This Day in Labor History: July 1, 1847

On July 1, 1847, the Factories Act of 1847 in Britain went into effect. This law limited hours in textile mills for women and children under 18 to 10 per day. It also lowered the weekly hours to 63. The idea here was that by officially limiting the hours for women and children, it would effectively do the same for men since you couldn’t really run a textile mill with just men given the reality of who worked in these factories. This is a critical moment in the global fight against child labor.

That the mill towns of England were horrifying is well known today. Basically, the Industrial Revolution started and no one knew or cared what would happen to the workers who entered these mills. Of course people were already poor and many came in from rural England or Wales or Scotland, where they had nothing to begin with. But what no one quite anticipated was how horrifying the cities would become and what this would mean for health, for crime, for life expectancy, and for every other social issue. And of course the unregulated city was a massive disaster. When the Industrial Revolution extended into the United States after 1800, the horrors of places such as Manchester and Birmingham combined with American elites’ preexisting antipathy for cities to lead to intentional designs to not recreate these hellholes. Cities such as Lowell, Massachusetts developed on an experimental basis. But it didn’t really work, as the realities of capitalism and the ease by which one could open a factory given the lack of required capital investment put endlessly heavy downward weight on profits.

So the British, having dealt with these problems for longer and also in the midst of reforms that slowly brought a semblance of real democracy to the country, were far ahead of Americans in seeing the need for government intervention if the problems of the cities were to be fixed. Of course many British manufacturers opposed this idea on principle. This was the great era of fundamentalist free market thinking after all–or perhaps I should say the first era, since we clearly today live in the second era. The classical liberals is ascent believed that people had the “right” to sell their labor at whatever price they agreed to. Of course, this intellectual principle completely ignored power relationships between employer and worker and did so quite intentionally. Telling people they have a right to starve is some kind of politics, but it was a very real thing then.

But by the early 1830s, as the British people were demanding more direct democracy, the movement for an hours bill began to gain traction. Importantly, it was not just a class warfare kind of bill, if you want to use that language. For sure, nascent labor organizations and radicals supported the idea. But so did some wealthy people who were horrified at what the Industrial Revolution had wrought. John Fielden, for example, was a mill owner himself. Second generation in fact; like many early mill workers, he started at age 10 in his father’s works because that’s simply what one did then. He strongly supported factory reform legislation during his fifteen years in Parliament, which also ended in 1847. Fielden would get the Ten Hours Act, as it was widely known, through Parliament, despite being affiliated with neither the Whigs nor Tories.

In fact, the British had passed a precursor bill. The Factory Act of 1833 created an eight-hour day for workers between the ages of 9 and 13 and a twelve hour day for workers aged 14-18. But it had no meaningful enforcement mechanism and thus was effectively useless. So the fourteen years in between these two bills had seen a lot of debate over what to do, at least when the Whigs held power. The Tories of course didn’t care what happened to children. Some things never change. The key to change in 1847 was the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846, reducing trade restrictions in the UK, the subsequent fall of John Peel’s administration because of the intra-Tory split those caused, and the rise of the Whigs into power. There was significant support for the Ten Hour Law among workers themselves, who were at best in proto-unions at this time but were making their feelings heard, as well as large sections of the Anglican church.

Naturally, this law was far from perfect. It required further refinement because of loopholes that its authors hadn’t foreseen and that was accomplished in 1850 and then a further law was passed in 1853. Enforcement still remained difficult. We were far from the era of the activist state and most of the time; lawmakers couldn’t yet foresee what would really be needed to enforce regulatory law. But after this, child labor did decline in Britain. Was this because of the law or because technological change required fewer workers or because of labor activism? People can debate whether the Factory Act was the catalyst or merely reflective of larger sentiment, but it doesn’t matter so much. It is still a pioneering piece of legislation in the fight against child labor and for limitations in working hours. Moreover, like basically every piece of labor legislation in every country since the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution, the economic catastrophe predicted by opponents did not happen. In fact, the economy just kept on running perfectly smoothly without kids being worked 15 hours a day. Reminds of the freakouts over minimum wage legislation today filled with dire predictions that suddenly disappear after the wages rise.

For Karl Marx, the impact of this law was huge. He talked about it briefly in The Communist Manifesto, published the next year. He then stated in 1864:

“This struggle about the legal restriction of the hours of labour raged more fiercely since; apart from avarice, it told indeed upon the great contest between the blind rule of the supply and demand laws which form the political economy of the middle class, a social production subjected to a foreseeing social control which forms the political economy of the working class. Hence the Ten Hours’ Bill was not only a great practical success; it was the victory of a principle; it was the first time that in broad daylight the political economy of the middle class succumbed ignominiously, ludicrously, before the political economy of the working class.”

It would take until 1938 for the United States to adopt such a bill and get it through the right-wing Supreme Court. The future of the Fair Labor Standards Act here is quite questionable.

This is the 570th post in this series. Previous posts are archived here.