Work and Workers in the Industrial Revolution

The Industrial Revolution was one of the greatest changes in Western and ultimately world history. Taking shape toward the end of the 18th century in Great Britain, industrialization dominated the 19th century in Western Europe and North America. Based on radically new technologies, including the use of fossil fuels for power, industrialization revolutionized the production and transportation of goods. It sustained rapid population growth in the West and created growing material abundance as well. This industrialization transformed a social structure once based on the land into divisions based on urban wealth and property. It fostered large organizations and a growing state capable of using new technologies and communication and marshaling large amounts of capital and large numbers of goods and people. It challenged family life by taking work out of the home and redefining the roles of many women and children. It was, in sum, as basic a change in human history as had occurred since the advent of settled agriculture.

One of the many areas altered by industrialization was the nature of work, particularly for those people who labored in the proliferating mines and factories. Some features of industrialization benefited work: Machines could lighten labor, factories could provide social stimulation, and some jobs that demanded new technical expertise became unusually interesting. But many workers found industrial working conditions a strain because they challenged a number of traditional values and habits. Certainly, changes in work provide one way of measuring the human impact of the vast industrialization process—some would say, of measuring human degradation.

The documents I would like you to read focus on three aspects of industrial work during the 19th centuries (you can read all of the documents by clicking here). The first document comes from a parliamentary inquiry on child labor, conducted in Britain in the early 1830s and ultimately the source of laws restricting children’s work. Child labor was not in fact new, so one question to ask is what aspects of the factory system made it seem newly shocking. A second, related feature of industrial work—and one that persisted far longer than child labor—was the attempt to bring new discipline to the labor force. In the second document, shop rules—in this case, from a French factory in the late 1840s—did battle with a number of customary impulses in an effort to make work more predictable, less casual. Finally, new working conditions provoked direct comment by workers through protest and individual statements. The comment offered in the third document, by an unusually sensitive German miner around 1900—among other things, an ardent socialist—is not typical, but it does express some widely shared grievances. All three documents suggest the tensions that changes in work could bring. A basic feature of Western life in the 19th century, this strain spread with industrialization to other societies later. How could workers modify or adapt to new work habits? How might changes in work affect other aspects of their lives, in the family, politics, or culture?

I would also like you to consider and discuss the following when you have finished reading the three documents: What features of child labor seemed newly objectionable in the context of the factory industry? What were the main goals of factory work rules? What problems did they address? What innovations did they particularly suggest, compared with more traditional work patterns? What does Max Lotz see as the primary problems of mine work? Were work conditions getting better or worse by 1900 in highly industrialized societies like Germany? Why might some workers disagree with Lotz’s assessment? Do problems of work in 19th-century Europe suggest that industrialization deteriorated the quality of human life? What other factors need to be taken into account? How did workers and others deal with the issues identified in these documents? Your thoughts…