Modern liberal rewriting of the industrial revolution focuses on foul factories, and people toiling at assembly lines. Forgotten are the onerous tasks these same people, and their children, were toiling at before the factories were there. And after the revolution, these people could now purchase things that only the rich used to have.

They could barely afford bread on factory wages. That's why we have unions now.

Eleven-year-old Gus Rangnow worked in a Kensington hosiery factory, where he packed stockings, hour after hour, for eleven hours each day. He worked nearly that long on Saturdays. The long days and lack of sleep showed in his face, which a reporter described as the face of an old person.

Eddie Dunphy was twelve. For eleven hours each day, he sat on a high stool and handed thread to the worker next to him. Dangerous machinery clanked and whirled around him. He knew to be careful. He had seen the crushed hands and missing fingers of the boys and girls.

Ten-year-old James Ashworth walked all day, carrying bundles of yarn from one department to the next. The bundles weighed seventy-five pounds, too much for any child whose bones were still growing. Already, James's stooped back and shoulders showed signs of deformity: he looked like an old man.

Gus, Eddie, and James lived and worked in Kensington, Pennsylvania, a mill district outside Philadelphia. In 1903, most Kensington families found work at the mills, where everything from coats to dresses to shirts to stockings to carpets were produced. As in other mills and factories throughout the country, Kensington children doffed bobbins, tended spinning looms and spindles, cleaned machinery, swept floors, and performed countless other jobs.

The mill workers wanted their weekly hours reduced from sixty to fifty-five. For sixteen thousand mill children like Gus, James, and Eddie, five fewer work hours meant more time to play or attend night school. According to one reformer, many working children could barely read or even spell their own names.

In most labor struggles for a shorter workweek, the workers demanded that their hours be reduced and their wages remain the same. Though wages were already low, the Kensington workers agreed to accept reduced wages in return for a shorter workweek. In April 1903, the Kensington workers sent a delegation to approach the mill owners. The delegation requested that the workweek be reduced by five hours.

The mill owners refused, even though it is unlikely that their profits would have been affected. New machinery made it possible for workers to produce as much in fifty-five hours as they did in sixty. Because most workers were paid by the piece, production mattered, not the number of hours.

So why did the owners refuse? They claimed that the working conditions in their factories were already better than the workers deserved. They called the workers' grievances and threats of a strike unfair and unjust.

The mill owners met at the Manufacturers' Club in Philadelphia and formed their own association. They promised they wouldn't give in to the workers' demands. To ensure that each mill owner remained resolute, the association developed a forfeit plan. Each owner contributed a substantial amount of money to a forfeit pool: the amount of the forfeit depended upon the size of the factory and the amount of the equipment it had. In the event of a strike, any mill owner who gave in to the workers' demands would lose his forfeited money.

The workers announced a strike for Monday morning, June 1, 1903. On that morning, six hundred mills opened as usual. The bosses and owners waited for the stream of children, women, and men to come through the doors. But most of the workers never came. Nearly one hundred thousand workers, including sixteen thousand children, stayed home. The Kensington mill strike of 1903 had begun.

Bartoletti, Susan Campbell. Kids On Strike! Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999. pp.108-111.

This strike was broken and the strikers returned to work on August 17 to the same conditions because they had only starvation as their other choice.

During the ferocious Lawrence, MA, strike of 1912, the result of wage and working hour cuts with no cut in required rate of productivity, police and state militias were shooting people in the streets. Families, worried about their children's safety, began to send them out of town, using the relief funds sent from across the country by other workers. (Lawrence was an immigrant town; the practice of sending children to a more secure location was something familiar in the old country.) The authorities in Lawrence were embarrassed, first by the implication that Lawrence was unsafe for children, and second, by the reports coming out about the condition of the children themselves once they arrived at their temporary homes. They began to forbid parents from sending their children out of town.

On February 23, the Lawrence marshal declared that no more children would be permitted to leave Lawrence, not even with their parents' permission. The next morning, when 150 children and their parents arrived at the station, they were met by 200 militiamen and police, who told them: "You are not going to send any children away this morning."

Most parents became afraid and changed their minds, but forty parents remained convinced that their children would be safer elsewhere. They bought the children's tickets and proceeded through the station to board the train. The soldiers guarded the station doors, inside and outside, leaving the parents and children no way to escape.

"As soon as the children started out," said Samuel Lipson, "[the soldiers] tried to grab one child from the mother and to grab the women, trying to arrest the children. . . . One policeman took a child and threw her into the wagon and she got a black eye. She was seven years old. Even women being in the family way were arrested and dragged and pushed into the patrol wagon."

Max Bogatin, a salesman, was also horrified. "I saw them take little children and pick them up by the leg and throw them in the patrol wagon like they were mere rags. One of the women put up a little resistance and a policeman grabbed her by the neck and choked her until she was not able to resist anymore."

At the police station, the mothers were charged with neglect and improper guardianship and sent to jail. Sixteen children were taken from their mothers and sent to the poor farm.

Bartoletti, pp.172-73.

The Industrial Revolution resulted in the uprooting and impoverishment of millions of people over a period of over 75 years before labor finally organized to make possible the reaping of benefits you cite. Maybe where you live, there is no history of the human cost of industrialization, but I live in Pennsylvania, where that history is present and vivid.

Making soap was no picnic. Plowing with a mule was not fun, especially if you were a sharecropper. Working indoors among dangerous machines with a diet of bread, molasses and beans (Bartoletti, p. 158) at the ripe old age of 10 -- if you lived that long* -- was no modern paradise, either. Before you romaniticize the rise of industry, read some of the first-person accounts of the times and ask yourself if you would want to raise your children in such a place.

Regards--
Mary Anne

*Infant mortality in Lawrence among workers hovered at 20% of all live births at the beginning of the 20th century.