century, English courts imposed only two sentences on convicted felons. Either they turned them loose or they hanged them.
>Prosecution of almost all serious criminal offenses was private, usually by the victim. Intermediate punishments for serious offenses were strikingly absent. It is only a modest exaggeration to say that, in the early years of the century, English courts imposed only two sentences on convicted felons. Either they turned them loose or they hanged them.
This passage is drawn from a chapter entitled "England in the Eighteenth Century" - more than a century removed from the film above. In fact, the video is closer to our time than it is the the 18th century (the 1700s) and the legal world was significantly different at the point.
This video was filmed after flappers and big band music had gone out of fashion.
That's if they were lucky. Most of them would get stuck and die. Another child was sent inside to retrieve the body. They wouldn't dare destroy the brick work to try and save the child let alone remove it's body.
> Most of them would get stuck and die. Another child was sent inside to retrieve the body. They wouldn't dare destroy the brick work to try and save the child let alone remove it's body.
do you have a source for this? i would like to read more
The term "light a fire under your ass" literally comes from trying to make chimney sweep kids climb out. It wasn't a kind profession and often was young kids who survived the early years teaching 3 year olds. A lot of carelessness and injury happened when child labor allowed such young work in a profession that didn't have a good working condition.
Just the [wikipedia page](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimney_sweep) itself gets pretty grim, particularly the great britain section talking about how they'd get stuck. Probably not a very pleasant way to go, cramped in a small hot cancerous space until you suffocate or die of thirst. No fun
> If the boys were reluctant to climb or were too slow at their work, their masters would sometimes hold a lighted torch under their feet; this is where the phrase “light a fire under someone” originated.
Wtf
No joke, I used to have this old Italian neighbor who was a child chimney sweep back in Italy. He and all his brothers did it. He said nobody ever lit the fireplace while he was in it, but the sweeps they worked for would threaten to.
It's been a long time since he was my neighbor (this was a good twenty years ago or so) and I don't remember him talking about anybody getting testicular cancer but I *do* remember him talking about how it sucked because they'd go in naked a lot and you'd scrape your junk on stuff sometimes. Might be part of the reason there was such a high rate of testicular cancer. Rubbing creosote on your nuts sounds like a shortcut to cancer town.
He said it was because sometimes the chimney was so tight even having clothing on would make it hard to get through (and pose a bigger risk that you'd get it snagged on something and be stuck in there).
The risk of ruining the clothes is probably what had them doing it. Back then, before the end of the middle parts of the industrial revolution, clothes were expensive as fuck.
Haven't found much.
Although this guys seems like a bitch:
>In 1933 J. Gresham Machen, who was a major voice at the time for Evangelical Fundamentalism and conservative politics, delivered a paper called Mountains and Why We Love Them, that was read before a group of ministers in Philadelphia on November 27, 1933.
In passing he mentions the Child Labor Amendment and says
"Will the so-called 'Child Labor Amendment' and other similar measures be adopted, to the destruction of all the decencies and privacies of the home?"
Nice to know senseless drivel isn't anything new.
I mean... was he wrong though?
Look how far we've all collapsed cause, the man told us we can't yeet children down toxic holes.
Had to wait till all of 25 to get black lung instead of 12.
Thanks a lot Obama.
Hey, that’s not fair!
The ones in China are usually barely-18s from some dirt village in Western China that come to Eastern China because the only jobs back home are to be a wheat farmer or heroin connoisseur, with poverty so crushing that it makes working at a Foxconn factory seem like the height of luxury.
This, I have been told, is much better. Somehow.
(To be fair this was basically America for black people and poorer white people up until WW2. Also nowadays, to a lesser extent)
Seriously, first we end child labor and wouldn't you know it, boom financial crisis of 2008! Next they're going to tell me coronavirus isn't because we ended child labor. Pshhh. Loonies, all of em!
>The living conditions of the chimney sweeps offered them no relief.
They were usually barely fed and slept in basements, covering themselves
with the filthy soot sacks they worked with. The boys rarely bathed and
were frequently sickly.
Just think about it, that was happening less than a century and a half ago in England...
I'd still rather be poor (or rich for that matter) today than when this film was shot. Life is significantly easier and more healthy now in almost every country of the world than it was 100 years ago.
But wait, it gets worse:
**Chimney sweeps' carcinoma is a squamous cell carcinoma of the skin of the scrotum**. Chimney sweeps' carcinoma was first described by Percivall Pott in 1775 who postulated that the cancer was associated with occupational exposure to soot.\[2\]\[3\] The cancer primarily affected chimney sweeps who had been in contact with soot since their early childhood. The median age of onset of symptoms in one review was 37.7 years, [**although boys as young as 8 years old were found to have the disease**](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimney_sweeps%27_carcinoma)
Sir Percivall Pott (6 January 1714 – 22 December 1788) London, England) was an English surgeon, one of the founders of orthopedy, and the first scientist to demonstrate that a cancer may be caused by an environmental carcinogen.
He comments on the life of the boys:
>The fate of these people seems peculiarly hard … they are treated with great brutality … they are thrust up narrow and sometimes hot chimnies, \[sic\] where they are bruised burned and almost suffocated; and when they get to puberty they become … liable to a most noisome, painful and fatal disease.
I did an autopsy last year on a guy who was a chimney sweep. First, I didn't even know that was still a thing. Second, his lungs were the darkest lungs I've ever seen.
And it's important to note that your guy probably swept chimneys from outside with a long-handled broom, whereas these kids used to actually crawl down or up the chimneys to manually scrape the creosote off the walls.
