Booktalking Colorado - Full Booktalk Record

Booktalking Colorado Full Record:

	Title:	Kids On Strike
	Author:	Bartoletti, Susan Campbell
	Date Published:	1999
	Genre:	Non-Fiction
	Grade Level:	6 - 7
	Booktalker:	Kathy Preller

Booktalk:
If you were born 100 years ago, you probably wouldn’t be sitting in school at your age. If you lived near a city, you’d probably be working in a mill. You’d get up at 4:30 in the morning, start work promptly at 5:00, work all day till 9:00 at night. That’s 16 hours; twice as long as most people work today. Oh, you’d get two short meal breaks, but you would be watched by the overseer. While working, there is no talking, no sitting, no looking out windows. Often you’d be locked into the work room. You’d work six days a week, Sunday you’d have the day off, but you were required to go to church. Oh, you’d get paid - $1.00 per week, of course you would have to give most of it to your family. This is what 10 year old Harriet did, and millions of other kids. They worked grueling hours for meager wages. Their work was dangerous; the youngest, smallest kids were used to clean and oil the machines, but the machines weren’t turned off while they did this, so many kids lost fingers in the machinery, some were killed, crushed by the huge machines. More than one girl had her hair caught in a machine and had her scalp ripped right off – not just her hair, but the whole scalp, skin and all. In the cotton mills the air was so thick with cotton lint that many died of lung disease. Many young children were permanently deformed from carrying loads heavier than they were. When the first spinning mill opened in 1790, they hired 9 workers, all were between 7 and 12 years old. Employers liked to hire children, because they didn’t have to pay them as much. Does this seem fair? Would you accept the 16 hour days? Would you accept the dangerous conditions? The crummy pay? Would you miss going to school? Most times you would be forced to live in housing owned by the company, and when they raised your rent, without raising your pay, it was like a pay cut. Would that make you mad? What if they speeded up the machine you worked on, and made you work twice as fast, but didn’t give you any more money. Would you complain? After coal came out of the coal mines, it was broken up and sent down chutes. Breaker boys sat hunched over these chutes from 7 in the morning till 6:30 at night, sorting the coal, picking out pieces of slate and other useless material, while an overseer hit them with a stick if they talked too much, or missed a rock. When the breaker boys went on strike, they shut down the whole coal processing operation. This is a book about working conditions so bad that people got together and went on strike. Kids were some of the best strikers out there. Remember Harriet in the cotton mill? When she was 11 she led all the spinners out of the mill on strike. In New York City 5,000 newspaper boys went on strike and forced millionaire publisher William Hearst to negotiate with them. Kids discovered power when they banded together for a common cause. People joined together, and refused to work until some condition was changed. They weren’t always very successful, because the factory owners were rich, and could hold out a lot longer than people with no place to live, or no food to eat. Factory owners also hired thugs to beat or even kill people who were striking. It was a long process to try and improve conditions in the mills and the mines. Each chapter in Kids on Strike tells about a different industry – millworkers, shoeshine boys, messenger boys… and gives a true account of what conditions were like, and what kids did to improve those conditions. It’s loaded with great pictures, and it’s all true.