V.

Unrest, Protest, and Regulation

Nonetheless, as producers, industrial workers were often restless as the number of machines multiplied. Sometimes they destroyed machines. The Luddites considered them a threat to their independence and livelihood. A different reaction was to develop collective bargaining through unions (and if necessary enforced by strikes) to raise wages. While industrial workers were paid higher wages than farm labourers and there was thus an economic incentive for individuals to find industrial jobs and move into industrial towns, there were many signs of family and social unrest as rhythms of work changed along with patterns of community.

Since industry developed through alternating booms and slumps, there were also large numbers of unemployed in “bad times”, which often coincided with bad harvests when the price of food rose. The demand for cheap bread was not new, but it was louder than ever before. Yet when a large section of the new employing class, in their campaign against the Corn Laws, claimed that bread would be cheap if imports of grain were allowed into the country free of commercial duties and employment would rise with the increased exports thereby generated, many industrial workers refused to cooperate with them in attacking the landed interests as the source of all the country’s troubles. Chartism was the world’s first specifically industrial working-class movement, with industrial workers demanding political rights along with bread.

The years of most active and open protest followed the start of what was to be Britain’s first prolonged industrial slump in 1837, a depression that lasted until a boom, generated by railway expansion, in the mid-1840s. These were years when the Anti-Corn Law League, with middle-class leadership, agitated in parallel to the Chartists, both conscious of the new significance of “class” in an industrial society. The Corn Laws, protecting British agriculture from foreign imports, were finally repealed in 1846, but the Chartist demands for votes and other political rights were not conceded until later in a complex political process.

One of the working-class agitations that merged into Chartism was that of anti-Poor Law demonstrators, who campaigned against the abolition of outdoor relief for the poor and the building of workhouses, enshrined in a new Poor Law of 1834. In Britain, and even more conspicuously in industrialized Germany later in the century, the demand for social security was to figure on the political agenda.

So, too, was the demand for regulation of hours of labour and conditions of labour, beginning with the hours and conditions of work of women and children in the new textiles factories in the earliest Factory Reform Acts. It was through a vigorous Ten Hours agitation, backed by philanthropists concerned especially with the “plight” of children, that a Ten Hours Act was passed in 1847. Already there had been earlier acts, based on investigative inquiries, introducing the essential machinery of inspection, and through a sequence of later acts of Parliament, a network of controls was introduced that by the beginning of the 20th century had become a factory code. If Britain had launched the world’s first specifically working-class movement, it had also carried through, therefore, never without opposition, the first attempts to regulate conditions of work through legislation and administration. The opposition to reducing hours had been led by one of the most influential British political economists, Nassau Senior, and it was a radical minister, Charles Poulett Thomson, who urged that: “In pursuing a gradually progressive but steady approach to a liberal system, we must tamper as little as possible with manufacturing or commercial industry by legislative regulation. Like love, its workings must be free as air; for at sight of human ties, it will spread the light wings of capital and fly away from bondage ... The elements of industry may be expressed in one word—competition.”