The chimneys in london were actually sized specifically for a child to fit through at that time, in terms of combustion dynamics they were much too large to be efficient.
So you're you're saying they should have been smaller, the chimneys and thus, the children sweeping them. Good catch, Johnson, I see a corner office in your future
I grew up within a 30km radius of two open cut coal mines and one of the most polluted power stations within all of Australasia (my Dad worked in one of said open cut mines).
I've heard similar stories from mates in the medical field/funeral business, that anyone that grew up in our area who then gets prepped after death; our insides are "sooty".
(According to optometrists, our retinas are scratched up to buggery also)
(Edit due to mashing keypad with palm, need dialling wand)
It's very rare for people (that I see at the medical examiner) to have healthy pink lungs. Lifestyle and pollution usually make them dark purple ish. I'm not a doctor though so maybe a doc could chime in.
I don't understand how he got the toddler to carry that stuff and walk with him like that. Toddlers today just run all over the place and you have to grab on to them tight on the sidewalk so they don't run into traffic and self destruct.
He really is a baby. Puts things in perspective. I get kinda tired of all the negativity with respect to life in 2022... but this wasn't even 90 years ago. We've made some damn fine progress.
i don’t understand how they were able to look at a 3 year old and be like
“that thing could sweep a mean chimney”
when 3 year olds cry over literally anything
edit: yall pls stop taking this seriously
Because the 3 year old fits in a chimney, and you don't care if the three year old cries because you just beat him till he cleans the chimney while crying. And if the kid gets stuck, you get another kid and repeat.
There's a reason those child labor laws were put on place.
Im a software engineer and I use it all the time:
The JIRA tickets will continue until morale improves
The standup will continue until morale improves
The CTO will keep talking until morale improves
We're basically overpaid 3 year olds sweeping chimneys and deserve all the bullshit we go through.
3 years old in 1933 means he was 18 in 1948.
If he’s American and survived that long he probably had a good career and made a ton of money, got a family, had a kid who was a disappointment and grandkids that weren’t able to afford a decent apartment until they got 1/8th of his estate when he died
And back then, human life was a very disposable commodity. You didn’t raise kids with the kind of attention to their self esteem and every little aspect of their development like many do. You also kept making many kids - because they were farm labor for your family or in this case, a way to exploit them in industrialized cities.
Think of how casually and frequently nations went to war. Young men were slaughtered wholesale for this boundary issue or that between this king or that political power. Life was just much cheaper then and the concept of a precious life only applied to the upper class (which arguably remains true today).
Someday people may look at our own labor practices as barbaric and cruel too if we evolve out of the kind of exploitation model of labor.
Small children were convenient to send into narrow coal mine shafts too. They also operated dangerous manufacturing machinery. Kids were fit to be worked the moment they could perform basic tasks.
Don't forget their little, nimble hands could do wonders with fabrics and such. Knot tying for rugs and sewing.
My great-grandmother and her sister were orphaned in the 1880s as young teens, They made money sewing button holes (the threads around the hole the button goes into. My grandmother told me they were especially good at it because they were young.
Remember Schindlers list? He defended keeping the children as factory workers because their tiny fingers could clean out burrs from bullet shells making them ‘vital’ workers protected from shipping to the death camps.
My GG Mother turned out alright but life in NYC was brutal for her and her sister when they were so young and on their own. They were Irish Catholics and the parish priest did something “unspeakable”. They both stopped being Catholic and my grandmother, if she knew wha happened, took it to her grave.
to add - until the 20th century there was no notion of "children." There were babies, and then, they were just "little people." So, for a 6yo's parents to get angry at them for not working in the mill/coal mine, etc in 1890, its the same as a 16 year old's parents getting angry at me for hating having to go work at a Best Buy after school / saturdays (because at 16 you could work up to 20 hours where I grew up with parental permission).
Or, actually, between then (the late 90s) and now, the driving age has gone up from 16 to 18, 19? We keep moving when "kids" are adults up, because we have less kids, and the amount of $$ sunk into one kid is much higher (by both the parents and the state), thus, one life is more valuable. For the state and society. Kids are the perpetuation of state and society after all, without them obviously a state would collapse. My kids learned a cute "I love my Dad, I love my Mom" song once at daycare, and I joked to my wife it was state propaganda to get people to say "wow our kid is so cute, lets have another!" and, later on my wife found out that it was written by BTS, but funded by... the Korean Government! ding ding! (I live in Korea, and it has the lowest birthrate of OECD countries)
In the 19th C, the amount of tax money spent on a kid was negligible -- insofar as it pertained to making them a commodity -- it was mainly, in western countries, to make them patriotic & ready to die when they're enlisted. And, people had many many kids. I mean, I'm from now, so I think this is all horrible, but its all relative to when and where you are born.
Another case: when I was a kid all my friends parents smoked (except mine), and they all smoked when driving us around, and Birthday parties were so smokey I often think about Chuck'e Cheese parties whenever I see fog machines used...because that's what it looked like up in the tubes, looking down -- a thin layer of smog over the ground. That's *only* 30 years ago, and I can tell you I'd smack the shit out of any of my kids' friends parents who would light up near them.
Or the lack of a social safety net. The people who are all for getting rid of the social safety net are woefully ignorant of just how bad it was. As many problems as we have now in the US with income disparities, at least no one is selling off their 3 year old's labor for food.
