Miscellany

WORKERS AND “WAGE SLAVES”
•	One ugly outgrown of the factory system was an increasingly acute labor problem. 
o	Hitherto manufacturing had been done in the home or in the small shop, where the craftsman and his apprentice could maintain intimate and friendly relationship.
o	The industrial revolution submerged this personal association in the impersonal ownership of stuffy factories in “spindle cities.”
•	Clearly the early factory system did not shower benefits evenly on all. Owners waxed fat, while the working people wasted away at their workbenches.
o	Hours were long, wages were low, and meals were skimpy. Workers were forced to toil in unsanitary buildings that were poorly ventilated, lighted, and heated. They were forbidden by law to form labor unions to raise wages.
•	Especially vulnerable to be exploited were child workers. 1820, half the nation’s industrial toilers were children under 10 years of age. They were mentally blighted, emotionally starved, physically stunned, and even brutally whipped.
•	By contrast, the lot of most adult wage workers improved markedly in the 1820s and 1830s when the laboring man was given the right to vote.
o	They set goals such as a 10 hour day, higher wages, and tolerable working conditions, they demanded public education for their children and an end to the inhuman practice of imprisonment for debt.
•	 Laborers learned that their strongest weapon was to lay down their tool, even with the risk of prosecution.
o	Dozens of strikes erupted in the 1830s and 1840s, most of them for higher wages, some for the ten-hour day and a few for unusual goals.
o	The workers usually lost more strikes then they won, the employer could hire strikebreakers 
•	Labor unions formed with some 300,00 trade unionists, but were dashed following the depression of 1837.
•	The supreme court case of Massachusetts ruled in the case of Commonwealth v. Hunt that labor unions were not illegal conspiracies, provided their methods. It did not legalize the strike overnight, but was a significant signpost of the times.