How working conditions changed: children's hard labor and 20 hours in mines

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

In 1741, a decree was issued in the Russian Empire that limited the working day in factories to 15 hours. That is, before that, the working day was even longer, to the point that a person was given less than five hours to sleep.

Image at the beginning - Children miners in Alabama, USA. End of the 19th century

We propose to recall the times when small children worked at factories in Europe, when the whole life of a poor man was reduced to hard work without days off, holidays and sick leave. It is only thanks to the labor movement and protests that we can now work in much more comfortable conditions. But today's achievements are only a stage on the way to a normal lifestyle.

From workshops to factories

In the Middle Ages, the working day was not specifically regulated and was mainly limited to daylight hours, since there was no electric lighting. It is believed that medieval peasants worked about nine hours a day in summer and much less in winter. At the same time, the church forbade work on holidays, which came out several dozen a year, not counting Sundays. The working day of city artisans was much longer. As a rule, in the summer in city workshops of the XVI century they worked 14-16 hours a day. In winter, the working day was reduced to 10-12 hours. At the same time, the foremen worked as much as the hired workers, write in the book "Course of Labor Law" A. Lushnikov and M. Lushnikov.

In the 18th century, with the industrial revolution, machine tools appeared. Maintenance of a machine tool in a factory no longer required such skills as in a medieval manufactory. Therefore, the pay of the workers has become less, and they have begun to work, on the contrary, more. Gas lighting was invented and people began to work at night.

The huge army of urban workers was replenished at the expense of impoverished artisans and peasants. They settled in cellars and closets, rented bunks and "corners". It happened that unfamiliar man and woman shared one bed, if the first worked at night, and the second - during the day.

"To live in a city, to lose the traditional support of a vegetable garden, milk, eggs, poultry, to work in huge premises, to endure the unpleasant supervision of masters, to obey, not to be more free in one's movements, to take firmly established working hours - all this in the near future will be an ordeal "- writes the historian Fernand Braudel.

In the 1840s, workers in French and British factories worked 14-15 hours, of which half an hour was allocated three times per shift for rest. Work on Sundays became widespread.

The record for the duration was broken by a 20-hour working day at the turn of the 18th-19th centuries. The workers ate and slept right next to the machines.

Since working at the machine did not require qualifications, women and children gradually became the main labor force, who were paid even less than adult men. Thanks to the cheapness of child labor, by the middle of the 19th century, almost half of the workers in factories in England were under 18 years of age.

It happened that children started working in mines at the age of five or six. Special rules were established for children, for example, it was forbidden to look out the window at the workplace and play during lunchtime. On Sundays, children were often forced to clean the machines.

Slave houses

Since the 17th century, such a phenomenon as workhouses has been widespread in Europe and Russia. These were supposedly charitable institutions where beggars could live and work for money.

In fact, the workhouse was more like a prison, where people were forcibly sent, according to laws prohibiting begging and prostitution. Physically or mentally ill people, children of the poor, the elderly could get into workhouses. Sometimes families disposed of girls in this way who became pregnant outside of marriage. The mother of Oliver Twist, the hero of Dickens' novel, died in just such a workhouse.

In the workhouses, men, women and children were kept separate from each other. Discipline was punished. So the site workhouses.org.uk lists the penalties for a workhouse in British Dorset. A certain Sarah Rowe was locked up in a punishment cell for 24 hours on bread and water for noise and abuse. Isaac Hallett sent to prison for two months for a broken window. James Park is flogged for trying to escape.

A typical workhouse routine was as follows. At 6:00 - wake up, roll call, prayer and breakfast. From 7:00 to 18:00 - work with an hour break for lunch. After that we had supper and went to bed at 20:00. It was forbidden to talk while eating.

One can imagine what the slaves of the workhouses ate. Thus, Karl Marx quotes in Capital a recipe for a soup invented by Earl Rumford as a way to reduce the cost of food for workers: “5 pounds of barley, 5 pounds of corn, 3 pence of herring, 1 penny of salt, 1 penny of vinegar, 2 pence of pepper and greens, for a total of 20, 75 pence, it turns out a soup for 64 people. Bon Appetit.

Workhouses began to close after several high-profile scandals. So, in 1845, journalists discovered inhuman conditions for keeping people in the workhouse of the English Andover. The workers suffered so much from hunger that they ate the bones of dogs and horses, which were to be ground into fertilizers.

Shortly after the Andover scandal, the horrors of a working house in Huddersfield became known, in particular at the local infirmary. The patients were practically not looked after, there was no question of even basic hygiene - it happened that the patient had to lie in the same bed with the deceased for a long time, since no one took the body. New patients were put in the same bed where the deceased from typhus had been lying before, but the linen was not changed for two months.

Bloody protests

Strikes, protests and unionization were natural reactions to unbearable working conditions.

In the early 1800s, Luddites appeared in England - rebels who attacked factories and destroyed machines. They were led by a certain mythical King Ludd. They considered machines to be the cause of unemployment. For example, a knitting machine produced more stockings and was much cheaper than a knitter's products. An army was thrown into the suppression of the riot, the Luddites were executed or exiled to Australia.