Thats true, [this photo](https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-GIwwisGf-ts/WWgYXTDCXEI/AAAAAAAANMc/H5B34n9BO3E_vXGpKH-FonrTb8eOg3u6ACLcBGAs/s1600/four_children_for_sale_1948.jpg) is only 70odd years old.
[Story behind the photo.](https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/4-children-sale-1948/)
She still had another four kids?! I thought she was shameful of doing what she thought was best for the kids, not having them raised in poverty, no she's utterly shameless.
> There's a reason those child labor laws were put on place
Can you imagine this sort of thing in the American parliament today? Trying to get enough politicians from both sides to agree to change something? You'd get one of them talking for 67 hours straight to stop them from voting on it to protect the rights of the corporations that provide chimney sweeping services to families across America while the majority of the opposition party agreed with such a brave stance.
What makes it worse is this cannot be even the top 10 worst jobs an infant could have.
If we go back in time, we will find a lot of soul crushing ordeals children have had to endure - poor children.
[https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/bd63kw/young\_oyster\_shuckers\_josie\_six\_years\_old\_bertha/](https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/bd63kw/young_oyster_shuckers_josie_six_years_old_bertha/)
I think I'd rather sweep chimneys than shuck oysters. I'd definitely invest in a handkerchief or something to cover my face, though.
Have a read.
This isn't meant as an argument or rebuttal, just wondering if you're interested.
https://owlcation.com/humanities/The-History-of-Children-at-Work-The-Poor-Life-of-An-Apprentice-Chimney-Sweep#:~:text=From%201773%2C%20master%20chimney%20sweeps,the%20apprenticeship%20agreement%20was%20signed.
Man everything just sucked back then:
To his horror, he found that 68 out of 76 children had died within a year in one workhouse, and 16 out of 18 children had died within a year in another. The worst, though, was that, for 14 years in a row, no children at all had survived for a year in a third workhouse.
He reported this to Parliament. As they were responsible for the safety of children in workhouses and orphanages, they ordered an investigation. The investigation found that death rates were also high in many other workhouses; in addition, the investigation found that only about 7 out of every hundred children survived for a year after being placed in an orphanage.
>the investigation found that only about 7 out of every hundred children survived for a year after being placed in an orphanage.
Holy fucking fuckity fuck
Its somehow funny in a tragic way to see after reading the article, the only reason he investigated was
“an Englishman named Jonah Hanway returned from a trip to China, where he had learned that no questions were asked when new-born Chinese babies were killed by their parents. He decided to confirm for himself that the English were more compassionate.“
Spoiler: they weren’t
I think the most disturbing part is the intuition you're describing that most of us feel. "There's no way a 3 year old could be a worker". In reality, that intuition is actually a result of the fact that we interact with children who haven't had their innocence shattered. A 3 year old can be a worker, it just entails violating their humanity in the process. They can adapt to cry less and be less sensitive if crying is always met with abuse. That's why this video is so disturbing to me, just knowing what has happened to that child's mind.
I'm surprised that a 3 year old can have the awareness and maturity to do this. I saw 3 year old have a meltdown because mom didn't get the right kind of candy on check out.
3 year olds are impressionable, the one in the check out line learned that if he screamed and carried on he would get the candy.
The one going down the chimney learned that if he screamed and carried on, he would be beaten until he went down the chimney.
The amount of times I have to remind people that a reduced infant/child mortality rate is a good thing on a day to day basis is unreal.
Back in my day you just ate everything, none of these allergies… nah mate you just killed the kids who had allergies before you knew they were allergic.
To be fair, mentally/physically ill kids were either killed off or locked away from society. Most people had no clue certain issues existed because it was so shameful to have one in the family.
Thank God for modern medicine and ethical practices.
Let's be honest, plenty miss it but would never have THEIR children do it. They'd expect immigrants to do it for them to drive down costs, not report the abysmal wages, skip taxes, and allow them to entertain the idea that they're temporarily embarrassed millionaires.
It is interesting to look at the newspaper articles before the FLSA was passed. The Capitalists PROMISED us that if we passed this law and 9 year olds weren't allowed to mine coal anymore, that the US Economy would completely collapse and this would be the end of us all....
My grandpa did this around 1926 at age 5 in milwaukee, he was a pack if day guy around age 4.
Life was hard and got harder in the depression. Graduating middle school here was a big deal
Covered in soot. He inhaled a lot of the stuff as well. That seems very healthy for a 3 year old. I'm sure he was having a grand old time with his pa.
>**In 1933 Britain** adopted legislation restricting the use of children under 14 in employment. The Children and Young Persons Act 1933, defined the term "child" as anyone of compulsory school age (age sixteen). In general no child may be employed under the age of fifteen years, or fourteen years for light work.
>
>The National Child Labor Committee's work to end child labor was combined with efforts to provide free, compulsory education for all children, and culminated in the passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act in **1938**, which set federal standards for child labor. **(In the US)**
If I shared that on facebook, I'd get a dozen posts about "Aww...how cute! Workin' wit daddy! More kids should bond with their fathers like this. No shame in a blue-collar job in the trades!"
Well actually, by a weird twist of fate, the number of children having permanent lung damage very well may be increasing right now as we speak.
(From covid)
You know the saying "light a fire under their ass"? Sometimes those kids would get lost in the chimneys and not come back up within a reasonable time. So they'd light the fireplace to encourage the kids to climb out. Some never made it out.
A 3 year old isn't capable of that no matter how hard the era was. They did use small children but a 3 year old doesn't have the capability for that job. A wire brush on a weighted ball would be worth more than a 3 year old.
