--In the existing condition of the trade (the time of the cotton famine), it was greatly to the
advantage
of the operatives to work 12 hours per day, and make wages when they could.
Marx - Capital-Volume-I
?
?
Pecentage of Adult Females Engaged
in Manufactures
18. 0 34. 9 20. 4
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 30. 0
? ? 26. 0
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 17. 2
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 19. 3
? ? 13. 9
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? --
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Kind of Cotton Do. Worsted Female
Occupation
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Do.
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Silk
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Do.
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Earthenware
? ? ? ? ? ? ? Do.
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? --
? ? ? ? 141 It is well known with what reluctance the English --Free-traders,? gave up the protective duty on the silk manufacture. Instead of the protection against French importation, the absence of protection to English factory children now serves their turn.
142 During 1859 and 1860, the zenith years of the English cotton industry, some manufacturers tried, by the decoy bait of higher wages for over-time, to reconcile the adult male operatives to an extension of the working day. The hand-mule spinners and self-actor mincers put an end to the experiment by a petition to their employers in which they say, --Plainly speaking, our lives are to us a burthen; and, while we are confined to the mills nearly two days a week more than the other operatives of the country, we feel like helots in the land, and that we are perpetuating a system injurious to ourselves and future generations. . . . This, therefore, is to give you most respectful notice that when we commence work again after the Christmas and New Year's holidays, we shall work 60 hours per week, and no more, or from six to six, with one hour and a half out. ? (Reports, &rc. , for 30th April, 1860, p. 30. )
143 On the means that the wording of this Act afforded for its violation of the Parliamentary Return --Factories Regulation Act? (6th August, 1859), and in it Leonard Horner's --Suggestions for amending the Factory Acts to enable the Inspectors to prevent illegal working, now becoming very prevalent. ?
144 Children of the age of 8 years and upwards, have, indeed, been employed from 6 a. m. to 9 p. m. during the last half year in my district. ? (Reports, &c. , for 31st October, 1857, p. 39. )
145 --The Printworks' Act is admitted to be a failure both with reference to its educational and protective provisions. ? (Reports, &c. , for 31st October, 1862, p. 52. )
? 207 Chapter 10
146 Thus, e. g. , E. Potter in a letter to the Times of March 24th, 1863. The Times reminded him of the maoufacturers' revolt against the Ten Hours' Bill.
147 Thus, among others, Mr. W. Newmarch, collaborator and editor of Tooke's --History of Prices. ? Is it a scientific advance to make cowardly concessions to public opinion?
148 The Act passed in 1860, determined that, in regard to dye and bleachworks, the working day should be fixed on August 1st, 1861, provisionally at 12 hours, and definitely on August 1st, 1862, at 10 hours, i. e. , at 101/2 hours for ordinary days, and 71/2 for Saturday. Now, when the fatal year, 1862, came, the old farce was repeated. Besides, the manufacturers petitioned Parliament to allow the employment of young persons and women for 12 hours during one year longer.
