Labor and Laboring Conditions

Sources

Sweated Work. The garment industry was one of the major employers of female labor throughout the nineteenth century. As spinning machines and power looms increased the production of fabric, demand for seamstresses multi-plied. Sewing was one job virtually every woman knew how to do. In the preindustrial economy women had been assigned the sewing of women’s and children’s clothing, while male tailors made men’s clothing. The first major change of the industrial era in the garment industry occurred with the introduction of machine-cut pieces. In a continuation of the putting-out process, women picked up these precut pieces and took them back to their urban apartments to sew together with needle and thread. These women then returned the finished articles of clothing to their employers. The labor of seamstresses who worked in putting-out industries was extremely easy for employers to exploit. These women worked for piece rates and paid their own overhead costs. Initially these expenses included light, heat, rent, needles, and thread. Later they rented sewing machines from their employers. Working at home, and thus isolated from fellow workers, they had no way to organize

for higher wages. Moreover, the number of seam-stresses looking for work undercut any bargaining position those employed may have sought. Consequently, employers were able to pay extremely low rates and force them to work long hours. Hunched over their work in poorly lit conditions, these women worked in what, for good reason, came to be called the “sweated trades.” The second major change in sewing occurred in 1851 when Isaac Singer invented a foot-treadle sewing machine, which, like spinning machines and mechanical looms, increased the number of garments a woman could produce in a day. Sewing remained a home industry until the end of the century. When Singer introduced an electric sewing machine in 1889, the sewing industry moved into small factories. These factories became known as “sweatshops.”

Rural Child Labor. In the nineteenth century, child labor became a subject of debate and concern, but children’s work was nothing new. It simply became more visible. In the countryside, children’s work was crucial to the economic survival of most families. Most children worked for their own families, although some were sent to work for others or were apprenticed in a trade. Beginning perhaps as early as age five, children were assigned productive tasks. They helped with the washing, carding, and combing of wool for their mothers to spin. They gathered eggs, chased birds from the fields, carried water, and looked after farm animals such as sheep and pigs. As they approached the age of ten, they helped care for younger children, thus freeing their mothers for productive work. They also began to cook and do laundry. At harvesttime they helped gather and bind sheaves of grain, gleaned fields for grain that had dropped to the ground during the first cutting, and carried food to adult workers. Around the age of twelve, children’s work became gender specific. Girls continued to help their mothers, as all younger children had, but boys began to help their fathers in the fields or at tasks such as weaving, smithing, or brickmaking. Many children remained part of the family work unit until they married, although staying at home to work probably reduced the possibility of marriage for all but the eldest son, who would inherit the family farm or small business. Not all children remained at home until marriage, however. Many left in their early teenage years to work as servants or apprentices.

Child Labor. The early cotton mills primarily employed women and children. Even later, mill owners who employed men to operate heavy machinery continued to hire children to perform a variety of tasks on the factory floor. Children crawled under machinery to repair broken threads with their fingers, carried bobbins to spinners, pulled heavy cords for weavers, and wound silk on bobbins.

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As young adolescents, they began tending mechanical looms by themselves. Most disturbing of all, perhaps, children also worked in mines. They led donkeys on under-ground rails, worked ventilation doors, and when they were strong enough, dug for coal. The sight of thin, poorly clothed children trudging to and from work in a mill or mine disturbed many a bourgeois. This new middle class came to embrace a domestic ethic that viewed children as young people who should be nurtured and cherished in the home, not sent out to work. As long as adult wages were too low to support a family, however, working-class families had little choice but to send their children to the factories and mines.

Work Hours. The workday of preindustrial workers could be as long as it was for early factory workers, up to fourteen hours. The difference was the regularity of factory work. In cottage industry, men and women worked in bursts of activity demanded by the merchants’ commercial delivery schedule. Now men, women, and children remained on task in factories day in and day out, dictated by the manufacturers’ incentive to meet a seemingly limitless demand for cotton fabric and to keep his expensive machinery in as full use as possible. Greater production justified the investment in the physical plant and raised profits. Undoubtedly, unscheduled breaks from work occurred regularly as machinery broke down, power failed, or threads snapped. During such stoppages all workers remained in the factory, but children could sleep or play and adults could relax. If such stoppages had not occurred, children as young as six years of age simply would not have been able to remain awake during the working day.