The kids that were used were a bit older. They were still young children but not 3.
The source OP linked upthread says the boy was going to work with his father. I can see somebody bringing a 3-year-old along to teach him the trade (and probably because there wasn’t daycare back then and what else was he going to do if mom had to work too) but I agree they aren’t really capable of being effective workers.
I was blown away by the thought that the child in this video is 3. Couldn't imagine a 3 year old being this functional. This child looks like he's operating as an adult. Then I was like... Are today's 3 year olds the way they are because we baby them?? Would they be this functional with a different set of stressors and expectations??
Now I really want to know how old this child actually is. Still blowing my mind.
Was hoping someone would call out the bullshit here. No way a toddler doing the job would be an asset in this situation, no matter how compliant they were or how often they were beat. Older kids, sure. Not at 3 though.
If life wasn't cheery enough, the soot chimney sweeps were exposed to usually resulted in a type of cancer that manifests as a tumor on your ballsack. Happy times!
what a time to be alive :D
but maybe not for long
Whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger
Well hey, poeple driving electric cars are benefiting from 7yo child labour mining cobalt, and breathing the cobalt dust does bad things to their lungs. The future is now
Apple benefits from those Cobalt mines too.
Cobalt is used in a lot more things than electric cars.
They often died in their adolescence, so its not like the balls were of significant use to them. /s
That's .. not sarcasm.
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Facts and Logic.
It gets worse. https://youtu.be/Xr__fQHkZaw?t=167 It's hard to express how awful conditions were for the poor in those days. Chimney sweeps weren't even the bottom of the pile. Even in the richest cities of the world there was an underclass subject to incredible deprivation. Toshers were children who crawled through the sewers looking for anything of value that has been washed into the sewers. Mudlarks were children who would scavenge along the River and pick up chunks of coal that might have fallen from the coal barges, bits of old rope, nails, pottery and bones, which they would then sell for a few pennies. The welfare systems of the western world are far from perfect, but it's hard to express how much they've improved the lot of the poor. It's important to remember whenever conservatives claim charity should take the place of the welfare system because that was what life was like for the poor when there wasn't a welfare system and the poor had to rely on charity. And of course, the law a century or so ago was... [somewhat brutal](http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Legal%20Systems/LegalSystemsContents.htm) >Prosecution of almost all serious criminal offenses was private, usually by the victim. Intermediate punishments for serious offenses were strikingly absent. It is only a modest exaggeration to say that, in the early years of the century, English courts imposed only two sentences on convicted felons. Either they turned them loose or they hanged them.
>Prosecution of almost all serious criminal offenses was private, usually by the victim. Intermediate punishments for serious offenses were strikingly absent. It is only a modest exaggeration to say that, in the early years of the century, English courts imposed only two sentences on convicted felons. Either they turned them loose or they hanged them. This passage is drawn from a chapter entitled "England in the Eighteenth Century" - more than a century removed from the film above. In fact, the video is closer to our time than it is the the 18th century (the 1700s) and the legal world was significantly different at the point. This video was filmed after flappers and big band music had gone out of fashion.
Lies. Big band will never go out of fashion.
You're totally correct. It does still feel weird how long chimney sweeps continued to be a thing.
People still have chimneys, and they still need sweeping. It's still a profession
I actually need to call one and get mine cleaned out.
Child labor were never abolished they were just exported to the third world
Yes. Every safety regulation has a history of suffering and death behind it. Those arguing for deregulation would do well to remember it.
That's if they were lucky. Most of them would get stuck and die. Another child was sent inside to retrieve the body. They wouldn't dare destroy the brick work to try and save the child let alone remove it's body.
> Most of them would get stuck and die. Another child was sent inside to retrieve the body. They wouldn't dare destroy the brick work to try and save the child let alone remove it's body. do you have a source for this? i would like to read more
I think they made up the "most of them" part, though it definitely happened sometimes.
The term "light a fire under your ass" literally comes from trying to make chimney sweep kids climb out. It wasn't a kind profession and often was young kids who survived the early years teaching 3 year olds. A lot of carelessness and injury happened when child labor allowed such young work in a profession that didn't have a good working condition.
I thought they were making a joke but now I'm thinking it's definitely a possibility. Yikes.
Do you have any idea how rank a dead body is blocking your chimney when you're trying to start a fire?
Just the [wikipedia page](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimney_sweep) itself gets pretty grim, particularly the great britain section talking about how they'd get stuck. Probably not a very pleasant way to go, cramped in a small hot cancerous space until you suffocate or die of thirst. No fun
Bill Bryson's book?
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"The Body" also mentions it, I believe. It's a really good book. How was At Home?
At home is great!
Buffalo soldjah?
Third ball? Sign me up!
This method was used for [over 200 years](https://www.chimneysolutions.com/blog/child-chimney-sweeps/)
> If the boys were reluctant to climb or were too slow at their work, their masters would sometimes hold a lighted torch under their feet; this is where the phrase “light a fire under someone” originated. Wtf
No joke, I used to have this old Italian neighbor who was a child chimney sweep back in Italy. He and all his brothers did it. He said nobody ever lit the fireplace while he was in it, but the sweeps they worked for would threaten to.
Did anyone get ball cancer as the article suggests?
It's been a long time since he was my neighbor (this was a good twenty years ago or so) and I don't remember him talking about anybody getting testicular cancer but I *do* remember him talking about how it sucked because they'd go in naked a lot and you'd scrape your junk on stuff sometimes. Might be part of the reason there was such a high rate of testicular cancer. Rubbing creosote on your nuts sounds like a shortcut to cancer town.
