I'm writing a sort of dystopian fictional book set in the 19th century. I've been trying to scour the internet for a while now and can get nothing past the vague "working at the factories were often dangerous". So what were their jobs exactly? How were the looms operated and how were the children punished?
The industrial revolution (1760-1820ish) was a more severe time with regard to abuses of child labor. Employers would sometimes not pay them if they were orphans, claiming that feeding and housing them was their pay. Coal mining was dependent on children to break up coal and to pull the wagons when the shafts were too narrow for ponies. Their capacities in mills maintaining looms was dangerous because they were doing the unskilled work on large machines. They'd change bobbins or reach into the machine to tie together broken pieces of thread, often losing fingers or toes if they weren't fast enough. Another job common for children was selling newspapers.
Child labor laws existed as early as 1833, but they weren't very well enforced. "By 1890 18% of the labor force consisted of children between the ages of ten and fifteen." (BLS) Children were a great resource for employers in the more ruthless days of business ethics. They took wages that were a fraction of an adults and were more likely to be obedient. In Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, he describes how a 14 year old lies about his age (getting a priest to sign a certificate saying he's 16) so that he can work in the Chicago stockyard as a lard machine attendant. He develops a paranoia of the cold after one of his fellow attendants loses their ears to frost bite due to the fact that they can't move from their spot replacing the cans in the lard machine in the freezing factory.