--In the existing condition of the trade (the time of the cotton famine), it was greatly to the advantage of the operatives to work 12 hours per day, and make wages when they could. ? A bill to this effect had been brought in, --and it was mainly due to the action of the operative bleachers in Scotland that the bill was abandoned. ? (Reports, &:c. , for 31st October, 1862, pp. 14-15. ) Thus defeated by the very workpeople, in whose name it pretended to speak, Capital discovered, with the help of lawyer spectacles, that the Act of 1860, drawn up, like all the Acts of Parliament for the --protection of labour,? in equivocal phrases, gave them a pretext to exclude from its working the calenderers and finishers. English jurisprudence, ever the faithful servant of capital, sanctioned in the Court of Common Pleas this piece of pettifogging. --The operatives have been greatly disappointed . . . they have complained of over-work, and it is greatly to be regretted that the clear intention of the legislature should have failed by reason of a faulty definition. ? (l. c. , p. 18. )
149 The --open-air bleachers? had evaded the law of 1860, by means of the lie that no women worked at it in the night. The lie was exposed by the Factory Inspectors, and at the same time Parliament was, by petitions from the operatives, bereft of its notions as to the cool meadow-fragrance, in which bleaching in the open-air was reported to take place. In this aerial bleaching, drying-rooms were used at temperatures of from 90? to 100? Fahrenheit, in which the work was done for the most part by girls. --Cooling? is the technical expression for their occasional escape from the drying-rooms into the fresh air. --Fifteen girls in stoves. Heat from 80? to 90? for linens, and 100? and upwards for cambrics. Twelve girls ironing and doing-up in a small room about 10 feet square, in the centre of which is a close stove. The girls stand round the stove, which throws out a terrific heat, and dries the cambrics rapidly for the ironers. The hours of work for these hands are unlimited. If busy, they work till 9 or 12 at night for successive nights. ? (Reports, &c. , for 31st October, 1862, p. 56. ) A medical man states: --No special hours are allowed for cooling, but if the temperature gets too high, or the workers' hands get soiled from perspiration, they are allowed to go out for a few minutes. . . . My experience, which is considerable, in treating the diseases of stove workers, compels me to express the opinion that their sanitary condition is by no means so high as that of the operatives in a spinning factory (and Capital, in its memorials to Parliament, had painted them as floridly healthy after the manner of Rubens. ) The diseases most observable amongst them are phthisis, bronchitis, irregularity of uterine functions, hysteria in its most aggravated forms, and rheumatism. All of these, I believe, are either directly or indirectly induced by the impure, overheated air of the apartments in which the hands are employed and the want of sufficient comfortable clothing to protect them from the cold, damp atmosphere, in winter, when going to their homes. ? (l. c. , pp. 56-57. ) The Factory Inspectors remarked on the supplementary law of 1860, torn from these open-air bleachers: --The Act has not only failed to afford that protection to the workers which it appears to offer, but contains a clause . . . apparently so worded that, unless persons are detected working after 8 o'clock at night they appear to come under no protective provisions at all, and if they do so work the mode of proof is so doubtful that a conviction can scarcely follow. ? (l. c. , p. 52. ) --To all intents and purposes, therefore, as an Act for any benevolent or educational purpose, it is a failure; since it can scarcely be called benevolent to permit, which is tantamount to compelling, women and children to work 14 hours a day with or without meals, as the
? ? 208 Chapter 10
case may be, and perhaps for longer hours than these, without limit as to age, without reference to sex, and without regard to the social habits of the families of the neighbourhood, in which such works (bleaching and dyeing) are situated. ? (Reports, &c. , for 30th April, 1863, p. 40. )
150 Note to the 2nd Ed. Since 1866, when I wrote the above passages, a reaction has again set in.
151 --The conduct of each of these classes (capitalists and workmen) has been the result of the relative
situation in which they have been placed. ? (Reports, &c. , for 31st October, 1848, p. 113. )
152 --The employments, placed under restriction, were connected with the manufacture of textile fabrics by the aid of steam or water-power. There were two conditions to which an employment must be subject to cause it to be inspected, viz. , the use of steam or waterpower, and the manufacture of certain specified fibre. ? (Reports, &c. , for 31st October, 1864, p. 8. )
153 On the condition of so-called domestic industries, specially valuable materials are to be found in the latest reports of the Children's Employment Commission.
154 --The Acts of last Session (1864) . . . embrace a diversity of occupations, the customs in which differ greatly, and the use of mechanical power to give motion to machinery is no longer one of the elements necessary. as formerly, to constitute, in legal phrase, a ? Factory. '? (Reports, &c. , for 31st Octaber, 1864, p. 8. )
155 Belgium, the paradise of Continental Liberalism, shows no trace of this movement. Even in the coal and metal mines labourers of both sexes, and all ages, are consumed, in perfect --freedom? at any period and through any length of time. Of every 1,000 persons employed there, 733 are men, 88 women. 135 boys, and 44 girls under 16; in the blast furnaces, &c. , of every 1,000, 668 are men, 149 women, 98 boys, and 85 girls under 16. Add to this the low wages for the enormous exploitation of mature and immature labour-power. The average daily pay for a man is 2s. 8d. . for a woman, 1s. 8d. . for a boy. 1s. 21/2d. As a result, Belgium had in 1863, as compared with 1850, nearly doubled both the amount and the value of its exports of coal, iron, &c.