End of Child Labor. So great was the need for a child’s contribution to the family budget that mill and mine owners knew they could hire youngsters for extremely low pay. Not surprisingly, these owners feared that eliminating child labor from their establishments would increase labor costs. The end to child labor would only come from government action. The earliest factory acts were targeted directly at

factories using machines and employing at least twenty workers—the textile mills. Provisions of these laws were weak, although they probably got the youngest children (under age eight or nine) out of the mills. Later legislation raised the minimum age for work, forbade the work of girls underground in mines, and eventually applied rules to more workplaces. Despite this legislation, however, throughout the nineteenth century many children continued to work in unregulated and unrestricted occupations. More effective than protective legislation in ending child labor were increases in men’s wages and the passage of compulsory education laws. By the end of the century almost no children in the paid labor force were under thirteen years of age.

Shortening the Workday. Attempts to shorten the work day to ten hours were made repeatedly from the 1840s until the end of the century. Gradually national legislatures passed laws establishing maximum hours for certain work-places (usually mines and factories using machinery) and for specific groups of workers. Called “protective legislation” or “factory acts,” these laws at first applied to children and women. In factories that also employed men, the shortened hours sometimes were extended to them as well.

The greatest progress toward a shortened working day for men came as a result of union organization and socialist political party agitation. Arguing that some of the benefits of increased production that resulted from mechanization should be passed on to workers, socialist parties and unionized workers demanded a day divided equally between work, leisure, and sleep. Employers viewed such proposals as attacks on productivity and profit, and so remained adamantly opposed to them until after World War I (1914–1918). It was only then that the demands of laborers resulted in the adoption of the eight-hour workday in most of industrialized Europe.

Lighting the Workplace. The emergence of the factory provided an incentive for the creation of a new source of light. People working alone in their own homes, or a few people working in a small workshop, could use traditional candles and oil lamps for illumination before sunrise and after sunset. Lighting a factory by hundreds of candles, however, was prohibitively expensive. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, British engineer William Murdoch installed the first set of pipes to convey gas from a gas plant, where it was produced by baking coal, to a cotton factory in Manchester where it was burned for light. The first gasworks and gas delivery system had been created. The same principles and procedures were later used to light streets, public buildings, and bourgeois homes in cities. The lighting of factories made it possible to standardize the workday year-round. No longer could workers expect to work fewer hours in the winter and more hours in the summer. Gas lighting was not problem free, however. There remained the constant danger of explosion, gruesomely demonstrated on several occasions by spectacular explosions that killed many people. Gas also polluted the ground around gasworks and the air in homes and factories. Rooms had to be well-ventilated, otherwise headaches or even asphyxiation might occur if the flame went out and the gas continued to flow. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, Thomas Edison, an American inventor, improved upon the inventions and work of others and produced an incandescent electric lightbulb. This invention revolutionized lighting. Electric light had none of the drawbacks of gas light. It was clean, did not burn up oxygen, and presented no danger of poisoning or asphyxiation. Now, more than ever, factories could be illuminated by artificial light. Electricity became ubiquitous in the twentieth century, altered life and work in innumerable ways, and provided power for a multitude of machines as well as light.

Sources

Duncan Blythell, The Sweated Trades: Outwork in Nineteenth-Century Britain (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1978).

Judith Coffin, The Politics of Women’s Work: The Paris Garment Trades, 1750-1915 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996).

Gary Cross, A Quest for Time: The Reduction of Work in Britain and France, 1840-1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989).

Hugh Cunningham, Children and Childhood in Western Society since 1500 (London & New York: Longman, 1995).

Colin Heywood, Childhood in Nineteenth-Century France: Work, Health, and Education among the “Classes Populaires” (Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

Eric Hopkins, Childhood Transformed: Working-Class Children in Nineteenth-Century England (Manchester & New York: Manchester University Press, 1994).

William M. Reddy, The Rise of Market Culture: The Textile Trade and French Society, 1750-1900 (Cambridge Sc New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984).

Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Disenchanted Night: The Industrialization of Light in the Nineteenth Century, translated by Angela Davies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988).

James A. Schmiechen, Sweated Industries and Sweated Labor: The London Clothing Trades, 1860-1914 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press 1984).

E. P. Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” Past and Present, 38 (1967): 56-97.