Short Term Impact

The newsboys strike of 1899 was one of, if not the biggest, successful strikes of child laborers in US history. It inspired other successful newsboy strikes, such as the ones  in Butte, Montana in 1914  and Louisville, Kentucky in the 1920s. For the New York City newsboys, It was also immediately impactful because they won a new right: they could return unsold papers at the end of the day. This was a big win as that meant that even if they didn’t meet their daily quota of papers to break even, they would at least be able to make enough so that they could buy a new set of papers the next day. In addition, another short term impact was that after the strike the two largest papers in the city were back in full circulation, and the printed communication in the largest city in the USA resumed.