Mill Workers
"Most millworkers were employed to carry out specific unskilled tasks or processes. What job you did also depended on your age and your gender. Some jobs needed physical strength, like bale-breaking or sorting the raw cotton; hauling boxes in warehouses or stoking boilers and so were largely done by men. Both men and women were often in charge of machines though. They might be mule spinners, or winders or carders. These processes all required different machines."
Children did the repetitive, boring work that no one wanted to do. Children might have been found "tying ends of cotton or cleaning fluff from the machines". They did this at the cost of their safety; working around large machines was not at all safe for the children. Machines back then still needed glitches to be worked out. They were not perfect, and children should have known that above anyone else.
"Children were used in the mills for many tasks. As well as the key jobs like piecing, they also helped the blenders to mix the cotton from the bales. They were used to fetch and carry baskets of cotton or bobbins from room to room. They had to carry pails of water from the well to the spinning rooms, to keep the floors damp to prevent the threads from breaking."
(Children and Cotton)
Children did the repetitive, boring work that no one wanted to do. Children might have been found "tying ends of cotton or cleaning fluff from the machines". They did this at the cost of their safety; working around large machines was not at all safe for the children. Machines back then still needed glitches to be worked out. They were not perfect, and children should have known that above anyone else.
"Children were used in the mills for many tasks. As well as the key jobs like piecing, they also helped the blenders to mix the cotton from the bales. They were used to fetch and carry baskets of cotton or bobbins from room to room. They had to carry pails of water from the well to the spinning rooms, to keep the floors damp to prevent the threads from breaking."
(Children and Cotton)
http://www.historyplace.com/unitedstates/childlabor/