Industrialisation and the labour movement

The industrial revolution begins in Britain in the middle of the 18th century. It will change the world forever. Agricultural development leads to tens of thousands of people losing their land and becoming unemployed. They turn to the cities to seek work in the newly established factories. Life as an industrial worker is hard.

The pace is fast, and the salary is low. Factory owners are happy to hire women and children who get paid less than men. Good for the owner! The working day is long. The men work 12-13 hours a day, sometimes as much as 16.

Women and children work shorter days. The work is often monotonous and risky. It's easy to trap your hand in a machine. Many factory workers become injured for life. The most dangerous workplace is the coal mine.

Using steam engines to pump out the groundwater, mines can be dug deeper than before, and yield even more coal. But this also increases the risks of collapse, lack of oxygen, and toxic gases. The coal mine workers are children, because the mines are so narrow that no one else can get in. To help them, they have birds in cages, such as canaries. These birds are sensitive to oxygen deficiency and toxic gases.

If the birds faint, the miners know that they have to get out. Sometimes workers protest against the poor working conditions. This doesn’t help. A protesting worker can soon be replaced with a new one. Those who move to the cities to work need places to live.

In industrial cities like London and Manchester, large slums develop, where workers live in cramped conditions. Here there is no drainage and the narrow streets are filled with rubbish. The rubbish attracts rats, that attract lice, that spread diseases. The unhealthy life in the working districts causes diseases to spread rapidly. People die of cholera, typhoid, malnutrition, pneumonia, and even simple infections.

By the middle of the 19th century, half of all children in Britain die before they reach the age of five. Factory workers rarely get older than 30. Eventually, the workers have had enough. They demonstrate, start riots, and organize protests when everyone refuses to go to work: they strike. This organized resistance is called the labour movement.

Factory owners do not like this at all. They ensure that the labour movement is prohibited. The workers who are discovered organising themselves are sentenced to prison. But the workers continue to organise themselves secretly. Together with other workers within their profession, they form trade unions.

Textile workers form a union and miners another. The most important weapon of the trade unions is to refuse to work - to strike. But then they get no pay. To afford to do it then, unions collect money from their members in advance - for a strike fund. These new unions are supported by the Church, and many of the newspapers are also on the side of the workers.

In the end, Parliament gives in and it becomes legal for workers to organise themselves. When workers in the rest of Europe hear about this, they also begin to form trade unions, and make demands. Now come the first laws for protection of workers. For example, mine owners are forbidden to send women and children under ten down the mines. In the 1840s, there are so many workers in the trade unions that industry owners and politicians must respond to their demands for higher wages and better working conditions.

The labour movement is now a strong political force in society. But it doesn’t only benefit the workers. Factory owners notice that when workers get higher wages, they buy more of the factories' mass-produced goods. In that way, the money will soon return to the owners' pockets. Higher wages also mean less risk of strike and riots.

The labour movement’s ideas about a better life grow over time into a coherent theory of how society works, what is fair, and how ownership and rights should be distributed. The labour movement thus becomes an important part of the political ideology of socialism.