Factory Acts
Perspectives on labor laws
1. Children under fourteen should not work in a factory for more than 8 hours a day
All else should not work for more than 12 hours
Although he would suggest 10
1 He is looking for the government to help
1 Reducing hours will affect the economy
Less hours= less productivity
Consequences for poor of industrialization
Children with deformities
"Tidiness and everlasting sameness it prays on the spirits"
Physical crushing as well as mental!!
Working conditions are horrible and unsanitary
Government’s role in helping poor/mitigating problems of industrialization Economist article
Technological unemployment
Due to our discovery of means of economizing the use of labor outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses fro labor
By raising productivity any automation which economies on the use of labour will increase incomes
Generate demand for new products and services
Industrialization did not end up eliminating the need for human workers
Industrialization clearly led to enormous rises in income and living standards
The industrialization revolution was not simply a matter of replacing muscle with steam; it was a matter of reshaping jobs themselves into the sort of precisely defined components that stream-driven machinery needed
Faster wage growth helped spread the benefits of industrialization
The development of mechanical electronic computing rendered these arrangements (workers doing mathematical equations by hand) obsolete
Enabled vastly more output per person than craft producers could ever manage
Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhF_zVrZ3RQ
Significant inventions
New markets and marketing to middle class
Why Britain developed IR first
Significant inventions Samuel Smiles: Self Help
What’s the poor’s problem?
How character determines success
True source of national vigor and stringth
Character is national help and stimulate men to elevate and improve themselves by their own free and independent individual action
Influence of IR (competition, capitalism, new skills/work) on his ideas of “success” and how to achieve it. conditions of personal life and character must be changed (the rich)
"whatever id don't for men or classes, to a certain extent takes away the stimulus and necessity of doing for themselves; and where men are subjected to over-guidance and over-government, the inevitable tendency is to render them comparatively helpless" Benjamin Disraeli: Sybil
Physical changes to working-class
'broad-chested and muscular , wet with toil, and black as the childen of the tropics"
Wearing men clothing- both sexes
Social costs of IR to working-class
Poverty = trap
Blending gender roles
Like slavery Domestic Role of Women
“Angel in the House”
