Factory Acts

“ Factory Legislation Incomplete.—There is an idea abroad, which is quite unwarranted, that our body of factory legislation is more or less final in its character, and that it has, in fact, accomplished the purpose for which it was intended by its authors. The provisions of the Factory Acts range themselves for the most part under three heads. They deal either with educational matters, with the regulation of the hours of labour, or with sanitary conditions. It needs no argument to show that great progress in public opinion has been taking place in respect of these three points. ”

“ A normal working day for modern industry only dates from the Factory Act of 1833, which included cotton, wool, flax, and silk factories. Nothing is more characteristic of the spirit of capital than the history of the English Factory Acts from 1833 to 1864. ”

“ Growing complexity of aims and of legislative machinery. Primarily Factory Acts aim at regulation of quantity of labour. Reductions of the working-day forms a backbone of this legislation. A twelve-hour day, ten, nine, eight, covering wider classes of workers and applied to a larger number of industries, marks the line of movement. With each advance the basis of protection is broadened, other considerations of machine-fencing, sanitation, education, etc., entering more largely into the Acts. ”

“ IV This long succession of mechanical improvements brought immense wealth to the manufacturers and helped to tide England’s credit over the exhausting years of the American Rebellion and continual Continental wars; but it brought the original foul blight of the factory system, which replaced the spinning once done in cottage homes. Industry was stived up in overcrowded workshops, the slums came into existence, and under-paid, over-worked, and cruelly treated child-labour characterised the days before the passing of the Factory Acts. ”

“ Factory Acts, Acts passed for the regulation of factories and similar establishments. Considering that women and children were not qualified fully to protect themselves against the strain of competition, the British legislature has passed a series of Acts to regulate the conditions of their employment in factories. ”

“ The first of the general factory acts was marked by the same philanthropic character, but here the manufacturing capitalists, introduced by the reform act, were induced by self-interest to oppose it. Ever since the beginning of the century the sufferings and degradation of children in factories had occasionally engaged the attention of parliament, but the full enormity of the factory system was known to few except those who profited by it. ”

“ In no other country is there so elaborate a code of factory laws as the 'British factory and workshop act' of 1878 (41 Vict., chapter 16) , it being an act consolidating all the factory acts since Sir Robert Peel's act of 1802." C. D. Wright, Factory Legislation (Tenth Census of the United States, volume 2) . ALSO IN: First annual Report of the Factory Inspectors of the State of New York, 1886, appendix. C. Knight, Popular History of England, volume 8, chapters 22 and 27. H. Martineau, History of the Thirty Years' Peace, volume 2, pages 512-515. See, also, ENGLAND: A. D. 1832-1833. ”

“ Any illegal acts on the part of the administration discovered by the Factory-Shop Committees, or any suspicion of such illegal acts, which cannot be investigated or remedied by the workers alone, shall be referred to the district central organisation of Factory-Shop Committees charged with the particular branch of labour involved, which shall discuss the matter with the institutions charged with the execution of the general industrial plan, and find means to deal with the matter, even to the extent of confiscating the factory. ”

“ It is only in such laws and their proper administration that a safe remedy is to be found. Your committee are of opinion—That it should be a duty upon all manufacturers to find workshop accommodation for those they employ, whether the number be many or few. That any part or parts of a dwelling house so occupied should be considered a factory, and should be so registered for the purposes of any Act of Parliament made to apply to their supervision, and that all rules and acts made for the inspection and regulation of factories and workshops should be applied equally in all cases. ”

“ The only modifications of the Act of 1833 which have been made since, have been mere extensions of its principles. The regulations, which at first applied to cotton, cloth, and silk mills only, have been extended by subsequent Acts to bleaching and dyeing works. Powers have also been given to compel the fencing of machinery, and to enforce other safeguards against injury to the workpeople.
Even after the Factory Commission had finished its work, and had ceased to exist, my grandfather continued to watch with interest the results of what had been done. ”

“ But though the factories in which cotton, whiskey, and cards are manufactured are stringently regulated under the factory code and the Public Health and Building Acts, the inspectors appointed to carry out these Acts never go to a manufacturer and inform him that unless he manufactures woollens instead of cottons, ginger-beer instead of whiskey, Bibles instead of playing-cards, he will be forbidden to place his products on the market. ”

“ It appears to us that the public are under great obligations to the National Association of Factory Occupiers, for undertaking the important but difficult task of ascertaining,—first, what the law is, as between factory employers and their workers ”

“ It is evident that the English legislature, which certainly no one will venture to reproach with being overdosed with genius, has been led by experience to the conclusion that a simple compulsory law is sufficient to enact away all the so-called impediments, opposed by the nature of the process, to the restriction and regulation of the working day. Hence, on the introduction of the Factory Act into a given industry, a period varying from six to eighteen months is fixed within which it is incumbent on the manufacturers to remove all technical impediments to the working of the Act. ”

“ Within those walls twenty-seven thousand men and women living in a degree of comfort never known before to the spinners and weavers of the world, earn their daily bread. [Pg 28] Those towering factories are, every one, monuments to the genius of Richard Arkwright, the penny barber of Preston. If he appropriated the inventions of others, he perfected these inventions and made them of permanent value to mankind; and moreover, he arranged the machinery into series, organized the factory system, and revolutionized industry. ”

