‘Factories in the 19th century were terrible.’ Do you agree?
There are many reasons why the factories in the nineteenth century were excellent in some ways and awful in others. I am going to show that factories back then were not as terrible as some people thought.
A reason why people thought factories were bad was because the workers had to work long hours. They started working when the sun was up until sun down. Some workers never even got a break as this wasted time and that meant less work was done. But this was not always the case. Some factory owners treated their workers well (for example Titus Salt) because you would want to work harder for someone who treated you well apposed to someone who treated you badly and wouldn’t let you have a break. Another example of someone who treated lower class people well was Robert Owen. He believed that ‘people were a product of their environment.’
Factories were notorious for having poor working conditions. Machines were not boxed so there was a danger of getting caught on it and fibres of cotton were in the atmosphere so the workers breathed it in. Young children climbed into machines to clean them while they were running because adults could not fit and stopping the machines would waste time (fewer goods were produced).Workers were fined for opening windows because the damp would get in and rust the machines, this meant factories were hot in the summer. But this was at the beginning of the industrial revolution, when factories were a new thing. As time went by there were more and more laws about safety and child labour. For example routine inspections were compulsory and children under the age of nine were not allowed to work in the textile industry, (factory act of 1833). By 1878 there were laws that stopped children under ten being employed, education was required for children up to the age of ten, ten - fourteen year olds could not work more than half a day and women could not work more then fifty-six hours a week.
