Labor in Europe in the 19th Century: Exploitation and the Rise of Labor Unions
As Carolyn Tuttle of Lake Forest College points out, the first textile mills in England were bad enough to elicit the opprobrious condemnation of none other than Charles Dickens in the 19th century, who scorned them as "dark satanic mills" (Tuttle). By the beginning of the 19th century, the First Factory Act of 1802 was passed -- but it did little to amend the strict, severe, and inhuman conditions in which "labor shortage" issues were solved by "employing parish apprentices" (i.e., via the exploitation of child labor) (Tuttle). Dickens would become a proponent of labor and education reform in England, depicting the latter as pernicious as the former in Hard Times (a novel which portrays the headmaster of a school as stubbornly insistent on the rote memorization of "facts" and "nothing but facts" (1) -- a subtle Dickensian point indicating that education had become as mechanical and inhuman as the labor force under the weight of Industrialization). But it was not just in England that labor and education in the time of the Industrial Revolution suffered from the de-humanizing character of the era. In countries such as Spain, France, Switzerland and others, the impact of Industrialization was keenly felt. However, each country had its own customs when it came to labor and politics, and with the rise of labor unions in the 19th century, both England and the Continent began to address more directly the issues that men like Dickens highlighted in their own homelands. This paper will show how labor unions and various trends in Europe in the 19th century correlated to bring an end to the exploitation of children in factories and to provide more rights for workers in general.
Labor, Unions, Children and Education
Throughout Europe in the 19th century and prior, communities viewed child labor as an outlet for poor families -- a way for every member of the family (including children) to contribute to the household. However, prior to the rise of Industrialization in the 19th century, labor was less intensive, less modernized, less factory-based and factory-driven -- and, therefore, less detrimental to the physical well-being of minors (Pleck 178). With the rise of the machine-based operations of the 19th century, where working conditions became more dangerous, less sanitary, and more taxing in terms of hours worked and ground to be made up (as poverty increased in various communities), nations began to take a closer look at the role of children in the workplace. This was as true for England as it was for the Continent. Industrialized urban centers in Spain were no different from those in the UK or other parts of Europe (Cunningham 414-416).
Grievances illustrated artistically in the popular novels of Dickens were matched by writers and activists in other nations: Spain had its Realists, just as France had Emile Zola, who was preceded by Victor Hugo (author of The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Les Miserables) and Honore Daumier (Goldstein 43). Hugo himself predicted the effect that the labor unions would have on the fate of children in the future when he wrote that "sooner or later the splendid question of universal education will present itself with the irresistible authority of the absolute truth; and then, those who govern under the superintendence of the French idea will have to make this choice; the children of France or the gamins of Paris" (12). Indeed, just ten years after Hugo penned those words, a workers' rebellion in France gave birth to the Paris Commune. As a result, the Labor Movement in one of the leading intellectual cities of the Europe fanned the flames of social justice -- to such an extent, in fact, that the Catholic Church under Pope Leo XIII in Italy issued its own perspective in the encyclical "Rerum novarum -- Of revolutionary change: Rights and Duties of Capital and Labor: On the Condition of the Working Classes," which called for the standardization of working hours, wages, the abolition of child labor, and the rights of labor unions (which had seen undue repression under the various regimes that had come into power in the Continent throughout the century). Writers were as responsible as anyone else in these nations for stirring the social consciousness, which when prompted exerted its influence through the development of labor unions. Indeed, writers were part and parcel with the labor unions in many ways, as the relationship between the novelist and the activist was born in the same salons. Together their impact on social, political and economic changes...
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