Factory act

“ Furthermore, all parts of the Factory in which preparatory work is carried on are subject to the Factory Act, as well as all kinds of printing establishments in which more than five workmen are employed. The Swiss Factory Act requires that a Factory shall possess all those characteristics assigned to it by German protective law, with the exception, however, of power machinery, and hence it doubtless covers all manufacturing business in which a number of workmen are employed. ”

“ Steps have already been taken under Section 8 of the Factory Act, 1891, for drawing up special rules for injurious trades, but in view of the constant changes which take place in manufacture, it seems highly desirable that there should be a regular staff of experts in connection with the Home Office, so that the Factory Department could be in touch with such industrial changes and inventions as take place from time to time. ”

“ An extension of the Factory Act, although it would of necessity leave the shop-assistant’s hours longer than those of most workers, would at least protect him from unlimited labour, and would insure his work being carried on under fairly healthy conditions. ”

“ Whether it is true or not, that there are fewer accidents from the shafting of mills than from any other industrial apparatus of any magnitude, it is our business to see how accidents can he best guarded against,—in other words, what is the true relation between the millowner and the government on the one hand, and his workpeople on the other. Whether the deaths be 12 or 12,000 in a year, the question is—what ought to be done? There is the Common Law, which operates for the protection of all; and there are the Factory Acts, which are intended for the special protection of factory operatives. ”

“ If factories are dispersed throughout the inland district, it will not alter these effects, because excises must either extend to a great number of household manufactures, or these factories could not furnish objects for an excise to act upon. If farmers consume the factory manufactures, they must pay the excises laid upon them, which would be equivalent to the payment of the same taxes upon household manufactures. ”

“ In its final report the Commission proposes to subject to the Factory Act more than 1,400,000 children, young persons, and women, of which number about one half are exploited in small industries and by the so-called home-work. ”

“ The necessity for a generalization of the Factory Acts, for transforming them from an exceptional law relating to mechanical spinning and weaving—those first creations of machinery—into a law affecting social production as a whole, arose, as we have seen, from the mode in which Modern Industry was historically developed. In the rear of that industry, the traditional form of manufacture, of handicraft, and of domestic industry, is entirely revolutionised; manufactures are constantly passing into the factory system, and handicrafts into manufactures ”

“ 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. ”

“ Now, if the Factory Acts, owing to their compulsory provisions, indirectly hasten on the conversion of small workshops into factories, thus indirectly attacking the proprietary rights of the smaller capitalists, and assuring a monopoly to the great ones, so, if it were made obligatory to provide the proper space for each workman in every workshop, thousands of small employers would, at one full swoop, be expropriated directly! ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Some tell us that we want capital, and that we should send abroad and get men to come here with money to build factories. This is not what we need. If the cotton lord and the millionaire come here and hire you to build factories and pay you their money for their work, when the factory is erected they own it, and they set their price upon your labor and your wool or cotton—they have dominion over you. But if, by your own efforts and exertions, you cooperate together and build a factory it is your own. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Money or some equivalent must be had to keep the machinery of the department going. Arrearages especially should be provided for. For instance, over $5,000,000 is now due to the factory interest alone for goods long since delivered and expended, and that, too, after a liberal use of call certificates, non-taxable bonds, and even the raw material, cotton. All the factories are under contract to deliver at fair prices two-thirds of their production. They all work under a uniform system, one built up with care and labor, and with a result perfectly satisfactory. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ There is no ground on which reasonably to hold that refusal by a manufacturer, whose raw materials come from states other than that of his factory and whose products are regularly carried to other states, to bargain collectively with employees in his manufacturing plant, directly affects interstate commerce. In such business, there is not one but who distinct movements or streams in interstate transportation. The first brings in raw material and there ends. Then follows manufacture, a separate and local activity. ”

“ It is not our object here to contend against what is called the factory system—we accept it with its evil and its good; we are not calling for measures directly hostile to it; but we certainly should exclaim against the sacrifice of a branch of household, stable, permanent industry, to be compensated by an increase in this already enormous system of factory labour, which, together with much good, brings with it so dreadfully precarious a condition of thousands and tens of thousands of men. ”

“ The products of a mine pass daily into interstate commerce; many things are brought to it from other states. Are the owners and the miners within the power of Congress in respect of the latter's tenure and discharge? May a mill owner be prohibited from closing his factory or discontinuing his business because so to do would stop the flow of products to and from his plant in interstate commerce? May employees in a factory be restrained from quitting work in a body because this will close the factory and thereby stop the flow of commerce? ”

“ It would make no difference whether one company or one individual owned all the factories fabricating the component parts of a single product, or whether such part were made in our independently owned factory, if only all adopted the same service methods. If we can buy as good a part as we can make ourselves and the supply is ample and the price right, we do not attempt to make it ourselves—or, at any rate, to make more than an emergency supply. ”

“ Therefore, laws and regulations should be established which would permit the workmen to receive from the factory owner their wages and a share in the fourth or the fifth part of the profits, according to the capacity of the factory; or in some other way the body of workmen and the manufacturers should share equitably the profits and advantages. ”

“ These improvements, costing little, and within the skill of ordinary laborers, would bring as good a profit as could be realized by a factory involving enormous outlay, great risk, and the utmost skill of management. The importance of reform here will be seen when we state that there is half as much capital—say $70,000,000—invested in machinery for baling, pressing, and ginning cotton as there is invested in the United States in machinery for weaving and spinning it. ”

“ The establishment of the factory altered completely the relation between employer and employee. Indeed in the modern sense these relations were then first established. Labor became a commodity which the master manufacturer, who was also the capitalist, bought and which the workingman sold. When in the year 1785 Arkwright’s patents were set aside and the use of his perfected spinning machinery became free to all manufacturers, a great extension of the cotton industry followed. ”

“ The League early saw the evils prevailing in many factories, and therefore decided [Pg 124] to carry the white-list idea under a slightly different form into this field. After a thorough investigation by its own representatives and consultation with the State factory inspectors, the League, where the situation is satisfactory, allows the use of its label guaranteeing that the goods are made under clean and healthful surroundings. The conditions under which the label is issued are:
1. The State factory law is obeyed.
2. No children under the age of sixteen are employed. ”

“ The case was the same with the home-products of earlier times, and compared with them the newer factory-product was shoddy; because, if the manufacturer was to earn a living from his industry he must produce a certain quantity within a limited time. These by-products of the home were enabled to hold their own against the factory products until the development of machinery in the eighteenth century; and until that time the factory system, although factories existed on a rudimentary scale, did not fully develop. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ The immediate change to be desired for the tailors is the introduction of the back-shop. There are two or three reasons for such a change. In the first place, the owner of a factory does not require or expect his workers to pay rent for the room in which they work nor to own the machines they use. The factory system is supposed to have displaced domestic industry in this age in America. ”

“ The factory system has not only wrought this change, but has compelled the economists to recognize the distinction between commodities and services. There has been greater and greater freedom of contract in respect to commodities, but the contracts which involve labor have become more and more completely under the authority and supervision of the State. ”