Mass demonstrations in an eight-hour day took place in cities in the United States and Canada on May 1, 1886. In Chicago, a 40,000-strong protest ended in a bloody crackdown in which six workers were killed. Hundreds of workers were laid off.

In response, new mass protests began. During one such demonstration, in Haymarket Square in Chicago, a provocateur threw a bomb at the police and they opened fire. Several dozen people died that day, and four more workers were hanged on false charges of organizing the explosion. It is in memory of the tragic events in Chicago that the International Day of Workers' Solidarity is celebrated on May 1.

The rule of three eights

In the 17th century, the famous educator Jan Komensky formulated the rule of "three eights" - eight hours for work, eight for sleeping and eight for cultural activities. This rule was supported by the German doctor Christoph Hufeland, who proved that in order to be healthy, a person should not work more than eight hours a day with eight hours of sleep.

Jan Komensky

But in the capitalist West of the 18th-19th centuries, the positions of the classical political economy of Adam Smith and David Ricardo reigned. It was believed that the longer the working day, the greater the profit, that the regulation of the working day by the state allegedly undermines the competitiveness of the economy and is disadvantageous for the workers themselves, since it limits the possibility of their earnings.

The first laws to improve working conditions existed only on paper, none of the factory owners followed them. For example, in 1802 in England, Peel's law forbade children to work in factories for more than 12 hours, as well as on the night shift. Then for children under 14 years old, an 8-hour day was introduced. In practice, these rules were ignored - the commission found that English children aged five to nine continued to work underground for 12-14 hours a day.

At the same time, individual entrepreneurs, on the contrary, were even ahead of the laws. Back in 1799, Englishman Robert Owen set up a social experiment from his textile factory in New Lanark. He introduced a 10-hour workday, built housing for workers, increased wages and continued to pay them even when the factory temporarily closed. And his business really flourished. By doing this, Owen wanted to show that the duty of caring for the wage earners coincides with the interests of the employer.

Such reformers were Ernst Abbe, who in 1888 introduced an eight-hour working day, 12 days of annual leave and a pension in the Zeiss factories. Moreover, there was a rule that each employee received a share of the profits. At the same time, nobody's salary, even Abbe himself, could not exceed the minimum by more than ten times.

Henry Ford also had an eight-hour working day. His car factories had the highest wages in the United States at $ 5 a day. True, these bonuses were compensated by strict discipline, which squeezed all the juices out of the workers.

First laws

For the first time, the law for an eight-hour work day and a 48-hour work week for adult men was passed in Australia in 1856. In 1900, the working day in the USA, Great Britain, France, Germany averaged 10 hours, in the Russian Empire - 11.5 hours.

At the same time, no one prohibited overtime work. It was only assumed that they would pay extra for it. That is, the workers continued to work a lot, but their incomes increased slightly.

In Europe, the first country to legally cut the working day to eight hours was Soviet Russia. The work week was still six days. Vacation was also introduced. Under Stalin, it was only six days a year. Only in 1970 did the paid leave increase to three weeks.

Two days off - Saturday and Sunday - appeared in 1936 in France, two years later - in the United States. Beginning in the 1960s, laws began to limit the number of overtime hours and to significantly increase the pay for them.

In the modern world

In fact, the rule of three eights is not being followed in the modern world. For example, South Korean law requires a 40-hour work week. But Forbes magazine once described the real regime of 39-year-old municipal employee Lee.

He wakes up at 5:30, drives to Seoul for two hours, where he works from 8:30 to 21:00. Back home, Lee has time to shower and sleep for four hours. The day off is only Sunday. His vacation is three days a year.

In this case, we are talking about the most "hardworking" country in the Forbes ranking. But let's imagine a typical working day for an office worker in St. Petersburg or Moscow. He wakes up at 7:00, washes and has breakfast. Then he drives to work, which takes him about an hour, as modern cities expand, distances increase, and morning congestion slows down traffic more and more.

By 9:00 a worker arrives at the office. In it he is not eight hours, but nine, because one hour is spent for lunch. Due to the stupid organization of urban space, not everyone is lucky to spend their lunch break, leisurely strolling in the park with ice cream in hand. As a rule, lunch is standing in line at the nearest cafe, a snack in the office kitchen, or a sandwich hastily chewed in front of a computer monitor. And a walk in a downtown metropolis full of parked cars becomes impossible.

At 6:00 pm, the worker leaves the office to spend an hour in traffic jams. If he doesn't want to sacrifice a normal 8-hour sleep, then from 19:00 he has only four hours for dinner and "cultural time".

Already, some countries of the world are moving away from this scheme. In Belgium, Norway, Great Britain, France, Austria, Sweden, the working week is 35 to 37 hours. Holidays for Danes and Norwegians lasts 35 days.

Leftist sociologists believe that the work week should be even shorter. Most suggest working six hours a day. André Gorcet calls the 25-hour work week normal. Experts from the New Economic Foundation advocate for a 21-hour week. American Timothy Ferriss has published a book in which he tells how to work no more than four hours a day.

Anarchist Bob Black proposes to abolish labor altogether, citing as an example the "working day" of the Australian aborigines and African Bushmen, who spend only four hours a day to get their food.