Kelsey Divis
English 101
Mr.Bleck
January 23, 2010

Extreme Working Conditions

In Sinclair’s book The Jungle twelve year old Stanislovas is forced to find a full time job in order to help the family make the payments on their home, something that no twelve year old child should have to worry about. No one ever really puts enough though into the working conditions, that is, unless you have or have had one of these exhausting jobs. So often times I hear “back in the good old days…” and before watching the video found on you tube called “Working Conditions of 1907” I used to think back in the good old days everything was better and much more simple. If you think like I used to, your mind will change after seeing this video, part of you will want to help make a change in the areas where this is still happening. In the film you see pictures of how children as young as ten if not younger are used for work, something that no ten year old should have to go through. Also you will see the working conditions of several men and women of this time.
In the film “Working Conditions of 1907” the target audience is the adult population, they are trying to inform them of what went and in some cases still goes on. Hoping that these adults will all come together and try to make a change where this is still going on. In a way it could also be targeted to the children, showing them how far we have come and what the children in the past had to go through. “Working Conditions of 1907” really is focusing on making the viewer think twice, making them think about child labor by showing these poor children working in different factories all over. They achieve this by showing close ups of the children’s emotions as well as the clothes that they are wearing which are very dirty and worn out, looking as though they are worn daily. They also achieve this by zooming into the emotions of the children as well as the adults and the factory conditions.
The clothing of the children really shows a lot, it shows how serious things were taken. Men and young boys wore overalls and shirts, and in every picture women and young girls are wearing dresses. Their clothes were so worn it looks as though they were worn every single day. Now days most people wear their nicer clothes to work (depending on their job), and back then it was defiantly not a important, they had higher priorities.
The use of props in this video really helps the audience get a feel of what really went on, they really add to the emotion you feel after watching this film. Some main props that were used were the machines that both the children and the adults were standing next to or working on. Also, the camera use and music were huge factors to this video.
` Another element that was used to grab the viewer’s attention throughout the entire video was the music; it is a slow country song. It sounds really sad and gloomy which both are what is portrayed throughout the entire video, making the song fit even better.
The use of emotion- communicating faces is used a lot throughout this video; it is one of the biggest elements that are targeted to really get your emotions going. The cameras zooms up on the faces of these children, none of them look happy. They all look as though they have had very hard lives; they just look exhausted which is what no child should look like. If you notice throughout the video you do not see any of these children smiling, laughing, or running around playing which also is not normal for children. If they did a Working Conditions of 2010 you would not even see children in the film, we have very strict child labor laws in America which only allow children of a certain age to work.
Now, when I hear people say things like “Wish we could go back to the good old days…” I will know that, that is simply a saying and no person would really want to go back to the working conditions of 1907. It is sad to think that child labor still goes on today, maybe not in The United States but in other countries it does. A stop needs to be put on child labor; these are children we are talking about. They are who is going to grow up and run the world one day, they are our future. They deserve to be treated with the respect that any adult is expecting to receive. The people who enforce or who support child labor need to step back and think about how they would feel if they were put in those situations at the age of about ten working eight hours or more each and every day. The working conditions for several adults also need to be improved, even in the United States. This video lets us take a look at how not all of us, but some of us have come so far. How the conditions have changed drastically in most places.