Factories Act Research Articles

Child Labor in English Literature

Child labor is an old social problem. It peaked during the Industrial Revolution which greatly influenced English society, such as rural exodus, lack of equal job opportunities, miserable living and working conditions, social classes, lack of mandatory education, poverty, and, most importantly, child labor. The paper investigates the crimes against children carried out under the cover of child labor and poses the question of whether authorities, governments, religious institutions, businesses, and even parents are complicit in these crimes or have chosen to overlook them in spite of the constant backlash against them. The main aim of this study is to show the positive role of some authors like Charles Dickens, William Blake, Frances Trollope, Charles Kingsley, Robert Southey, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Caroline Norton, and Elizabeth Barret Browning who refused to ignore such atrocities and their consequences. These writers showed their opposition to child labor through great literary works such as Oliver Twist, Hard Times, David Copperfield, The Chimney Sweeper, A Voice from the Factory, The Water-Babies: A Fairy Tale for a Land- Baby, and The Cry of the Children. The study follows the close reading method and the sociology of literature approach. The study concludes that poverty and urbanization were some of the adverse outcomes of the Industrial Revolution. It reveals the official’s role in profiting from child labor and presents the authors’ role in changing The Poor Laws and Factory Acts to ban hiring minors. The study recommends national child labor regulations that should be enacted and enforced in order to prevent or at least control child work, as recommendations for further research.

Marx, exploitation, and socioeconomic justice: Analytical and strategic possibilities

AbstractMarx's concept of exploitation, developed in Capital, retains the laissez‐faire premises of classical liberal political economy, whereby capitalist wage labor denotes a contract between formally free, legally equal, employers and workers. Marx, though, inserts the political‐economic conflict between capitalists and workers over surplus value, rendering the concept distinctively ‘Marxist’. Both liberal economists and ‘free marketeer’ politicians had long since distanced themselves, to varying degrees, from the classical laissez‐faire construction, during the debates and campaigns leading to the UK's series of Factory Acts (1802–1853). A dialogue of socioeconomic justice had emerged, driven primarily by public outrage over employment conditions in the textiles industry. In engaging with this dialogue, Marx's critique of capitalist wage labor extends beyond the parameters of his own, political‐economic concept of exploitation, intersecting with other, moral‐economic critiques of capitalist wage labor. This paper examines these points of intersection, going on to evaluate the possibilities of analytical and strategic pluralism. It concludes by assessing the contemporary relevance of Marx's concept of exploitation: to what extent and in what ways might it retain analytical and strategic relevance, with respect to the achievement of socioeconomic justice?

The relationship between the factory remodeling hall and the sports park planning and design and the national fitness industry

National fitness has become a national strategy. How to realize the efficient supply of national fitness venues and facilities has become an important factor in the realization of national fitness. In the 21st century, China's urbanization process is accelerating. With the growth of economic level and the restriction of people's leisure distance, a large number of outdoor sports leisure places and facilities need to be built. The demand for venues for national fitness is the institutional incentive for the sports industry policy. The favorable policy has become the institutional guarantee for the development of sports parks. The two support each other and will provide an institutional basis for the development of sports parks. In the case that the national physical quality needs to be improved urgently, the positive energy brought by sports and fitness will have a good effect. Moreover, in a beautiful and pleasant green environment, breathing the negative ion gift of nature, interacting with animals and plants rather than looking at the electronic screen, the body will be exercised and the mood will become cheerful. This paper is of great significance to study the planning and design of the factory reform hall and the sports park.

Age as a Historical Category of Analysis

This work utilises archival methods to examine the processes of identification authorized by the colonial state to establish the certification routine for children employed in the textile mills of Bombay in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Specifically, this project will investigate how colonial administrative and bureaucratic policies, along with the legal regulation of the Indian Factory Acts, naturalized ‘age’ as the category of identification for laboring children. This work argues that the colonial obsession with ‘age’ standardization is very much present in the contemporary law governing child labor in India, i.e. the Child Labor (Prohibition and Regulation) Amendment Act. Therefore, the proposed research plans to center on ‘age’ as a historical category of analysis and its institutionalization with related processes of identification through the introduction of medico-legal procedures by the colonial state. The working hypothesis is that the ‘industrial child’ was produced as an age-based category through the interaction between these regulatory processes, a corrupt bureaucracy, and a superficial colonial concern for child protection.

