Doffer
A doffer is someone who removes "doffs" (bobbins, pirns or spindles) holding spun fiber such as cotton or wool from a spinning frame and replaces them with empty ones.
[3] The Industrial Revolution created growing demand for child labor in the mills and factories, since children were easier to supervise than adults and good at monotonous, repetitive tasks that often required little physical strength, but where small bodies and nimble fingers were an advantage.
[10] In the textile industry in Britain, wages for children continued to rise steadily compared to those for adults during the period from 1830 to 1860, indicating that demand was outstripping supply.
[5] Memoirs from writers such as Lucy Larcom and Harriet Hanson Robinson describe the long hours, but also the leisurely pace of work and the opportunities for social interactions.
[16] An 1889 Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Relations of Capital and Labor in Canada recorded a statement by the assistant superintendent of St. Croix Cotton Mills in St. Stephen, New Brunswick.
[18] Doffers in 1887 in a large mill in Cabarrus County, North Carolina, both boys and girls, earned 40 cents a day.
[21] William Madison Wood, the manager at the Washington Mill in Lawrence, Massachusetts, instituted a system in 1895 where employees gained bonuses for meeting production quotas, as long as they missed no more than one day per month.
Stephen Davol, born in November 1807, joined his elder brothers as a doffer in the Troy mill in Fall River, Massachusetts in 1818.
The mill was unusual for its time in being built as a whole to plans that considered both the structure and the arrangement of the machinery, belts and gearing.
Gray started work as a doffer before the Civil War when aged eight, earning ten cents a day in a mill at Pinhook, North Carolina.
[24] Carl Augustus Rudisill (1884–1979) began work as a doffer boy in Cherryville, North Carolina, at ten cents a day.
He was superintendent of the Indian Creek Manufacturing Company by 1907, and later developed the Carlton Yarn Mills into a major operation.
[27] A report on conditions in the Bombay mills in India between 1891 and 1917 noted that laws had been passed in response to agitation in England by which no child under nine years old could be employed.
[34] Lewis Hine obtained a job with the National Child Labor Committee in the United States in 1908, and over the next decade took many photographs that documented children at work.
[35] Many of the children worked barefoot, which made it easier to climb the machinery to reach bobbins or broken threads.
The air was filled with lint and dust, making breathing difficult, and often leading to diseases such as tuberculosis and chronic bronchitis.
[36] However, as Hine reported, "In every case, the youngsters told me their age as 12 years, even to the little Hop-o'-My-Thumb, whom the others dubbed 'our baby doffer.'
"[38] A photograph by Hine of an evidently very young doffer at the Melville Manufacturing Company in Cherryville, North Carolina appeared on the cover of a National Child Labor Committee report around 1912.
[41] After World War I ended in 1918, the US textile industry was left with surplus capacity and went into a slump, not recovering until after the 1930s Great Depression.
In response, mill owners cut wages and laid off workers, or put them on short hours, while mechanizing further to improve efficiency.
The practice of using child labor in the mills declined, finally ending completely when the NIRA Cotton Textile Code was adopted in 1933.
In Kenya in 1967 "doffer boy" was still listed as a job position in the Kisumu Cotton Mills, one of the lowest paid.
In 1984 the Occupational Health and Safety Administration responded to pressure from this group and implemented a new cotton dust standard.
