The evidence on how workers fared economically as the mechanized factory displaced the domestic system is spotty. As we have seen, economic and biological indicators alike suggest that material standards during the classic years of the Industrial Revolution were stagnant or even declining for parts of the population. Such indicators are informative in that they capture the aggregate trajectories of material well-being. In its early days, however, the Industrial Revolution was not an aggregate phenomenon. The textile industry was the first to mechanize, and this is where the force of the factory was most keenly felt. Economic historians like Jane Humphries and Benjamin Schneider have recently drawn our attention to the personal tragedies the mechanized factory inflicted upon parts of the population. Hand spinning, which provided part-time work for hundreds of thousands of adults—mostly women—in rural Britain was the first trade to be affected. Humphries and Schneider show that hand spinning was condemned by mechanization in the late eighteenth century, and its demise came with prolonged agonies for families across rural Britain. As employment opportunities dried up for spinners, family incomes suffered a blow from which rural households struggled to recover.35
In the public imagination, however, it is the hand-loom weaver who remains the tragic hero of the Industrial Revolution. The autobiography of Walter Freer, born in 1846, recounted that, “before his birth handloom weavers had been labour’s aristocrats.”36 Like hand spinners, the skills of weavers were rendered redundant by the onward march of mechanization. Examining the wages of weavers, Robert Allen has shown that poverty accompanied the spread of the power loom. Not only did wage inequality grow rapidly, but the earning potential of weavers was reduced to subsistence level.37 The case of the hand-loom weaver sheds light on the conditions of England question more broadly: the incomes of many artisans vanished as the factory system spread. Humphries’s seminal account of six hundred autobiographies of men who lived and worked during the Industrial Revolution provides many vivid descriptions of the personal tragedies that accompanied the disappearance of hand trades.38 Their stories resonate with the view of Allen, who wrote: “The standard of living issue in the Industrial Revolution was the result of the destruction of hand loom weaving and other hand trades.”39 Indeed, even the detailed investigation into the case of the hand-loom weaver by Duncan Bythell—which is often cited to suggest that their conditions were not as desperate as sometimes portrayed—asserts that the power loom led to “the largest case of redundancy or technological unemployment in our recent economic history.”40 In 1816, the unemployment rate among weavers in the Stockport district was 60 percent. A decade later, 69 percent of hand-loom weavers in the town of Darwen were still unemployed, some five thousand weavers in Glasgow were out of work, and 84 percent of all looms in Lowertown were standing empty.41
There can be no doubt that people suffered as their jobs vanished. However, the extent to which unemployment was the result of mechanization during the Industrial Revolution is harder to judge, not just because of sparse statistics but because unemployment has many causes. The fact that the years of high unemployment among weavers concurred with economic downturns suggests that unemployment in part was cyclical rather than technological.42 John Fielden’s estimates, which draw upon statistics from the relatively prosperous year of 1833, probably come closer to an unemployment rate that can be deemed technological: in a survey of the poor in thirty-three townships in Lancashire and Yorkshire, who chiefly worked as hand-loom weavers, Fielden found that the rate of unemployment was around 9 percent.43 Whether such unemployment was permanent or temporary is yet another matter. Even if the arrival of power-loom weaving caused unemployment among hand-loom weavers in certain locations, some eventually migrated to jobs elsewhere.