John Douthwaite and ‘John Powlett’: Trades’ Unionism and Conflict in Early 1830s Yorkshire

This article examines two of ‘the great [trades’] Unions of the North’, represented by John Douthwaite and the mythical ‘John Powlett’, during the ‘revolutionary era’ of general unionism. These were built on tried and tested organizational forms and operational tactics, and featured traditional ritualistic elements backed up by strong bonds of secrecy. However, they also activated close mutual ties within their broad trades, explored new tactics of cooperative production, and developed strong links with other like-minded trades. The West Riding unions were at the heart of general union developments of the era and were closely involved in key industrial conflicts, the fate of the Dorchester labourers, and the brief life of the GNCTU. Far from a being a separate and largely discrete branch of working-class endeavour, trades’ unionism was intimately connected to other contemporary struggles, notably the fight for the political reform, cooperative self-reliance, and factory reform. The smashing of the Yorkshire unions, following the Dorchester prosecution and a concerted employers’ counterattack using ‘the document’, fed into the powerful narrative of Whig betrayal - through the Reform Act, the dashing of hopes for a ten-hour day, and the new Poor law - that underpinned early Chartism.

Women and Children First: Appropriated Fiction in the Ten Hours’ Advocate

This article examines interclass strategies to bring about reform in mid-nineteenth century England. It specifically explores the way the Ten Hours’ Advocate, a paper written for the working classes, looked to present itself as a middle-class periodical in order to further the argument for factory reform. In reproducing fiction filched from middle-class periodicals, the Advocate performed its argument for the Factory Bill: that the Bill would ease social tensions, dissipate the Chartist or radical threat, and ensure a “return” to traditional gender roles. The appropriated fiction is mild, rather bland; the non-fictional argument for reform is direct and unapologetic. That the Advocate was opportunistic in the way it made the case for reform is an example of the advantages provided to reformers by the absence of strict copyright laws and by Victorian periodical culture in general. But it also contextualises the debate over the family-wage argument and the working-class role in hardening the Victorian sexual division of labour.

THE ENVIRONMENTAL DRIVERS BEHIND THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE VICTORIAN TEXTILE FACTORY

Textile industry in the nineteenth century of the British empire was one of the milestone industries which center around cotton mills. The development of this industry attracted many people who wished to increase their life’ standard to migrate to area near the factories located in order to work there. As much as giving revenue for the country, these factories also gave impact to the environment as well as people living and working in it. There were three things behind the environmental impact during the Victorian era of textile industry, fire hazard, mills’ poor conditions and factory bill. Flammable materials, like raw cotton which mainly used in this industry, and high temperature room caused the factories engulfed in fire. The lacked protection from fire of the factories’ construction then led to a new building method being introduced and applied called the “Fireproof Construction”. Poor health condition of the workers who worked in high humidity and temperature of cotton mills brought a creation of factory bill (Factory Act) being passed. However, the act that was supposed to act as a regulation for factories owners to offer their worker a much more suitable place to work was hardly fully implied during this time. The writer used literature review method in collecting data. This article therefore intended to deliver the reader about the environment situation in the cotton factories while also giving the idea on how hardly an ideal comfort was achieved.

Examples from practice of the elementary education in Great Britain of the 19th century (R. Owen’s private initiative on people education)

The article studies the issue of the theory and practice of the elementary education development in Great Britain of the 19th century. A correlation between private initiative and State assistance in the formation process of the elementary schools net has been defined and proved by the samples from the history of the elementary education development. Special attention is given to the investigation of R.Owen’s private initiative on people education activity. Three periods in this activity have been identified according to changing R.Owen’s philosophy, publishing new works, searching for new forms of his private initiative on people education activity. New Lenark’s period in his education activity has been considered. The main trends of R.Owen’s education activity in the denoted period have been characterized. The goal of R.Owen’s public and education activity has been determined as paying attention of people and British government to the issue of creating and activity of elementary education schools. Assistance for two British educational specialists has been defined as one of the main trends in R.Owen’s education activity. Taking a part in the creating standards base of the elementary education development including Factory Acts (1802-1819) has been described as a considerable contribution in R.Owen’s education activity. R.Owen as a founder of kindergarten in Great Britain in 1816 ( a part of his Institute) has been ascertained in the investigation. R.Owen’s studying both native and foreign educational specialists experience has been pronounced the significant part of his education activity. It is concluded that elementary education school activity in Great Britain of the 19th century is characterized by private initiative. R.Owen’s education activity has received recognition in the elementary education development in Great Britain of the 19th century.

