Factory labor

“ The manufacturing industry is continually passing under the management of fewer individuals, while the number of operatives in each factory tends to increase. With concentration of management goes concentration of wealth, and the gap widens between rich and poor. Out of the modern factory system has come the industrial problem with all its varieties of skilled and unskilled work, woman and child labor, sweating, wages, hours and conditions of labor, unemployment, and other difficulties. ”

“ Hand workers sought employment in the factories. Vast numbers of purely agricultural laborers left the rural districts for the manufacturing [Pg 59] towns. And, augmenting this great supply of labor, came thousands of children—for an eight-year-old child was capable of operating a spinning-frame, in which, for this very reason, the spindles were set near to the floor. With an unlimited supply of labor, the cotton masters had only the cost of production to consider, and so it came about that they thought only of their profits and forgot the human hands which operated the machinery. ”

“ Men used to working at home were generally not inclined to go to work in a factory. So there was an assortment of unskilled factory labor, such as country people driven from their villages by the growth of large estates, disbanded soldiers, and paupers. ”

“ He does not consider that factory-labor in itself operates prejudicially, and reports the mills to be more healthy to work in now than they were in years past. The prime cause producing the bad physical condition of the factory-population is, in his opinion, the intemperate habits of the factory-workers. ”

“ 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. ”

“ For a time after the factory system came into vogue there were small shops where the employer busied himself among his men and personally superintended them, but the large factory tends to displace the small workshop, the corporation takes the place of the individual employer, and the employee becomes as impersonal a cog in the labor system as is any part of the machine at which he works. ”

“ And labor in the factories and workshops is not at all the terrible thing you make it out to be. Even if there are some abuses in factories, the government and the public are taking steps to obviate them and to make the labor of the factory workers much easier, and even agreeable. The working classes are accustomed to physical labor, and are, so far, fit for nothing else. ”

“ The completed product was the handiwork of one man—an individual production—and as such, the workman might well take a large measure of pride in this evidence of his patience, industry and skill. But the capitalists introduced the factory system of production, and the journeyman, though still working with hand tools, did only a portion of the labor on an article and passed it on to another to do another portion. ”

“ Within a short time the whole face of industry was changed. The primitive shop had been absorbed into the industrial factory, eliminating the individual owners. Gigantic industrial corporations with billions of dollars at their command became the masters of industry, dictating the price of commodities, the wages of Labor and the policy of our State and National Governments. While the captains of industry were creating these great industrial combinations what were the leaders of Labor doing? Not a thing except to draw down their fat salaries, and they never failed in that. ”

“ We propose to own the commodities we produce ourselves and to exchange commodities containing a certain quantity of necessary social labor, for other commodities representing an equal quantity of necessary social labor.
You and I work for the boss because he owns the factory or mine or railroad or the mill. Ownership of the means of production and distribution (the factories, land, mines, mills—the machinery that produces things) makes masters of capitalists and wage-workers of you and me. ”

“ When the rapid growth of the country required greater productiveness, and the enlargement of territory made necessary a change in the distribution of the products of labor, the factory system was introduced, whereby capital, or unproductive labor, was joined with productive labor to accomplish greater results than had heretofore been attained by individual labor. ”

“ 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 factory, with its little army of workers, {202} men, women, and children, was managed according to the will and judgment of the owner, unless in the rare cases where the demand for labor far exceeded the supply. In most places the supply exceeded the demand, and the master was therefore free to make any conditions he pleased with his workers. ”

“ So the factory system, which at first threatened to take away the occupation of thousands who had formerly devoted their time to making yarn and cloth by hand labor, developed new occupations and new industries, and brought portions of the hitherto scattered people into groups, and these groups in time developed better accommodations for themselves and their families in homes, in comforts of life, in educational facilities, and in hours of labor ”

“ When machinery was applied to industry, and mill and factory took the place of the country blacksmith shop; when the workers were divorced from their tools and recruited in the mills; when they were obliged to compete against each other for employment; when they found themselves in the labor market with but a low bid or none at all upon their labor power ”

“ But because the factory led to the growth of great manufacturing towns and caused the migration thither of a vast population from the agricultural districts, and because it was among this population that the social discontent, which for a long period had existed in the lower classes, first became articulate, the factory directly contributed to the development of modern democracy.
The factory transformed not only craftsmen [Pg 68] into operatives, but agricultural laborers as well, the latter becoming for the first time free to dispose of their own labor ”

“ The statement is, however, that labor received only 20 per cent of the value of the product which it served to create.
Even with a superficial knowledge of economics and industrial processes one ought to perceive that the laborers employed in manufacturing industries by no means create the full value of the products which these industries place upon the market. The laborer in the factory does not create the raw material which the factory uses; labor on the farm, in the mine or in the forest entered into that. ”