156 Robert Owen, soon after 1810, not only maintained the necessity of a limitation of the working day in theory, but actually introduced the 10 hours' day into his factory at New Lanark. This was laughed at as a communistic Utopia; so were his --Combination of children's education with productive labour and the Co-operative Societies of Workingmen? , first called into being by him. To-day, the first Utopia is a Factory Act, the second figures as an official phrase in all Factory Acts, the third is already being used as a cloak for reactionary humbug.
157 Ure: --French translation, Philosophie des Manufactures. ? Paris, 1836, Vol. II, pp. 39, 40, 67, 77, &c.
158 In the Compte Rendu of the International Statistical Congress at Paris, 1855, it is stated: --The French law, which limits the length of daily labour in factories and workshops to 12 hours, does not confine this work to definite fixed hours. For children's labour only the work-time is prescribed as between 5 a. m. and 9 p. m. Therefore, some of the masters use the right which this fatal silence gives them to keep their works going, without intermission, day in, day out, possibly with the exception of Sunday. For this purpose they use two different sets of workers, of whom neither is in the workshop more than 12 hours at a time, but the work of the establishment lasts day and night. The law is satisfied, but is humanity? ? Besides --the destructive influence of night-labour on the human organism,? stress is also laid upon --the fatal influence of the association of the two sexes by night in the same badly-lighted workshops. ?
159 --For instance, there is within my district one occupier who, within the same curtilage, is at the same time a bleacher and dyer under the Bleaching and Dyeing Works Act, a printer under the Print Works Act, and a finisher under the Factory Act. ? (Report of Mr. Baker, in Reports, lic. , for October 31st, 1861, p. 20. ) After enumerating the different provisions of these Acts, and the complications
? ? 209 Chapter 10
arising from them, Mr. Baker says: --It will hence appear that it must be very difficult to secure the execution of these three Acts of Parliament where the occupier chooses to evade the law. ? But what is assured to the lawyers by this is law-suits.
160 Thus the Factory Inspectors at last venture to say: --These objections (of capital to the legal limitation of the working day) must succumb before the broad principle of the rights of labour. . . . There is a time when the master's right in his workman's labour ceases, and his time becomes his own, even if there were no exhaustion in the question. ? (Reports, &c. , for 31 st Oct. , 1862, p. 54. )
161 --We, the workers of Dunkirk, declare that the length of time of labour required under the present system is too great, and that, far from leaving the worker time for rest and education, it plunges him into a condition of servitude but little better than slavery. That is why we decide that 8 hours are enough for a working day, and ought to be legally recognised as enough; why we call to our help that powerful lever, the press; . . . and why we shall consider all those that refuse us this help as enemies of the reform of labour and of the rights of the labourer. ? (Resolution of the Working Men of Dunkirk, New York State, 1866. )
162 Reports, &c. , for Oct. , 1848, p. 112.
163 --The proceedings (the manoeuvres of capital, e. g. , from 1848-50) have afforded, moreover, incontrovertible proof of the fallacy of the assertion so often advanced, that operatives need no protection, but may be considered as free agents in the disposal of the only property which they possess -- the labour of their hands and the sweat of their brows. ? (Reports, &c. , for April 30th, 1850, p. 45. ) --Free labour (if so it may be termed) even in a free country, requires the strong arm of the law to protect it. ? (Reports, &c. , for October 31st, 1864, p. 34. ) --To permit, which is tantamount to compelling . . . to work 14 hours a day with or without meals,? &c. (Repts. , &c. , for April 30th, 1863, p. 40. )
164 Friedrich Engels, l. c. , p. 5.
165 The 10 Hours' Act has, in the branches of industry that come under it, --put an end to the premature decrepitude of the former long-hour workers. ? (Reports, &c. , for 31st Oct. , 1859, p. 47. ) --Capital (in factories) can never be employed in keeping the machinery in motion beyond a limited time, without certain injury to the health and morals of the labourers employed; and they are not in a position to protect themselves. ? (l. c. , p. 8)
166 --A still greater boon is the distinction at last made clear between the worker's own time and his master's.
in Manufactures
18. 0 34. 9 20. 4
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 30. 0
? ? 26. 0
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 17. 2
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 19. 3
? ? 13. 9
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? --
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Kind of Cotton Do. Worsted Female
Occupation
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Do.