The evidence on the mobility of workers is equally spotty. Around 1850, only a quarter of adults in major industrial cities like Manchester, Glasgow, and Liverpool were actually born there, suggesting that Britons were highly mobile. However, more able and younger workers were much more mobile than people in their thirties, who tended to remain closely tied to their location and occupation and, if they did migrate, typically moved to locations nearby. Few moved from the rural south to the factory cities of the north.44
As mentioned above, the generational aspect of the Industrial Revolution was reinforced by the preference of factory owners for cheaper, more docile children as workers and by the nature of work in the factories. As Ure observed in 1835, “Even in the present day … it is found to be nearly impossible to convert persons past the age of puberty, whether drawn from rural or handicraft occupations, into useful factory hands.”45 With the aid of machines, spinning was quickly learned and needed little strength. During a Parliamentary hearing on child labor in 1833, a witness explained that “the discoveries of Arkwright, Watt, Crompton, and other great benefactors of mankind [transformed production in such a manner that] adults were superseded by children, whose wages were lower, and who soon acquired great dexterity.”46 Arkwright’s first mills were almost entirely filled with young children, and Hargreaves’s spinning jenny was brought to such perfection that a child was able to work 80 to 120 spindles.47 As the number of spindles on cotton spinning mules rapidly increased, so did the number of children in the factories: the ratio of children to adults increased from 2:1 to around 9:1.48 Wool combing was no different. Ure observed that a great “many self-acting machines have been contrived for performing the wool-combing operations.… After drying, the wool is removed to a machine called the plucker, which is always attended by a child, generally a boy of ten, twelve, or fourteen years.”49 These examples are crucially borne out by the statistics: by the 1830s, children constituted around half of the workforce in textiles, and about a third in coal mining.50
For factory owners, children provided cheaper substitutes for adult workers. The only cost of children was often their food and lodging. And when they were paid, their wage was between a third and a sixth of an adult’s wage.51 Not only was children cheaper workers, they were also easier to discipline. Alcoholism was a frequent problem among adult workers. When one engine man at the Boulton & Watt company received some money, he “drank so much the next day that he let the engine run wild, and it was thrown completely out of order.”52 And children could be made to work longer hours. Their working days lasted up to eighteen hours, and as machines could operate ceaselessly day and night, children were frequently forced into shift work, to take full advantage of the technological capabilities of the factory. For the only meal of the day, the children were often allocated no more than forty minutes and had to use part of their break to clean the machines. Anybody failing to obey the factory discipline risked corporal punishment. Although the investigations made by factory commissioners who looked into the working conditions of children found that cases of extreme child abuse were the exception rather than the general rule, many children unquestionably suffered. In the Litton Mill, Ellice Needham pinched children’s ears so that his nails met through the flesh, after hitting and kicking them. Robert Blincoe, a former child laborer, described ingenious methods of torture, including the filing down of children’s teeth, the hanging of children by their wrists, and the tearing out of their hair with a cap of pitch. Of course, not every industrialist treated children poorly. But it is nonetheless appropriate here to quote Baines’s reference to the factories as “hells upon earth.”53
Adult workers were rarely treated with the same level of cruelty; their main concern was the threat to their incomes. Even assuming that machines did not temporarily reduce the overall demand for workers, there was no guarantee that the workers who were displaced would find better-paying or less hazardous jobs. Some artisans undoubtedly found jobs in the factories, but the cost of making the transition to a new job was often substantial, as it required occupational and geographical mobility. A recent study of Northamptonshire provides a case in point. As the worsted industry became increasingly mechanized in Britain, the domestic industry in Northamptonshire collapsed,
and local producers were left unable to compete. The textile employment share of the Northamptonshire economy fell from 11 percent in 1777 to 1 percent in 1851, and the share of weavers and wool combers in the workforce declined at an even faster rate. The net population decline over the first two decades of the period suggests that some workers moved, perhaps to factory jobs in other regions. But the fact that agricultural employment in Northamptonshire surged as employment in textiles declined equally suggests that many textile workers moved into low-paying agricultural jobs. And because the influx of workers into agriculture could not be absorbed, it can be presumed that unemployment increased.54
As production processes kept changing, the skills of workers were becoming obsolete at an accelerating pace, putting pressure on the workforce to become more agile and adaptable to the rush of progress. Even if unemployment was just temporary, people had to provide for themselves when they were without work by saving some of their limited earnings when they were employed: government-sponsored unemployment insurance was not available in Britain until 1911. Maxine Berg, an economic historian whose writings examine the machinery question in some detail, aptly sums things up:
Working men and women felt keenly the unprecedented demands for mobility, both geographical and occupational. For them the machine meant, or at least threatened, unemployment, an unemployment which at best was transitional between and within sectors of the economy, and at worst affected the economy as a whole at times of scarce capital. For them the machine was accompanied by a change in the pattern of skills, and involved all too often the introduction of cheap and unskilled labour.… But the conceptual changes in political economy over the period are also very closely connected to class struggle. This shows in the very seriousness attached by political economists to the 1826 anti-machinery riots in Lancashire and to the 1830 agricultural riots.55
Defenders of mechanization, like Ure, were right in thinking that the factory would eventually create new and better-paying jobs. And clearly everyone might benefit from cheaper textiles. But this was little comfort to the workers who initially found their skills made redundant by worker-replacing technologies. The benefits of industrialization were rarely felt in workers’ pockets before 1840s. Perhaps most telling is the reaction of the workers themselves. The Industrial Revolution created new factories and jobs, but it also created many Luddites. For many of the workers living through the Industrial Revolution, opposition was the rational response.
