Child Labor and Factory Legislation

History of Welfare Development in UK

• Until the beginning of the 19th century, social policy in England had been used to suppress the
laboring classes in the interest of the land owners, the manufacturers, and the merchants.
• The development of the textile mills in the 19 th century offered an unprecedented opportunity
to use the children of paupers. They were offered to textile manufacturers as cheap labor.
• The fate of these children became deplorable. Some were as young as four years of age, and
there was no legal limitation of their working hours.
• “Slappers” kept them awake by whipping them when they fell asleep. Typically such poor
children leased out to a textile mill got up at four or five in the morning.
• The younger ones had to pick up cotton waste from the factory floor all day.
• Children of six or seven years were put to the spinning wheel or to the loom where their small,
deft, flexible fingers could throw the thread quicker than adults.
• The children usually had half an hour for a frugal breakfast and an hour for a lunch of similar
quality.
• During working hours they had to stand and were not allowed to leave their workplace,
outside of the meals, to go to the toilet or to drink water.
• Any child who left his or her station was brutally punished by whipping.
• As a rule, the child’s labor was completed after five or six in the evening, often hours later, so
that the working day was sometimes sixteen to eighteen hours long.
• The lack of sleep, of fresh air and sunshine, of rest, and of any vacation made many of these
children undernourished, weak, and sick.
• Many died in their teens, when they had worked themselves to death.
• Health and Morals Act of 1802
• The first step in the direction of the protection of these children was the Health and Morals
Act of 1802.
• It was passed on the initiative of Sir Robert Peel, who objected to the use of young children in
labor camps at the textile mills.
• The statue of 1802 restricted the working hours of “Pauper apprentices” to twelve hours a day
and forbade night work for children.
• However, the law only applied to children leased out from the poorhouses.
• Cotton mill owners, who hired children directly from their parents, could continue to exploit
them.
• Concerned about these conditions, Peel and others pursued the demand for protection of
working children against mistreatment and overwork.
• Factory Act of 1833
• This movement led to the enactment of the Factory Act of 1833, which prohibited the
employment of children under nine in the textile industry and limited daily working hours for
children.
• At the suggestion of Edwin Chadwick, the law introduced the appointment of factory
inspectors under a central national office.
• Factory Act of 1847
• An amendment of the Factory Act of 1847 ordered a daily maximum of ten working hours for
women and children under eighteen years.
• The industrial development of England and the economic crisis that accompanied the
introduction of modern machinery led to several periods of unemployment.
• Local boards of guardians were forced to borrow money to maintain the workhouses or to
provide public works in times of widespread unemployment.
• Even so, conditions in many workhouses were unbearable. Most workhouses had inadequate
sanitary facilities, poor ventilation, and no medical and nursing care for the sick and the aged.
• Workhouse superintendents and attendants were, as a rule, ignorant and callous.
• In 1871, the Local Government Board was founded to take over the functions of the Board of
Health and the Poor Law Board.
• The new board maintained the policy of advocating the workhouse test and of warning the
boards of guardians against a liberal granting of outdoor relief.
• The Local Government Board failed to recognize that such stern treatment usually fell on
broken-down, depressed, and feeble persons who could not obtain employment and needed
encouragement and help.
• Source: Book title “Introduction to Social Welfare”
Authors: Walter A. Friedlander
Robert Z. Apte