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Silk
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Do.
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Earthenware
? ? ? ? ? ? ? Do.
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? --
? ? ? ? 141 It is well known with what reluctance the English --Free-traders,? gave up the protective duty on the silk manufacture. Instead of the protection against French importation, the absence of protection to English factory children now serves their turn.
142 During 1859 and 1860, the zenith years of the English cotton industry, some manufacturers tried, by the decoy bait of higher wages for over-time, to reconcile the adult male operatives to an extension of the working day. The hand-mule spinners and self-actor mincers put an end to the experiment by a petition to their employers in which they say, --Plainly speaking, our lives are to us a burthen; and, while we are confined to the mills nearly two days a week more than the other operatives of the country, we feel like helots in the land, and that we are perpetuating a system injurious to ourselves and future generations. . . . This, therefore, is to give you most respectful notice that when we commence work again after the Christmas and New Year's holidays, we shall work 60 hours per week, and no more, or from six to six, with one hour and a half out. ? (Reports, &rc. , for 30th April, 1860, p. 30. )
143 On the means that the wording of this Act afforded for its violation of the Parliamentary Return --Factories Regulation Act? (6th August, 1859), and in it Leonard Horner's --Suggestions for amending the Factory Acts to enable the Inspectors to prevent illegal working, now becoming very prevalent. ?
144 Children of the age of 8 years and upwards, have, indeed, been employed from 6 a. m. to 9 p. m. during the last half year in my district. ? (Reports, &c. , for 31st October, 1857, p. 39. )
145 --The Printworks' Act is admitted to be a failure both with reference to its educational and protective provisions. ? (Reports, &c. , for 31st October, 1862, p. 52. )
? 207 Chapter 10
146 Thus, e. g. , E. Potter in a letter to the Times of March 24th, 1863. The Times reminded him of the maoufacturers' revolt against the Ten Hours' Bill.
147 Thus, among others, Mr. W. Newmarch, collaborator and editor of Tooke's --History of Prices. ? Is it a scientific advance to make cowardly concessions to public opinion?
148 The Act passed in 1860, determined that, in regard to dye and bleachworks, the working day should be fixed on August 1st, 1861, provisionally at 12 hours, and definitely on August 1st, 1862, at 10 hours, i. e. , at 101/2 hours for ordinary days, and 71/2 for Saturday. Now, when the fatal year, 1862, came, the old farce was repeated. Besides, the manufacturers petitioned Parliament to allow the employment of young persons and women for 12 hours during one year longer.
--In the existing condition of the trade (the time of the cotton famine), it was greatly to the advantage of the operatives to work 12 hours per day, and make wages when they could. ? A bill to this effect had been brought in, --and it was mainly due to the action of the operative bleachers in Scotland that the bill was abandoned. ? (Reports, &:c. , for 31st October, 1862, pp. 14-15. ) Thus defeated by the very workpeople, in whose name it pretended to speak, Capital discovered, with the help of lawyer spectacles, that the Act of 1860, drawn up, like all the Acts of Parliament for the --protection of labour,? in equivocal phrases, gave them a pretext to exclude from its working the calenderers and finishers. English jurisprudence, ever the faithful servant of capital, sanctioned in the Court of Common Pleas this piece of pettifogging. --The operatives have been greatly disappointed . . . they have complained of over-work, and it is greatly to be regretted that the clear intention of the legislature should have failed by reason of a faulty definition. ? (l. c. , p. 18. )