Collective action, opportunism, and class agency under ineffective state enforcement: Marx on English Factory Laws

AbstractThe paper focuses on a previously unexamined aspect of Marx's discussion on the 19th century English Factory Acts, and highlights its broader relevance for contemporary discussions about the role of institutions in a market economy. The capitalists' enlightened self-interest was to better husband their work force by limiting the workday and curtailing child labor, but market competition put them in a Prisoner's Dilemma creating an opportunism hazard. The ‘Factory Acts’ addressed the problem, but the state lacked the capacity to enforce them effectively. Marx held that the organized power of workers played an essential role in how the Factory Laws could gain traction at a time when state enforcement was unreliable. Organized labor's threats of sanction were credible enough to lower the expected benefit of non-compliance, enabling capitalists to commit to acting in their long-term, collective self-interest.

The political economy of state regulation: the case of the British Factory Acts

AbstractThis paper examines the British Factory Acts (enacted 1833–78) to articulate a political economic theory of policy formation. It argues that the British Factory Acts stabilised conditions for both capital accumulation and social reproduction, while perpetuating patriarchal–capitalist relations. Through these Acts, the state intervened in industrial relations to address social coordination problems and overexploitation caused by the incentive structure of firms and households. Overexploitation posed three threats to social reproduction: the deterioration of the health of the working class, the destabilisation of gender norms and patriarchal structures and political mobilisation of the working and middle classes. By conceptualising protective policy as the solution to social coordination problems in the industrial capitalist labour market, this paper builds upon Polanyian insights into the ‘double movement’, with an explicit Marxian theory of exploitation, the classical theory of competition and insights from feminist theories of social reproduction, unwaged labour and the patriarchal–capitalist system.

The Role and Regulation of Child Factory Labour During the Industrial Revolution in Australia, 1873–1885

AbstractThis study investigates child factory labour in Victoria, the most populous and industrialized colony in Australia in the second half of the nineteenth century. Three sources of primary data are analysed: Royal Commission reports, texts of bills and statutes, and parliamentary and public debates. The findings inform current academic debates by enhancing understanding of the role played by child workers during industrialization. They show that children were low-cost substitutes for adult males and that child labour was central to ongoing industrialization. A wide range of industries and jobs is identified in which children were employed in harsh conditions, in some instances in greater proportions than adults. Following the reports of the Royal Commission, the parliament of Victoria recognized a child labour problem serious enough to warrant regulation. While noting that circumstances were not as severe as in Britain, it passed legislation in 1885 with provisions that offered more protection to children than those in the British factory act of 1878. The legislation also offered more protection than factory laws in other industrializing colonies and countries. The findings throw light on the character of colonial liberal reformers in a wealthy colony who sought to create a better life for white settlers by adopting policies of state intervention.

The Role of British Legislations and the Working Class Movement in Bombay: A Historical Study of the Factory Acts of 1881 and 1891 in India.

India has been a country to raise inquisitiveness from ancient times. The era of colonialism in India unfolds many dimensions of struggle by the natives and the attempts of travesty by the imperialist powers. This paper will focus on the two landmark legislation of the end of the 19th century specifically pertaining to the labour conditions in India. The changing paradigms of the urban and rural labour underwent a phenomenal change by the mid 19th century. The characteristic which distinguishes the modern period in world history from all past periods is the fact of economic growth.

Pauperismo y cuestión obrera en la españa del siglo XIX: entre la “economía de la salvación” y el riesgo de fractura social

This work sketches the Malthusian analysis of social policy presented in the Factory Acts and the the Poor Laws, and describes the path of its influence in non British authors such as Garnier.

Richard Oastler, Toryism, Radicalism and the Limitations of Party, c.1807–46

AbstractRichard Oastler (1789–1861), the immensely popular and fiery orator who campaigned for factory reform and for the abolition of the new poor law in the 1830s and 1840s, has been relatively neglected by political historians. Few historians, however, have questioned his toryism. As this article suggests, labelling Oastler an ‘ultra‐tory’ or a ‘church and state tory’ obscures more than it reveals. There were also radical strands in Oastler's ideology. There has been a tendency among Oastler's biographers to treat him as unique. By comparing Oastler with other tories – Sadler, Southey, and the young Disraeli – as well as radicals like Cobbett, this article locates him much more securely among his contemporaries. His range of interests were much broader (and more radical) than the historiographical concentration on factory and poor law reform suggests. While there were periods when Oastler's toryism (or radicalism) was more apparent, one of the most consistent aspects of his political career was a distaste for party politics. Far from being unique or a maverick, Oastler personified the pervasive anti‐party sentiments held by the working classes, which for all the historiographical attention paid to popular radicalism and other non‐party movements still tends to get lost in narratives of the ‘rise of party’.