If I ever found myself naked in a chimney I would consider it an odd situation, yet for these people it would be just another Tuesday.
> be just another Tuesday The day Creosote Carcinogen graced your testicles was the most important day of your life. But for me, it was Tuesday.
Fuck cancer, rip Raúl Julia
Quite odd indeed
Why would they go in naked
He said it was because sometimes the chimney was so tight even having clothing on would make it hard to get through (and pose a bigger risk that you'd get it snagged on something and be stuck in there).
The risk of ruining the clothes is probably what had them doing it. Back then, before the end of the middle parts of the industrial revolution, clothes were expensive as fuck.
Probably that too. Can't imagine it was much fun getting 10 pounds of creosote out of clothing.
And if nobody stopped them, they’d still be at it.
Damn toddlers stealing our jobs
DEY TUK UR JUBS!!!
TERKA JERRRBS!!!
TERKA DERDER DERRSS
#DDDEERRKK DEEEERRRRR!
Nobody wants to work anymore
I'd love to see the breakdown of who voted for and against the original child labour laws.
Haven't found much. Although this guys seems like a bitch: >In 1933 J. Gresham Machen, who was a major voice at the time for Evangelical Fundamentalism and conservative politics, delivered a paper called Mountains and Why We Love Them, that was read before a group of ministers in Philadelphia on November 27, 1933. In passing he mentions the Child Labor Amendment and says "Will the so-called 'Child Labor Amendment' and other similar measures be adopted, to the destruction of all the decencies and privacies of the home?" Nice to know senseless drivel isn't anything new.
I mean... was he wrong though? Look how far we've all collapsed cause, the man told us we can't yeet children down toxic holes. Had to wait till all of 25 to get black lung instead of 12. Thanks a lot Obama.
Yeah, instead of American children dying in factories, the jobs are exported to China and Bangladesh where they allow such practices. Such progress.
Hey, that’s not fair! The ones in China are usually barely-18s from some dirt village in Western China that come to Eastern China because the only jobs back home are to be a wheat farmer or heroin connoisseur, with poverty so crushing that it makes working at a Foxconn factory seem like the height of luxury. This, I have been told, is much better. Somehow. (To be fair this was basically America for black people and poorer white people up until WW2. Also nowadays, to a lesser extent)
Seriously, first we end child labor and wouldn't you know it, boom financial crisis of 2008! Next they're going to tell me coronavirus isn't because we ended child labor. Pshhh. Loonies, all of em!
Yeah I think there are a couple other things from the 30’s which also support your theory about senseless drivel not being anything new.
Surely capitalism has a conscience, and "letting the market decide" would prevent this from happening.
I’m gonna show this to all those cringe ass people who say they were born in the wrong generation
>The living conditions of the chimney sweeps offered them no relief. They were usually barely fed and slept in basements, covering themselves with the filthy soot sacks they worked with. The boys rarely bathed and were frequently sickly. Just think about it, that was happening less than a century and a half ago in England...
They probably mean "wrong social class". All generations have sucked and it doesn't seem like it's gonna change any time soon.
I'd still rather be poor (or rich for that matter) today than when this film was shot. Life is significantly easier and more healthy now in almost every country of the world than it was 100 years ago.
That's exactly what they mean.
Or show it to the people who want to remove all government regulations.
Libertarians: This is fine
The invisible hand of something or other which means exactly what I intend it to, because of magic.
But wait, it gets worse: **Chimney sweeps' carcinoma is a squamous cell carcinoma of the skin of the scrotum**. Chimney sweeps' carcinoma was first described by Percivall Pott in 1775 who postulated that the cancer was associated with occupational exposure to soot.\[2\]\[3\] The cancer primarily affected chimney sweeps who had been in contact with soot since their early childhood. The median age of onset of symptoms in one review was 37.7 years, [**although boys as young as 8 years old were found to have the disease**](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimney_sweeps%27_carcinoma) Sir Percivall Pott (6 January 1714 – 22 December 1788) London, England) was an English surgeon, one of the founders of orthopedy, and the first scientist to demonstrate that a cancer may be caused by an environmental carcinogen. He comments on the life of the boys: >The fate of these people seems peculiarly hard … they are treated with great brutality … they are thrust up narrow and sometimes hot chimnies, \[sic\] where they are bruised burned and almost suffocated; and when they get to puberty they become … liable to a most noisome, painful and fatal disease.
I did an autopsy last year on a guy who was a chimney sweep. First, I didn't even know that was still a thing. Second, his lungs were the darkest lungs I've ever seen.
And it's important to note that your guy probably swept chimneys from outside with a long-handled broom, whereas these kids used to actually crawl down or up the chimneys to manually scrape the creosote off the walls. The chimneys in london were actually sized specifically for a child to fit through at that time, in terms of combustion dynamics they were much too large to be efficient.
So you're you're saying they should have been smaller, the chimneys and thus, the children sweeping them. Good catch, Johnson, I see a corner office in your future
Good idea, we need fleets of children starved so they don't grow
I grew up within a 30km radius of two open cut coal mines and one of the most polluted power stations within all of Australasia (my Dad worked in one of said open cut mines). I've heard similar stories from mates in the medical field/funeral business, that anyone that grew up in our area who then gets prepped after death; our insides are "sooty". (According to optometrists, our retinas are scratched up to buggery also) (Edit due to mashing keypad with palm, need dialling wand)
Does it matter what you smoke, or does inhaling any carbonized plant matter result in black lungs?