149 The --open-air bleachers? had evaded the law of 1860, by means of the lie that no women worked at it in the night. The lie was exposed by the Factory Inspectors, and at the same time Parliament was, by petitions from the operatives, bereft of its notions as to the cool meadow-fragrance, in which bleaching in the open-air was reported to take place. In this aerial bleaching, drying-rooms were used at temperatures of from 90? to 100? Fahrenheit, in which the work was done for the most part by girls. --Cooling? is the technical expression for their occasional escape from the drying-rooms into the fresh air. --Fifteen girls in stoves. Heat from 80? to 90? for linens, and 100? and upwards for cambrics. Twelve girls ironing and doing-up in a small room about 10 feet square, in the centre of which is a close stove. The girls stand round the stove, which throws out a terrific heat, and dries the cambrics rapidly for the ironers. The hours of work for these hands are unlimited. If busy, they work till 9 or 12 at night for successive nights. ? (Reports, &c. , for 31st October, 1862, p. 56. ) A medical man states: --No special hours are allowed for cooling, but if the temperature gets too high, or the workers' hands get soiled from perspiration, they are allowed to go out for a few minutes. . . . My experience, which is considerable, in treating the diseases of stove workers, compels me to express the opinion that their sanitary condition is by no means so high as that of the operatives in a spinning factory (and Capital, in its memorials to Parliament, had painted them as floridly healthy after the manner of Rubens. ) The diseases most observable amongst them are phthisis, bronchitis, irregularity of uterine functions, hysteria in its most aggravated forms, and rheumatism. All of these, I believe, are either directly or indirectly induced by the impure, overheated air of the apartments in which the hands are employed and the want of sufficient comfortable clothing to protect them from the cold, damp atmosphere, in winter, when going to their homes. ? (l. c. , pp. 56-57. ) The Factory Inspectors remarked on the supplementary law of 1860, torn from these open-air bleachers: --The Act has not only failed to afford that protection to the workers which it appears to offer, but contains a clause . . . apparently so worded that, unless persons are detected working after 8 o'clock at night they appear to come under no protective provisions at all, and if they do so work the mode of proof is so doubtful that a conviction can scarcely follow. ? (l. c. , p. 52. ) --To all intents and purposes, therefore, as an Act for any benevolent or educational purpose, it is a failure; since it can scarcely be called benevolent to permit, which is tantamount to compelling, women and children to work 14 hours a day with or without meals, as the
? ? 208 Chapter 10
case may be, and perhaps for longer hours than these, without limit as to age, without reference to sex, and without regard to the social habits of the families of the neighbourhood, in which such works (bleaching and dyeing) are situated. ? (Reports, &c. , for 30th April, 1863, p. 40. )
150 Note to the 2nd Ed. Since 1866, when I wrote the above passages, a reaction has again set in.
151 --The conduct of each of these classes (capitalists and workmen) has been the result of the relative
situation in which they have been placed. ? (Reports, &c. , for 31st October, 1848, p. 113. )
152 --The employments, placed under restriction, were connected with the manufacture of textile fabrics by the aid of steam or water-power. There were two conditions to which an employment must be subject to cause it to be inspected, viz. , the use of steam or waterpower, and the manufacture of certain specified fibre. ? (Reports, &c. , for 31st October, 1864, p. 8. )
153 On the condition of so-called domestic industries, specially valuable materials are to be found in the latest reports of the Children's Employment Commission.
154 --The Acts of last Session (1864) . . . embrace a diversity of occupations, the customs in which differ greatly, and the use of mechanical power to give motion to machinery is no longer one of the elements necessary. as formerly, to constitute, in legal phrase, a ? Factory. '? (Reports, &c. , for 31st Octaber, 1864, p. 8. )
155 Belgium, the paradise of Continental Liberalism, shows no trace of this movement. Even in the coal and metal mines labourers of both sexes, and all ages, are consumed, in perfect --freedom? at any period and through any length of time. Of every 1,000 persons employed there, 733 are men, 88 women. 135 boys, and 44 girls under 16; in the blast furnaces, &c. , of every 1,000, 668 are men, 149 women, 98 boys, and 85 girls under 16. Add to this the low wages for the enormous exploitation of mature and immature labour-power. The average daily pay for a man is 2s. 8d. . for a woman, 1s. 8d. . for a boy. 1s. 21/2d. As a result, Belgium had in 1863, as compared with 1850, nearly doubled both the amount and the value of its exports of coal, iron, &c.