“ Matters of employment and discharge, vacations, wage scales, refusal of work, degree of productivity and skill, reasons for abrogating agreements, disputes with the administration, and similar problems of the internal life of the factory, must be settled exclusively according to the findings of the Factory-Shop Committee, which has the right to exclude from participation in the discussion any members of the factory administration. ”

“ Factories containing machinery operated by steam power could produce cloth, shoes, implements, and almost every other sort of manufactured commodity more cheaply than they could be made by hand-industry in the homes or in small shops. So the factory system spread over the length and breadth of the land, drawing large investments of capital into its vortex, giving rise to great industrial corporations, creating a new labor class, fostering the growth of great cities, and compelling the government to take a hand in the regulation of industry. ”

“ The Industrial Revolution accomplished for England what the political revolution did for France, but by more peaceful means. Yet not alone in France was the event achieved in blood—for the Factory as well as the Terror had its victims. The history of the factory is no dry summary of patent rights and inventions, inventories of cotton and cotton goods, abstracts of ledgers, journals, cash-books, and pay-rolls,—it is a human story,—laissez-faire, over-production, enlightened selfishness, were no abstract terms, but vital human problems. ”

“ Factory legislation has been inevitably necessitated by the action of economic and social forces, and may, in fact, be regarded as a natural phenomenon accompanying the growth of the factory system of manufacture. It has developed against the opposition of extreme doctrines of free contract, and having demonstrated itself in the facts of actual life has also created a new theory of the relation of the state to labor and industry. ”

“ It was provincial in thought, speech, and habits. It was given over to agriculture, small trade, and rude home manufacture. Presently came the revolutionary inventions of textile machinery, of the steam-engine, and of processes for extracting and utilizing coal and iron. The heavy, costly machinery required capital and the factory. Concentrated capital and machinery required workers. The working people were forced to give up their small home manufacturing and their unprofitable farming and move to the industrial barracks and workrooms of the manufacturing centres. ”

“ All these acting in conjunction with the material force—invention—have operated on manufacturing industries to produce the factory system of to-day. It is, indeed, because the factory system is the resultant of so many forces working in the past that it touches in the present nearly every great economic, social, political, moral, and philanthropic question. ”

“ Here, indeed, we have the factory system—in which the division of labor is a conspicuous feature—employed with all its modern details; but not the steam-driven factory, building great cities and changing the whole social life of the kingdom. ”

“ Under a scheme of subdivided toil the factory hand succeeded to the journeyman who, with a few mates, had split nails or drawn wire in a shop no bigger than some day he might own for himself. With the need to occupy large premises, to install engines and elaborate machinery, the capital of an employer has to be vastly more than of old, creating a new dependence on the part of the workman, and rendering it all but impossible that he should ever have a factory of his own. While the factory system of production is general in America, it is far from universal. ”

“ The most necessary products are often made in such a manner that they not only go through twenty or thirty hands in the same factory, but often pass from one factory to another in order to be completed. The raw material for the manufacture of these articles often comes from distant places, and railroads, mails, and telegraphs are vital to production. Now, if it happens that one wheel of this enormous mechanism of society stops, the whole of this particular industry is laid idle. ”

“ Journeymen in factories could no longer aspire to become masters of their trade and no longer socialized with their employers. Hard and fast rules replaced the freedom of the small workshops. Each worker had his allotted place and his strictly defined and invariable duty. Everyone had to work, steadily and without stopping, under the vigilant eye of a foreman who secured obedience by means of fines, physical means, or dismissals. Work started, meals were eaten, and work stopped at fixed hours, signaled by the ringing of a bell. Factory hours were typically fourteen hours or more. ”

“ That is to say, it tended to become more and more an affair of large capital and large workshops, and, instead of the industrial individualism of small masters and independent “manufacturers,” who were still “hand”-workers, there was appearing the industrial collectivism of the factory system, where manufacture was nothing without its machinery, its colossal division of labour and its strict technical discipline and drill. There was a short period in England when employers were allowed to draw advantage from the change without any hindrance from the state. ”

“ To ensure a smooth running of the wheels of industry it is indispensable, as we have already explained, to have one general plan. It is not enough for every large factory to have its own board of management consisting of workers. There are many factories and many branches of production ”

“ As the number of factories increased it became possible for operatives to rise, first to positions of trust within the factory, and later to the rank of master manufacturer—so that many a bobbin boy became a cotton lord. ”

“ Being comparatively a new community, and being at liberty to select for imitation or for improvement whichever of the usages or systems in the old country they may prefer, the Americans have preferred to adopt the factory system rather than the workshop system, and to carry out the former to an extent not yet equalled in England—not yet equalled, we mean, in the number of trades to which it is applied. ”

“ The next step in the progress of factory legislation was to extend the protection to young persons engaged in manual employment whether apprentices or not. Time does not permit us to follow the interesting history of factory legislation, under the devoted leadership of Mr. ”

“ There is an ugly side to the story, especially in the beginning, for when the craftsmen of the world were transformed into factory operatives, thousands suffered a degree of poverty never known before, and many perished in the transition to the new system of manufacturing; but in the end that system revolutionized the whole social order, gave to toil its rightful dignity, and, creating a new loyalty to the cause of labor, became an element in the development of modern democracy. ”