The hours of labor of minors, male and female, are limited in all States, except Florida, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, South Carolina, Texas, Vermont, Utah, Washington, West Virginia, and Wyoming, particularly in factories and stores, usually under an age limit of sixteen, to ten hours per day or fifty-eight hours a week.[1] But in Alabama, Arkansas, and Virginia, the age is as low as fourteen, and in California, Indiana,[2] Louisiana, Maine,[2] Massachusetts, Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio,[2] Pennsylvania,[2] and South Dakota,[2] it is eighteen.  In California, Delaware, Idaho, and New York, it is nine hours, and in Colorado, District of Columbia, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, New York,[3] North Dakota, Ohio, and Oklahoma, it is as low as eight hours a day, though the laws in several States, as in New York, are contrary and overlie each other.  A corresponding limit, but sometimes less, is fixed for the week; that is, in the nine-hour States and some others, weekly labor may not exceed fifty-four hours or less.[4]

[Footnote 1:  Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts (in manufacturing, fifty-six), Mississippi, New Hampshire (nine hours, forty minutes), Pennsylvania.  In others, sixty hours a week (Alabama, Arkansas, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Maryland (in Baltimore only), Minnesota, New York, Oregon, South Dakota, Tennessee, Wisconsin).]

[Footnote 2:  As to females only (Indiana, Maine, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Dakota).]

[Footnote 3:  In factories (New York).]

[Footnote 4:  Fifty-four hours (Delaware, Idaho, Michigan, New York), fifty-five hours (New Jersey), fifty-six hours (Massachusetts, Rhode Island), forty-eight hours (District of Columbia, Illinois, Kansas, Ohio, Oklahoma), sixty-six hours (North Carolina).]

Night work in factories, etc., is prohibited in nearly all the States mentioned and in others.[1] Many States require working papers or certificates of age of the person employed, and there are often also certificates as to the required amount of schooling when necessary.  Indeed it may be said that we are on the way to the German system of having time cards or certificates furnished by State machinery for all industrial workers, and such a system will, of course, be absolutely necessary should the State ever engage in old-age insurance, as has been done in Germany and England; though the practical difficulty of such a scheme would have been thought by our fathers insuperable on account of our Federal and State system of government, and the necessary free immigration of American workmen from one State into another.