“I Never Saw Such Children”: Disability, Industrialism, and Children’s Advocacy in William Godwin’s Fleetwood

Drawing upon current studies of disability and Romanticism, this essay invites literary historians to consider the ways impairment intersects with poverty and age in the Romantic era, as well as the ways in which late eighteenth-century reform writers sought to prevent disability even as they helped constitute it as a category of difference. The essay uses William Godwin’s Fleetwood or the New Man of Feeling (1805) as a case study to explore the history of the factory reform act from a disability studies perspective. The Factory Reform Act of 1802 sought to protect child laborers from environmental and occupational impairment, though it ultimately failed to do so effectively. I argue that William Godwin’s Fleetwood (1805) criticized the Factory Act of 1802 by demonstrating the inability of its educational provision to protect children from neurological impairments resulting from factory labor.

Accounting and social conflict: Profit and regulated working time in the British Industrial Revolution

We demonstrate that social movements can use accounting for progressive purposes, and that such outcomes can be promoted where they are aligned with the material interests of key fractions of capital. Such fractionalization is a function of technology and labour process, underpinned by adopted ideology. Alignment with social movement objectives overcomes the class belongingness of accounting that limits its progressive role in normal circumstances. We illustrate the role of accounting in achieving limitations to working hours and child labour, drawing on accounting evidence used to resist and support factory reform during the industrial revolution. We compare the evidence on costs and profits presented by both sides in parliamentary hearings and also with data revealed from the business accounts of the main protagonists. These comparisons show that assumptions about cost behaviour were used to exaggerate or mitigate the apparent effects of reduced working time on profits. Regressive fractions of capital were unable to resist change because they failed to consistently monopolize accounting information to impose a dominant narrative about the consequences of regulation.

Child Workers and Industrial Health in Britain, 1780–1850. By Peter Kirby (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2013. 224 pp. $29.99)

Peter Kirby's new book addresses the neglect of a detailed examination of the occupational health of children in the “classic” Industrial Revolution period in Britain. Such inattention to the health of working children is perhaps unsurprising given the numerous methodological difficulties for such a study, for which Kirby's innovative solution is to use modern research into occupational health. He concludes the text with a call for historians to “challenge ingrained attitudes to child labour, both past and present,” and his nuanced approach to the complex causes and outcomes of poor health in child workers reminds us that the employment of children must be understood in context. In this sense, the book acts as a caution against the “othering” of states where child labor is common through its mental consignment to a horrific practice of the past in more “progressive” nations.1 An assessment of the impact of employment on children must always take account of the balance between costs and compensations. Cheap child labor could undercut and drive down adult wages, and thus did not necessarily increase the overall family wage, but as child workers were most likely to come from the very poorest families and particularly those where one or both parents were absent, the contribution a child could make might be the difference between starvation and survival.2 Focusing in particular on factory labor, Kirby's book seeks to offer “a major challenge to the predominantly pessimistic historiography of industrial child employment” (161). Kirby argues that historians have relied too heavily on the biased reports of factory reform commissions to the exclusion of dissenting voices, which often came from observers with more experience of factory communities. He contends that factories were, if anything, less dangerous to the health of child workers than was domestic industry, and that they were certainly safer than work in coalmines. Kirby finds the greatest body of direct evidence of work-related ill-health in the mining industry, demonstrated most startlingly in the growth differences between children employed in coalmines and those with other occupations (117–120). Given that other recent authors on the subject have concluded that industrialisation increased the extent and intensity of child labor, with consequent negative effects for health3, Kirby's alternative viewpoint contributes to a debate which shows few signs of abating.

“Like the incense of a bad heart”: The Ethics of Industry in Sophia Hawthorne's and Margaret Fuller's English Travelogues

