The Spokane Press

Children as "Dogs."

"Is thy servant a dog that he should do this thing?"

In the glass bottle factories the children who trot all night long, carrying bottles from the moulder to the annealing oven are as "dogs."

Theirs is certainly a dog's job.

The children thus employed are not taken as apprentices. There is no hope of promotion. They will never be anything but "dogs" in the glass factory. If a real canine had fingers it could do the work of the child.

And here is a strange thing:

This child labor is employed in glass factories because organized labor has opposed a law against it.

Child labor laws, the country over, have been passed by the influence and votes of union labor. But here is a humiliating exception. Pure selfishness is at the bottom of it. The more "dogs" a moulder has the more money he makes. The glass worker, who is everywhere a union man, traffics in the flesh and blood of childhood because it pays him personally.

Ohio and Illinois have child labor laws that prevent this employment of children, but in Illinois the glass blowers tried to defeat the law.

In New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Indiana, the other leading glass blowing states, mere babes toil all night as "dogs."

Bottles are more than child-flesh, "Dogs" are more than humanity.

Shame on the glass blowers!

They foul the escutcheon of organized labor.