The Luddites
Any discussion of the machinery question must distinguish the short run from the long run. Although workers whose skills were made obsolete suffered initially, the Industrial Revolution eventually brought new goods that had been unattainable to previous generations within the reach of the poor, while creating new and better-paying jobs along the way. Nineteenth-century defenders of mechanization may have been right in thinking that the feelings of workers rebelling against machines were stronger than their judgment. Yet what does the long run matter to workers who lose their livelihoods, especially if they are unlikely to live long enough to see the benefits of the new technology? As the experience of the Industrial Revolution illustrates, the short run can be a lifetime, and of course in the long run we are all dead. Because the benefits and profits from mechanization came to the factory owners at the expense of workers, many reasoned that machinery threatened their livelihoods and must therefore be destroyed.
In fact, an economist might wonder why citizens would ever voluntarily agree to participate in the industrialization process if it reduced their own utility. One explanation, of course, is that the opportunity cost of taking on a factory job was reduced by people’s steadily dwindling earning potential in domestic industry. Industrialization relentlessly reduced the price of manufactured goods, leaving rural industry uncompetitive, driving down the earnings of rural workers, and thereby forcing them to seek employment in the factories. What’s more, the movement of people from the domestic into the factory system is only a puzzle if one believes that they had any other choice—but they didn’t. Some workers did riot against the increasingly mechanized factory. But their efforts to halt the spread of machines were unsuccessful, as the British government sided with the pioneers of industry. As Paul Mantoux writes, “Whether [workers’] resistance was instinctive or considered, peaceful or violent, it obviously had no chance of success, as the whole trend of events was against it.”56
Clashes between labor and the British government over the adoption of machine technology were not uncommon. On May 10, 1768, the first steam-powered sawmill in Limehouse—for which its founder Charles Dingley had been awarded the gold medal of the Society of Arts—was burned to the ground by some five hundred sawyers who claimed that it had deprived them of employment. Four days earlier, the sawyers had informed Dingley of their intent, but he was unwisely dismissive of their ability to put words into action. As the sawyers arrived, Christopher Richardson, one of Dingley’s clerks, is reported to have confronted them, asking what they wanted: “They told me the saw-mill was at work when thousands of them were starving for want of bread.”57 The response of the British government to the Limehouse riot is even more telling than the sawyers’ rage against the machines. In contrast to preindustrial monarchs who sought to halt worker-replacing technological progress for fear of social unrest, Parliament passed an act in 1769 that made the destruction of machines a felony punishable by death.58
However, the 1769 act did not prevent similar disturbances. In 1772, a factory using Cartwright’s power loom in Manchester was burned down. And the riots of 1779 in Lancashire, where the use of machines had spread most rapidly, were every bit as dangerous. A letter by the industrialist Josiah Wedgwood, who was in the district at the time, describes the seriousness of the situation. He was met by a mob of several hundred workers in the road, and one of them told him that they had been destroying all the engines they could find and intended to do so throughout the country. The British government was decisive in its response, and prompt repression followed. Troops were sent from Liverpool, and the rioters were dispersed without much difficulty. A resolution passed after the Lancashire riots suggesting that restrictions on the use of machinery would deteriorate Britain’s competitiveness in trade underlines not only the logic of the British government, but also the political clout gained by merchants relative to preindustrial times. Even if the diffusion of machines came at the expense of workers’ utility and social unrest followed, Britain’s competitive advantage in trade was not to be jeopardized. And the events in Limehouse and Lancashire can hardly be described as isolated examples. Further machinery riots occurred in West Riding, Yorkshire, and in Somerset, just to name a few places. Any violent attempt to compromise the spread of machines was quickly crushed by successive British governments.59