Margaret Fuller and Sophia Hawthorne aren't often associated with the mid-nineteenth-century debates surrounding transatlantic factory and labor reform, yet both women begin their European travelogues with visits to English textile mills. In her first New-York Daily Tribune dispatch in August 1846, Fuller introduces her readers to an increasingly volatile Europe through a brief discussion of textile mill workers in Manchester and Liverpool. Over two decades later, Hawthorne's 1869 Notes in England and Italy similarly begins with her 1853 visit to a "very ugly" Lancashire mill town that is noticeably absent of workers yet leaves her haunted by the "cost" of industrialization (7-8). These moments are anomalous in both Fuller's and Hawthorne's narratives, yet they are also rare points of commonality in the two projects, which are divergent in many crucial ways. For even as Fuller's work for the Tribune traces her increasingly revolutionary politics, her more frequently discussed dispatches from Risorgimento Italy do not dwell on the effects of industrialization. (1) In contrast, Hawthorne's Notes focuses on ekphrastic descriptions of famous architectural landmarks and Italian masterworks; amid her accounts of museums and churches and interpretations of famous paintings and sculptures, social commentary is rare. (2) While it is important to note the similarities and differences between their texts, I use the women's introductory--and brief--references to English factories and factory workers as a way to think about the larger mid-century, transatlantic conversations surrounding industrialization and ethical labor. (3) Fuller's and Hawthorne's travels may be filled with visits to famous literary and cultural sites, but their (at least partial) "pleasure tours," to borrow William Stowe's term, are all the more striking by beginning in the un-aesthetically pleasing industrial centers of northern England with serious discussions of education and reform (103). Fuller's and Hawthorne's seemingly elliptical descriptions of the mills point to a larger cultural touchstone: they are commentaries on how the increasing pervasiveness of industrialization in the nineteenth century also raises questions about doing fulfilling work and leading meaningful lives. By beginning their respective journeys--and their accounts of those journeys--with these visits, Fuller and Hawthorne reveal how factories and the cloth they produce affect individuals regardless of class, gender, race, and nationality. Moreover, as women visiting northern England, then the industrial center of the Western world, Fuller and Hawthorne call attention to the often invisible labor done, in large part, by women. For if, as Annamaria Elsden suggests, Hawthorne understands her writing as "a way to 'copy' what she sees on her travels and transmit it to readers at home," then perhaps we can understand both Fuller's first dispatch and Hawthorne's Notes as confronting an individual's culpability for the working conditions of the factory operatives--even when physically removed from sites of industrialization and production (74). Ultimately, each woman positions her reflections on her tour as a way to establish common ground with her imagined readers, underscoring the wide-reaching impact of the international textile trade, the growth of factories, and the passage of laws protecting humane working conditions. In fact, Fuller and Hawthorne use their anomalous opening passages as oblique appeals to the middle-class reader--especially the middleclass, American woman reader--urging her to understand how she, too, is affected by these conditions overseas and, in turn, to support industrial reform on both sides of the Atlantic. I explore how Fuller's and Hawthorne's travel narratives are part of a larger mid-century print culture concerned with the transnational textile industry. I first outline Fuller's and Hawthorne's representations of their factory visits and how they pointedly obscure different parts of the industrial landscape: factories for Fuller and people for Hawthorne. …

Cold, Calculating Political Economyy: Fixed Costs, the Rate of Profit and the Length of the Working Day in the Factory Act Debates, 1832-1847.

The paper re-analyses the evidence presented by pro and anti-regulation interests during the debates on factory reform. To do so it considers the interrelationship between fixed costs, the rate of profit and the length of the working day. The interrelationship casts new light on the lobbying positions on either side of the debate. It does so by comparing the evidence presented in the debates before parliament and associated pamphlets with actual figures contained in the business records of implicated firms. As a result the paper identifies the compromise position of the working day length compatible with reasonable rates of profit based on actual cost structures. It is thereby able to reinterpret the validity of the claims of contemporary political economy used to support the cases for and against factory regulation.

Occupational Exposure to Respirable Suspended Particulate Matter and Lung Functions Deterioration of Steel Workers: An Exploratory Study in India

Objective. Manufacturing industry, especially casting and forging (iron and steel) industry, comprises a major part of the occupation in India. However, health protection is still ignored. Therefore the present study explores the respiratory symptoms among steel workers and subsequently measured the level of exposure to RSPM and lung functions parameters using spirometry investigation. Method. Present study assessed the level of respiratory symptoms through questionnaire survey of 572 workers, out of which 309 workers and another control group of 74 subjects were assessed for the spirometry test. Both of the groups were statistically matched for age and BMI. Students’ t-test and one-way ANOVA were used to compare the various subgroups. Results. The results reveal that workers are exposed to higher respirable suspended particulate matter (RSPM) levels than the limit of 5 mg/m3 prescribed by Indian factory act. The spirometric parameters such as FVC, FEV1, FEV1/FVC ratio, FEF25–75, PEFR, PIFR, and FIVC were significantly lower in exposed group than in controls. In the present scenario the iron and steel SMEs of the region are very much lagging behind in implementing the occupational health and safety practices. Conclusions. The majority of the workers were not wearing proper PPEs like masks due to ergonomically bad design, and at the same time they were working 60 to 72 hrs/week, which leads to very high level of exposure to RSPM. Therefore, the workers were under higher risk of lungs functions deterioration.