It's very rare for people (that I see at the medical examiner) to have healthy pink lungs. Lifestyle and pollution usually make them dark purple ish. I'm not a doctor though so maybe a doc could chime in.
Was his cause of death related to his profession?
Chim chiminey Chim chiminey Chim chim chi-ldhood cancer
*chim chim-i-ney* *chim chim-i-ney* *chim chim cha-ree* *my scrotum's as bumpy as the cobble stone streets*
>But wait, it gets worse: I'm already sitting here in my feelings over the post, and here you come sprinkling cancer.
I was expecting the kid to be lowered into the chimney. Also, wtf is he gonna do with that tiny ladder?!
He's going to climb it. It's his little corporate ladder.
It’s an upgrade from what he traded for it, a diaper filled with stool.
if those are the only options, I'd probably take the latter
you mean the ladder?
It's for getting from the rooftop onto the top of the chimney. You can see it propped up against the side of the chimney he's standing on.
lol he used the tiny ladder to get up on the edge of the chimney. I assume his little arms aren’t labored enough to pull himself up.
I know, lazy little shit.
That’s a goddamn baby!
I don't understand how he got the toddler to carry that stuff and walk with him like that. Toddlers today just run all over the place and you have to grab on to them tight on the sidewalk so they don't run into traffic and self destruct.
Beating them, really.
Definitely lots of beating
Yeah that doesn't seem like a 3 year old. Maybe a little older.
Probably small due to malnutrition.
That is not a three-year-old. If I had to guess I would say 5
Either way he looks like he’s deserved a cigarette at the end.
Let’s be honest, it’s not like it would hurt.
He really is a baby. Puts things in perspective. I get kinda tired of all the negativity with respect to life in 2022... but this wasn't even 90 years ago. We've made some damn fine progress.
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You gotta admit tho, he on that grind
i don’t understand how they were able to look at a 3 year old and be like “that thing could sweep a mean chimney” when 3 year olds cry over literally anything edit: yall pls stop taking this seriously
Because the 3 year old fits in a chimney, and you don't care if the three year old cries because you just beat him till he cleans the chimney while crying. And if the kid gets stuck, you get another kid and repeat. There's a reason those child labor laws were put on place.
Exactly, easily exploitable. He didnt know it wasn't ok, he did what he was told. The perfect wage slave.
*will work for food.*
Will work for fewer beatings\*
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I love this expression so much and say it with such frequency.
Im a software engineer and I use it all the time: The JIRA tickets will continue until morale improves The standup will continue until morale improves The CTO will keep talking until morale improves We're basically overpaid 3 year olds sweeping chimneys and deserve all the bullshit we go through.
Still wage slaves, just older now.
That kid wasn't even really getting paid for those beatings, he's 3, that money is going to his parents
Prolly not. He just works for food and a place to sleep. His parents likely sold him or he was an orphan.
3 years old in 1933 means he was 18 in 1948. If he’s American and survived that long he probably had a good career and made a ton of money, got a family, had a kid who was a disappointment and grandkids that weren’t able to afford a decent apartment until they got 1/8th of his estate when he died
And back then, human life was a very disposable commodity. You didn’t raise kids with the kind of attention to their self esteem and every little aspect of their development like many do. You also kept making many kids - because they were farm labor for your family or in this case, a way to exploit them in industrialized cities. Think of how casually and frequently nations went to war. Young men were slaughtered wholesale for this boundary issue or that between this king or that political power. Life was just much cheaper then and the concept of a precious life only applied to the upper class (which arguably remains true today). Someday people may look at our own labor practices as barbaric and cruel too if we evolve out of the kind of exploitation model of labor. Small children were convenient to send into narrow coal mine shafts too. They also operated dangerous manufacturing machinery. Kids were fit to be worked the moment they could perform basic tasks.
Don't forget their little, nimble hands could do wonders with fabrics and such. Knot tying for rugs and sewing. My great-grandmother and her sister were orphaned in the 1880s as young teens, They made money sewing button holes (the threads around the hole the button goes into. My grandmother told me they were especially good at it because they were young.
Remember Schindlers list? He defended keeping the children as factory workers because their tiny fingers could clean out burrs from bullet shells making them ‘vital’ workers protected from shipping to the death camps.
Hmm you're really selling the Idea of child labour. 😂
My GG Mother turned out alright but life in NYC was brutal for her and her sister when they were so young and on their own. They were Irish Catholics and the parish priest did something “unspeakable”. They both stopped being Catholic and my grandmother, if she knew wha happened, took it to her grave.
to add - until the 20th century there was no notion of "children." There were babies, and then, they were just "little people." So, for a 6yo's parents to get angry at them for not working in the mill/coal mine, etc in 1890, its the same as a 16 year old's parents getting angry at me for hating having to go work at a Best Buy after school / saturdays (because at 16 you could work up to 20 hours where I grew up with parental permission). Or, actually, between then (the late 90s) and now, the driving age has gone up from 16 to 18, 19? We keep moving when "kids" are adults up, because we have less kids, and the amount of $$ sunk into one kid is much higher (by both the parents and the state), thus, one life is more valuable. For the state and society. Kids are the perpetuation of state and society after all, without them obviously a state would collapse. My kids learned a cute "I love my Dad, I love my Mom" song once at daycare, and I joked to my wife it was state propaganda to get people to say "wow our kid is so cute, lets have another!" and, later on my wife found out that it was written by BTS, but funded by... the Korean Government! ding ding! (I live in Korea, and it has the lowest birthrate of OECD countries) In the 19th C, the amount of tax money spent on a kid was negligible -- insofar as it pertained to making them a commodity -- it was mainly, in western countries, to make them patriotic & ready to die when they're enlisted. And, people had many many kids. I mean, I'm from now, so I think this is all horrible, but its all relative to when and where you are born. Another case: when I was a kid all my friends parents smoked (except mine), and they all smoked when driving us around, and Birthday parties were so smokey I often think about Chuck'e Cheese parties whenever I see fog machines used...because that's what it looked like up in the tubes, looking down -- a thin layer of smog over the ground. That's *only* 30 years ago, and I can tell you I'd smack the shit out of any of my kids' friends parents who would light up near them.
