Why Workers Welcomed Long Hours of Industrial Revolution

March 19 (Bloomberg) -- Writers and academics often show aninteresting ambivalence about industrialization. Today, theyregard it as a blessing, the single-most-effective way to liftpeople out of poverty. But in thinking about Britain’sIndustrial Revolution, they have tended to reach the oppositeconclusion: The rise of the factory, they argue, caused the endof more “natural” working hours, introduced more exploitativeemployment patterns and dehumanized the experience of labor. Itrobbed workers of their autonomy and dignity.

Yet if we turn to the writing of laborers themselves, wefind that they didn’t share the historians’ gloomy assessment.Starting in the early 19th century, working people in Britainbegan to write autobiographies and memoirs in ever greaternumbers. Men (and occasionally women) who worked in factoriesand mines, as shoemakers and carpenters, and on the land, pennedtheir stories, and inevitably touched on the large part of theirlife devoted to labor. In the process, they produced aremarkable account of the Industrial Revolution from theperspective of those who felt its effects firsthand -- one thatlooks very different from the standard historical narrative.