What was factory work like at the turn of the century

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See More. The growth of this experienced adult factory workforce helps to account for the shift away from child labor in textile factories. While child labor was common on farms and under the putting-out system, historians agree that the impact of the factory system and the Industrial Revolution on children was damaging. In the industrial districts, children tended to enter the workforce at younger ages. Child laborers tended to be orphans, children of widows, or from the poorest families. Cruelty and torture was enacted on children by master-manufacturers to maintain high output or keep them awake.

Prior to the development of the factory system, in the traditional marriage of the laboring class, women would marry men of the same social status and marriage outside this norm was unusual. Marriage during the Industrial Revolution shifted from this tradition to a more sociable union between wife and husband in the laboring class. Women and men tended to marry someone from the same job, geographical location, or social group.

The traditional work sphere was still dictated by the father, who controlled the pace of work for his family. However, factories and mills undermined the old patriarchal authority.

Factories put husbands, wives, and children under the same conditions and authority of the manufacturer masters. Factory workers typically lived within walking distance to work until the introduction of bicycles and electric street railways in the s. Thus the factory system was partly responsible for the rise of urban living, as large numbers of workers migrated into the towns in search of employment in the factories. Until the late 19th century, it was common to work at least 12 hours a day, six days a week in most factories, but long hours were also common outside factories.

The transition to industrialization was not without opposition from the workers, who feared that machines would end the need for highly skilled labor. For example, a group of English workers known as Luddites formed to protest against industrialization and sometimes sabotaged factories. They continued an already established tradition of workers opposing labor-saving machinery. Numerous inventors in the textile industry, such as John Kay and Samuel Crompton, suffered harassment when developing their machines or devices.

However, in other industries the transition to factory production was not so divisive. Although the Luddites feared above all that machines would remove the need for highly skilled labor, one misconception about the group is that they protested against the machinery itself in a vain attempt to halt progress. As a result, the term has come to mean a person opposed to industrialization, automation, computerization, or new technologies in general.

The overall impact of the factory system and the Industrial Revolution more on adults has been the subject of extensive debate among historians for over a century.

For peasants, the large-scale production of goods such as crops meant fewer opportunities. Conditions further worsened due to the enclosure movement. Previously, villages had common lands that could be used by all villagers. Once large-scale agriculture became widespread, wealthy people bought these lands and used them for private farms. Due to these shifts, more rural people struggled to survive and many headed for towns and cities to find new jobs.

The growth of British cities was further accelerated by the development of factories. Industrial cities such as Manchester and Leeds grew dramatically in just a few decades. In , only one in five Britons lived in a city. By the middle of the 19 th century, that number had risen to half. Other Western European nations, including France, the Netherlands, and Germany, also saw an increase in their urban populations.

Before the Industrial Revolutions, most goods were made by craftsmen, including jewelers and blacksmiths. The dawn of industrialization came alongside inventions such as the coal-powered steam engine, and the pace of work increased.

In factories, coal mines and other workplaces, people worked long hours in miserable conditions. As countries industrialized, factories became larger and produced more goods. Earlier forms of work and ways of life began to disappear. Perhaps the most harmful consequences of industrialization were those affecting families. Throughout history, most people worked with their families. Married couples and their children often worked together on farms or in shops.

In 18 th -century Great Britain, women and men performed jobs like spinning wool into textiles and weaving textiles into cloth. This system was called the "putting-out" or domestic system. Once factories were built, most men no longer worked at home. Some left their families behind in the country for jobs in the city. Sometimes, an entire family moved to the city to remain together.

Even when men stayed with their families, factory jobs were so difficult that they had little time to relax and enjoy family life. Unmarried women worked as servants in other families' homes, and many others worked in textile mills. The machines that made mass manufacturing possible were often very dangerous. Kept in small spaces without proper enclosure or ventilation, manufacturing machines emitted noxious fumes and contributed to excessive heat inside factories filled with workers.

The exposed machinery routinely claimed lives and maimed laborers. In , 35, workers were killed in industrial accidents and , were maimed in factory accidents that ranged from severed limbs to burns. Formed in , The Occupational Safety and Health Administration OSHA enacted workplace safety standards as a direct result of the earlyth century industrial and factory accidents prevalent during the early s.

Work in the factories was long and monotonous. The average worker completed the same task, over and over, for at least 10 hours a day. Working long hours, six days per week contributed to extreme fatigue, illness and even injury.