The Voice of Labour

[Zor]

Imagine a woman in England in the year 1860, let's call her Emily. She lives in an apartment with her husband, her old mother and her six children with a seventh on the way. It is not a big apartment by any means, two rooms with maybe thirty square meters. fifteen more of these are stuffed into a four story building. There is a bed, a small stove, a chair, some mattresses and blankets, a table with some benches, a few old cabinets and a chamber pot. It is cold and damp, there is not much to burn. Mostly they burn old bits of rotten wood and garbage since coal is expensive.

She and her family are woken up by a tapping on the window at five thirty, she takes out a loaf of bread which has not gone hard yet, cuts off a few slices for her family's breakfast and fills up the pitcher from the pump. This is at ground level and means carrying up a pitched up four flights of stairs. The youngest children, a two year old and a three year old are kept under the eye of Emily's grandmother, who spends her days kitting socks which she sells for a few extra pennies. One of their sons is sent off to a Dame School while the eldest three children go off to work selling newspapers and in a mustard factory. Her husband goes down to the shipyards while she goes down to the cotton mill. To get there, she walks with her husband. Partially because it is mostly in the same direction, partially because the neighborhood she lives in has a few gangs. The police have had some success at reducing the gang's ranks and making them a bit less brazen about their activities, but there are always more gangmembers coming out of the woodworks. There is never a shortage of those who have turn to a life of crime out of desperation or because they were not brought up right. The streets are dirty and full of ash and garbage. These are picked over by people in search of various things they can salvage and sell, or eat.

For Emily work consists of her operating a power loom from seven in the morning to seven at night with only a twenty minute break for lunch (Usually some bread and an apple or pear every other day) at noon. It's long hard work in a dark, noisy and hot room at a cramped work station. She has to be constantly alert because the machines will take off a finger or a hand if you do something wrong. She had seen it happen before, it is not a pretty site. Moreover, if she lost a hand her boss would sack her, toss her out and hire one of the small crowd of young women which gather at the factory's office searching for a work. Her supervisor comes down hard on anything he sees as "lollygagging" and likes to shout and be mean. For her hard work she gets ninepence a day, better than a lot of people. Her husband's job is less cramped, but involves a lot of heavy lifting and hammering and has it's perils.

When she comes home exhausted, she eats a meal of potatoes, hard cheese and peas with her family. Three of the children have to share a fork. Every Sunday they might get some bacon or sausage if they are lucky, if not they will make do with meat of indeterminate origins and at Christmas their is usually a chicken and some sweets. Emily, her mother and her children drink either water or tea when they can get it for their worn second hand teapot. Her husband buys a couple of pints every week, though fortunately he does not drink to the excess of other men, nor if he gets drunk is he violent. Most of the family's combined income is consumed with food, rent, fuel for their stove and paying for one child to get a year at the dame school in hopes that knowing one's letters will allow them to get a job which pays better and runs less of a risk of getting one's hand torn off by a machine. They don't know it, but the owner of their apartment also owns the factory that Emily works at.

That was the life of many people in the Industrial Revolution, the masses which manned the machines which manufactured merchandize which made the money money with which millionaire industrialists used to build their manors. They toiled for long hours in horrible conditions for a pittance. But make no mistake, Emily's family had it better than many others. The attitudes of the Victorian period was that government should let business be and have the market fix all problems as industrialists drove on progress in their drive for profit. While they did create an industrial base, they knew that one of the best ways to make money was to cut expenses, specifically by paying their employees as little as possible while squeezing as much work as they could out of them.

But eventually, these working class people got tired of this routine, especially after a few particularly nasty incidents and pushed for changes to be made. One lone man or woman could easily be fired and left on the streets for complaining, but they realized, bit by bit that if they spoke together they could not be so easily disposed of. So they united to do just that, left their stations and went to the streets while demanding better wages, safer working conditions, more reasonable hours and to end child labor. They protested both to employers and the government, with the men of the working classes using their newly gained votes to back candidates who campaigned on platforms to improve working conditions and wage The struggle was a long and hard one and was often met by violence to suppress it. Members of this movement to improve the conditions of laborers were often beaten or imprisoned and in some cases murdered and executed. Never the less, they kept on, they found a few supporters beyond the working classes and, bit by bit they got what they demanded. An eight hour work day, a two day weekend, improved safety and working conditions, an end to child labor and improved wages. The last bit meaning that industry had a new customer base which, now they were not spending everything they had on food and shelter, could spend some of those disposable income on consumer goods. All thanks to the hard efforts of Unionized labor. This process was not confined to England, but also happened in France, German, the US, Canada, Japan and other countries. Even today, the Unions endure stand as a vanguard against the return of such bad old days and to serve as a voice for labor.

Despite all the good they have achieved nowadays there are a large number of people which have forgotten this part of history, in some cases because of the willful promotion of ignorance by certain political bodies who have an interest in saving money in the short run by doing away with workplace safety laws and cutting wages back to a pittance. They have encouraged ignorance how bad things where in the bad old days and the fact that labor unions were created to address said crappiness. Instead they sell the same old "Market solves all problems" ideology which was promoted in the 19th century, ignore it's deficiencies and scoff at minimum wage laws and similar as "holding back industry" and similar, often packaged with religion as a spoonful of opium to help the arsenic of misinformation go down even to the people who have benefited the most from the existence of the labor movement and it's results. The antidote to this deliberate nonsense is simple: educate people in the history so that the average person has a reasonable understanding of history and not swallow such garbage which has been prepared to weaken unions to silence the voice of employees so that what good they had have fought so hard to achieve can be undone for the benefit of a few.

Zor