156 Robert Owen, soon after 1810, not only maintained the necessity of a limitation of the working day in theory, but actually introduced the 10 hours' day into his factory at New Lanark. This was laughed at as a communistic Utopia; so were his --Combination of children's education with productive labour and the Co-operative Societies of Workingmen? , first called into being by him. To-day, the first Utopia is a Factory Act, the second figures as an official phrase in all Factory Acts, the third is already being used as a cloak for reactionary humbug.
157 Ure: --French translation, Philosophie des Manufactures. ? Paris, 1836, Vol. II, pp. 39, 40, 67, 77, &c.
158 In the Compte Rendu of the International Statistical Congress at Paris, 1855, it is stated: --The French law, which limits the length of daily labour in factories and workshops to 12 hours, does not confine this work to definite fixed hours. For children's labour only the work-time is prescribed as between 5 a. m. and 9 p. m. Therefore, some of the masters use the right which this fatal silence gives them to keep their works going, without intermission, day in, day out, possibly with the exception of Sunday. For this purpose they use two different sets of workers, of whom neither is in the workshop more than 12 hours at a time, but the work of the establishment lasts day and night. The law is satisfied, but is humanity? ? Besides --the destructive influence of night-labour on the human organism,? stress is also laid upon --the fatal influence of the association of the two sexes by night in the same badly-lighted workshops. ?
159 --For instance, there is within my district one occupier who, within the same curtilage, is at the same time a bleacher and dyer under the Bleaching and Dyeing Works Act, a printer under the Print Works Act, and a finisher under the Factory Act. ? (Report of Mr. Baker, in Reports, lic. , for October 31st, 1861, p. 20. ) After enumerating the different provisions of these Acts, and the complications
? ? 209 Chapter 10
arising from them, Mr. Baker says: --It will hence appear that it must be very difficult to secure the execution of these three Acts of Parliament where the occupier chooses to evade the law. ? But what is assured to the lawyers by this is law-suits.
160 Thus the Factory Inspectors at last venture to say: --These objections (of capital to the legal limitation of the working day) must succumb before the broad principle of the rights of labour. . . . There is a time when the master's right in his workman's labour ceases, and his time becomes his own, even if there were no exhaustion in the question. ? (Reports, &c. , for 31 st Oct. , 1862, p. 54. )
161 --We, the workers of Dunkirk, declare that the length of time of labour required under the present system is too great, and that, far from leaving the worker time for rest and education, it plunges him into a condition of servitude but little better than slavery. That is why we decide that 8 hours are enough for a working day, and ought to be legally recognised as enough; why we call to our help that powerful lever, the press; . . . and why we shall consider all those that refuse us this help as enemies of the reform of labour and of the rights of the labourer. ? (Resolution of the Working Men of Dunkirk, New York State, 1866. )
162 Reports, &c. , for Oct. , 1848, p. 112.
163 --The proceedings (the manoeuvres of capital, e. g. , from 1848-50) have afforded, moreover, incontrovertible proof of the fallacy of the assertion so often advanced, that operatives need no protection, but may be considered as free agents in the disposal of the only property which they possess -- the labour of their hands and the sweat of their brows. ? (Reports, &c. , for April 30th, 1850, p. 45. ) --Free labour (if so it may be termed) even in a free country, requires the strong arm of the law to protect it. ? (Reports, &c. , for October 31st, 1864, p. 34. ) --To permit, which is tantamount to compelling . . . to work 14 hours a day with or without meals,? &c. (Repts. , &c. , for April 30th, 1863, p. 40. )
164 Friedrich Engels, l. c. , p. 5.
165 The 10 Hours' Act has, in the branches of industry that come under it, --put an end to the premature decrepitude of the former long-hour workers. ? (Reports, &c. , for 31st Oct. , 1859, p. 47. ) --Capital (in factories) can never be employed in keeping the machinery in motion beyond a limited time, without certain injury to the health and morals of the labourers employed; and they are not in a position to protect themselves. ? (l. c. , p. 8)
166 --A still greater boon is the distinction at last made clear between the worker's own time and his master's.