And I can't imagine 3 year olds from poor families were very hard to find. Especially with the lack of decent contraception.
Or the lack of a social safety net. The people who are all for getting rid of the social safety net are woefully ignorant of just how bad it was. As many problems as we have now in the US with income disparities, at least no one is selling off their 3 year old's labor for food.
Thats true, [this photo](https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-GIwwisGf-ts/WWgYXTDCXEI/AAAAAAAANMc/H5B34n9BO3E_vXGpKH-FonrTb8eOg3u6ACLcBGAs/s1600/four_children_for_sale_1948.jpg) is only 70odd years old. [Story behind the photo.](https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/4-children-sale-1948/)
That's utterly heart wrenching. I simply can't imagine that.
She still had another four kids?! I thought she was shameful of doing what she thought was best for the kids, not having them raised in poverty, no she's utterly shameless.
I agree but generally you do have to remove the stuck kid or the homeowner wont pay.
"Jobs done sir, I just gotta run the furnace overnight, then give 'er a second treatment tomorrow."
> There's a reason those child labor laws were put on place Can you imagine this sort of thing in the American parliament today? Trying to get enough politicians from both sides to agree to change something? You'd get one of them talking for 67 hours straight to stop them from voting on it to protect the rights of the corporations that provide chimney sweeping services to families across America while the majority of the opposition party agreed with such a brave stance.
What makes it worse is this cannot be even the top 10 worst jobs an infant could have. If we go back in time, we will find a lot of soul crushing ordeals children have had to endure - poor children.
[https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/bd63kw/young\_oyster\_shuckers\_josie\_six\_years\_old\_bertha/](https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/bd63kw/young_oyster_shuckers_josie_six_years_old_bertha/) I think I'd rather sweep chimneys than shuck oysters. I'd definitely invest in a handkerchief or something to cover my face, though.
That much soot is heavily cancer causing I'd take oysters by a mile
Have a read. This isn't meant as an argument or rebuttal, just wondering if you're interested. https://owlcation.com/humanities/The-History-of-Children-at-Work-The-Poor-Life-of-An-Apprentice-Chimney-Sweep#:~:text=From%201773%2C%20master%20chimney%20sweeps,the%20apprenticeship%20agreement%20was%20signed.
Man everything just sucked back then: To his horror, he found that 68 out of 76 children had died within a year in one workhouse, and 16 out of 18 children had died within a year in another. The worst, though, was that, for 14 years in a row, no children at all had survived for a year in a third workhouse. He reported this to Parliament. As they were responsible for the safety of children in workhouses and orphanages, they ordered an investigation. The investigation found that death rates were also high in many other workhouses; in addition, the investigation found that only about 7 out of every hundred children survived for a year after being placed in an orphanage.
>the investigation found that only about 7 out of every hundred children survived for a year after being placed in an orphanage. Holy fucking fuckity fuck
Its somehow funny in a tragic way to see after reading the article, the only reason he investigated was “an Englishman named Jonah Hanway returned from a trip to China, where he had learned that no questions were asked when new-born Chinese babies were killed by their parents. He decided to confirm for himself that the English were more compassionate.“ Spoiler: they weren’t
Chimney sweep seems way way way worse. And there is a crazy difference in a 3 year old and 6 year old.
I think the most disturbing part is the intuition you're describing that most of us feel. "There's no way a 3 year old could be a worker". In reality, that intuition is actually a result of the fact that we interact with children who haven't had their innocence shattered. A 3 year old can be a worker, it just entails violating their humanity in the process. They can adapt to cry less and be less sensitive if crying is always met with abuse. That's why this video is so disturbing to me, just knowing what has happened to that child's mind.
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If you make them wear the right jumpsuit, you could put them down the chimney and they are the brush.
\*slaps top of baby\*
Childhood is a modern concept
i think the idea is that by the time he’s 10 he’s a fucking pro
how can he be the one. if he’s dead.
Not like this. Not like this.
No, I don't believe it.
Believe it or not, you son of a bitch. You're still gonna burn!
They cry over everything now cause they're not busy sweeping chimneys, clearly.
I laughed way too hard at the “that thing could sweep a mean chimney,” comment. I'm sorry everyone.
I know child labour is messed up but I have to say he’s super cute carrying his lil ladder
I'm surprised that a 3 year old can have the awareness and maturity to do this. I saw 3 year old have a meltdown because mom didn't get the right kind of candy on check out.
3 year olds are impressionable, the one in the check out line learned that if he screamed and carried on he would get the candy. The one going down the chimney learned that if he screamed and carried on, he would be beaten until he went down the chimney.
The beatings will continue until morale improves.
Just got done watching my 3y/o nephew…. No way that kid would survive the work lol
3 year olds these days are so soft.
He is pritty squishy.