Working people also explored other ways to hinder the diffusion of machine technology. Petitions against various machines were laid before Parliament. Among the numerous appeals, wool combers petitioned against Cartwright’s combing machine, journeymen petitioned against the use of machines in paper making, and cotton weavers petitioned against machinery they claimed to have driven them out of work.60 But attempts to hinder the diffusion of machines by political means failed just as dismally. Again, the argument put forward by employers that machines were essential to trade, upon which the fortunes of Britain as a country rested, resonated more strongly with Parliament than did workers’ complaints.
However, workers’ concerns did not go unnoticed. A Parliamentary inquiry into the woollen industry was set up, which culminated in a famous 1806 report. Addressing the committee of the House of Commons, appointed to consider of the State of the Woollen Manufacture of England, on behalf of the clothiers, Randle Jackson tried a different line of argumentation, suggesting that mechanization deprived producers of their customers by putting them out of work.61 Despite the argument that restrictions on the use of machines were also in the interest of industrialists, and the suggestion of many witness
es that machines had adverse impacts on people by diminishing the price of labor, the committee came to a much more optimistic conclusion, arguing that the use of “the machines has been gradually established, without, as it appears, impairing the comforts or lessening the numbers of the workmen.”62
The conclusion of the inquiry into the state of the woollen industry underlines the hopelessness of the case of British workers. In addition to failing to hinder the spread of new technologies, they also failed to get Parliament to enforce legislation prohibiting the adoption of old replacing technologies. Despite having petitioned for a decade to enforce the prohibition on gig mills that dated back to the sixteenth century, Parliament repealed the old legislation in 1809. Further riots followed. During the Luddite risings in the period 1811–16, the Nottinghamshire rioters mainly targeted knitting frames, whereas in Yorkshire, the riots were led by the croppers who rebelled against the spread of gig mills—both old and established technologies. What the various machines that were smashed had in common is that they threatened jobs. And there were many incidents of rebellion. Jeff Horn explains:
Named after a supposed Leicester stockinger’s apprentice named Ned Ludham who responded to his master’s reprimand by taking a hammer to a stocking frame, the followers of “Ned Ludd,” “Captain Ludd,” or sometimes “General Ludd” targeted this machine for destruction. The movement began in the lace and hosiery trades early in February 1811 in the Midlands triangle formed by Nottingham, Leicester, and Derby. Protected by exceptional public support within their communities, Luddite hands conducted at least 100 separate attacks that destroyed about 1,000 frames (out of 25,000), valued at £6,000–10,000. Luddism in the Midlands died down in February 1812, but it had already inspired the woollens workers of Yorkshire to take action, beginning in January. A third outbreak took place in April among the cotton weavers of Lancashire. Factories were attacked by armed crowds. Thousands participated in these activities, including many whose livelihoods were not threatened directly by mechanization. Despite the diversity of the crowds, the Luddites generally destroyed only machines that were “innovations” or that threatened employment. They left other machines alone. The specific causes of these outbreaks varied not only according to region but also by sector. Collectively, these initial episodes of Luddism caused perhaps £100,000 of damage. Further waves of machine-breaking, in which a few hundred additional stocking frames were destroyed, came in the winter of 1812–13, in the summer and fall of 1814, and in the summer and fall of 1816 and the beginning of 1817.63
The Technology Trap Page 15