“ The sudden and extensive introduction of machinery at the close of the eighteenth century drove hand labor out of employment, and, for a time, caused great suffering among the masses; but in the end it created an ever increasing demand for labor—a new labor more skillful than the old. ”

“ What avail the tireless labor of the machine and the mountains of material it places upon the market, if there are no purchasers? One man at a machine will do as much work in a factory to-day as required the work of fifty men fifty years ago; but the enhanced volume of production can have only one purchaser now where there was once fifty, hence the fitful existence of the one and the desperate struggle for existence of the forty-nine. ”

“ Without organization, the helpless workers were compelled to labor sixteen hours a day.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century factory workers a to be on the job at 4 A. M. and work until dark for a wage that was a mere pittance. A first class mechanic got 50c a day. Laborers worked for three and four dollars a month and board. Women toiled in the cotton mills from dawn till dark for $1.50 a week. ”

“ Now, it is not to be denied that on the first introduction into any factory, or class of factories, of any new labor-saving machine, by which perhaps one man is enabled to perform the work of a dozen or twenty, a large number of hands must necessarily be thrown out of work, and more or less immediate distress arise therefrom ”

“ The great manufacturer [he says] who guides the operations of a factory of a hundred thousand spindles, in which fifteen hundred men, women, and [221] children earn their daily bread, himself works on a narrow margin of one fourth of a cent on each yard of cloth. If he shall not have applied truth to every branch of construction and of the operation of that factory, it will fail and become worthless; and then with toilsome labor a hundred and fifty thousand women might try to clothe themselves and you, who are now clothed by the service of fifteen hundred only. ”

“ All this is due to a minute division [pg 182] of labor into as many tasks as there are different operations, each man having, if possible, but one distinct kind of motion. The saving is not only shown in the increased quantity of work, but in the uniform quality as well. All the workmanship is essentially perfect. These advantages appear more strikingly in the manufacturing arts, where the so-called factory system has brought division of labor to perfection. ”

“ Another development of the factory system has been the rise of labor unions. These are voluntary associations intended to [Pg 682] promote the interests of their members. They have grown as the factory system has been extended, and they now enjoy an influence in certain industries comparable to that exercised by the craft guilds of the Middle Ages. ”

“ Forest answered. “The different mutual productive associations would have needed men to manage such business affairs as were outside the management of the factory, attended to by the former manufacturer. For the workmen would soon have found out that it required more than the manual labor of the toilers to build up and run a large business establishment. ”

“ The factory system was the child of the "industrial revolution," and until capital had accumulated in masses capable of giving solidity to large bodies of labour, manufactures were necessarily carried on by scattered individuals, who combined a handicraft with agriculture. ”

“ Factory Operatives.—There is a class of laborers, consisting of men, women and children, whom we never contemplate but with regret—we see them, at least, in imagination, subsiding, in spite of all their care, into utter dependence and poverty. Hence, we never look upon a factory or large manufacturing establishment with unmingled pleasure. The men and women, who ply its machinery, are too apt to become identified with such establishments in an improper degree. ”

“ In proportion as machinery, with the aid of a relatively small number of workpeople, increases the mass of raw materials, intermediate products, instruments of labour, &c., the working-up of these raw materials and intermediate products becomes split up into numberless branches; social production increases in diversity. The factory system carries the social division of labour immeasurably further than does manufacture, for it increases the productiveness of the industries it seizes upon, in a far higher degree. ”

“ Now it is significant that before the great extension of manufactures occasioned by the factory, we find no reference [Pg 65] in our language to the working classes. The laboring poor belonged to no class; but when great cities grew up about the factories, populated by toilers whose interests in life were identical, the masses suddenly became conscious of their common life, their common needs, their common hopes. ”

“ The interest of anyone who starts a factory is in production i.e. running the factory. Everyone connected with the business knows that salary will be paid if the business works. If this is known to all then why is it that common methods of showing strength by the workers and management in industrial relations. tend to stop or reduce production? As an answer to strike by the workers the employer resorts to lock-out. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The factory system first applied to the cotton industry has been applied to all manufactures as well as to agriculture and has become the central fact in modern industrial life.
We are now to take up the question of how the establishment of the factory affected England’s laboring poor, and to study a little more in detail the social effects of the Industrial Revolution. In preparing the way for this discussion we should remember that the factory was not the sole cause of the Industrial Revolution, although it was a very important one. ”

“ It is evident that we must build up such an order of workers' management of enterprises which would train the workers in the idea that every factory is the property not only of the workers of that particular factory, but of the whole working people. ”