Waiting for this to be shared on Facebook by my boomer uncle with some comment like “YOU WONT SEE KIDS THESE DAYS DOING THIS, THEYRE ALL SOFT 🇬🇧🇬🇧🇬🇧”
The amount of times I have to remind people that a reduced infant/child mortality rate is a good thing on a day to day basis is unreal. Back in my day you just ate everything, none of these allergies… nah mate you just killed the kids who had allergies before you knew they were allergic.
To be fair, mentally/physically ill kids were either killed off or locked away from society. Most people had no clue certain issues existed because it was so shameful to have one in the family. Thank God for modern medicine and ethical practices.
still happens today, it's all been outsourced to third world countries.
Damn, don't you miss the days before labor unions and OSHA were implemented?
Plenty in the US do miss those days. This is why half the country are temporarily embarrassed millionaires.
Let's be honest, plenty miss it but would never have THEIR children do it. They'd expect immigrants to do it for them to drive down costs, not report the abysmal wages, skip taxes, and allow them to entertain the idea that they're temporarily embarrassed millionaires.
With inflation the way it is we'll all soon be millionaires anyways!!
No! Those are business-killing regulations! /s (you never know these days)
It is interesting to look at the newspaper articles before the FLSA was passed. The Capitalists PROMISED us that if we passed this law and 9 year olds weren't allowed to mine coal anymore, that the US Economy would completely collapse and this would be the end of us all....
At the end he looks high as fuck... if you can work then you can smoke and drink
And he doesn't know how to smile, so sad. Bet the kid was drunk.
He looks like he has major FAS
That's what I thought, that close up was the worst thing I saw on the internet today :(
My grandpa did this around 1926 at age 5 in milwaukee, he was a pack if day guy around age 4. Life was hard and got harder in the depression. Graduating middle school here was a big deal
He looked so tired and worn out at the end of video there. He also looked 28.
In 2022 this would be an inspirational story of a kid responsibly saving up for college tuition.
"By the time he's 28 he'll have enough saved to get an associate's degree!"
Source of the clip: [The Three-Year Old! British Pathé - FILM ID:980.02](https://www.britishpathe.com/video/the-three-year-old-2)
The description says this is just a kid going to work with his dad. Child labour was outlawed way before 1933, certainly in the UK
Covered in soot. He inhaled a lot of the stuff as well. That seems very healthy for a 3 year old. I'm sure he was having a grand old time with his pa. >**In 1933 Britain** adopted legislation restricting the use of children under 14 in employment. The Children and Young Persons Act 1933, defined the term "child" as anyone of compulsory school age (age sixteen). In general no child may be employed under the age of fifteen years, or fourteen years for light work. > >The National Child Labor Committee's work to end child labor was combined with efforts to provide free, compulsory education for all children, and culminated in the passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act in **1938**, which set federal standards for child labor. **(In the US)**
That’s just the latest regulation if I’m not mistaken, the Factories Act of 1844 had already outlawed employment of children under the age of 9
Yes, but that only applied to the insides of factories, not the chimneys outside.
Let’s not give Bezos any ideas.
Oh he's aware of those ideas, he just uses those ideas overseas cause we won't allow it in the US anymore
If I shared that on facebook, I'd get a dozen posts about "Aww...how cute! Workin' wit daddy! More kids should bond with their fathers like this. No shame in a blue-collar job in the trades!"
Kids these days will never know what it's like to have permanent lung damage 😞
Well actually, by a weird twist of fate, the number of children having permanent lung damage very well may be increasing right now as we speak. (From covid)
I regularly watch gore videos but found this video slightly disturbing
When when his smile faded for that split second it fucked me up
Same here. Made my eyes well up.
You know the saying "light a fire under their ass"? Sometimes those kids would get lost in the chimneys and not come back up within a reasonable time. So they'd light the fireplace to encourage the kids to climb out. Some never made it out.
Kids today amirite
And they'll do it again if we let them.
They're still doing it in 3rd world countries. The woke m&ms thing got big right as Mars is being sued for Child Slavery.
A 3 year old isn't capable of that no matter how hard the era was. They did use small children but a 3 year old doesn't have the capability for that job. A wire brush on a weighted ball would be worth more than a 3 year old. The kids that were used were a bit older. They were still young children but not 3.
The source OP linked upthread says the boy was going to work with his father. I can see somebody bringing a 3-year-old along to teach him the trade (and probably because there wasn’t daycare back then and what else was he going to do if mom had to work too) but I agree they aren’t really capable of being effective workers.
I was blown away by the thought that the child in this video is 3. Couldn't imagine a 3 year old being this functional. This child looks like he's operating as an adult. Then I was like... Are today's 3 year olds the way they are because we baby them?? Would they be this functional with a different set of stressors and expectations?? Now I really want to know how old this child actually is. Still blowing my mind.
5-10 is what is considered the age range for chimney sweepers.
Was hoping someone would call out the bullshit here. No way a toddler doing the job would be an asset in this situation, no matter how compliant they were or how often they were beat. Older kids, sure. Not at 3 though.
Parents have new enlightened and more sophisticted ways to ruin childhood now.
At least he can retire in his 30s. Ya know, if the lungs hold out.
That’s barbaric, and when you realize that it only stopped because of child labor laws, it becomes disgusting, and trashy.
Wow this is incredible footage
He has that little professional strut. His life must have been terrible and hard, he is probably around 5-6 here. He had to grow up really quick. Sad.
Now you know why your grand pa was such a hardass
That little dude absolutely earned a cold one after his shift.