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And few decades later across the pond: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radium_Girls https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radium_Girls The thing that is surprising to me
by zokier 4y ago
And few decades later across the pond: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radium_Girls https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radium_Girls
The thing that is surprising to me is that people were so desperate for these horrible factory jobs for so long. I think I need to read up on history again to figure out what was going on in the agriculture side that made people flood into cities, making labor expendable for factories.
- maxerickson 4y agoMechanization.
- mc32 4y agoIt was more than that. It was opportunity for advancement from the previous millennium or more of stasis. You could save up and advance, even if it was small. On a farm each generation had less farmland to farm (let's say you have 100 acres, and you have 4 heirs each with now 25 and so on... but let's say two because death and also pursuit of something else, so 50, but keep on doing that every generation)
- eru 4y agoWhat millennium of stasis? See the 'Real Life' section on https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MedievalStasis https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MedievalStasis (of all things). However you are right that the Industrial Revolution sped up the pace of change.
- mc32 4y agoYes, it's overstated but never the less until then (ind revolution), life was very agricultural (that did not change appreciably) and thus centered around land (ownership and control). One cannot make more land. As the population grows there was less land per person to develop, maintain and extract sustenance and growth from, so to the factory it was. Most importantly, life on a farm did not improve much, metal instruments did replace more rudimentary farm implements. There were additional advances here and there such as rotating crops, better ploughs drawn by oxen --never the less, you'd follow the cows typically barefoot and you'd suffer from any adverse weather event, too early, too late, a frost, no lifting of the rains, etc. One's fortune was at the whims of the weather and the pace was unrelenting. In the Winter it was time for repairs and household chores that waited a year.
- maxerickson 4y agoA number of my great grandparents homesteaded in Michigan in the late 1800s. They didn't make more land exactly, but they converted land to agriculture. The mechanization of much farming preceded that, as various horse and steam powered machinery was developed to harvest grains. https://library.cqpress.com/cqresearcher/document.php?id=cqresrre1927072800 https://library.cqpress.com/cqresearcher/document.php?id=cqr...
- mc32 4y agoIn an agricultural society land is everything. As you go down through generations the land is split into smaller plots for the heirs. Some had no option but go into the clergy, or alternate occupation. The industrial revolution opened the doors to lots of folk who otherwise would be completely destitute. Back in those days a merchant "afford" a houseboy or housemaid because people were really poor. The factory, though demanding, boring and dangerous by today's standards was a better alternative to many.
- Shacklz 4y ago> The thing that is surprising to me is that people were so desperate for these horrible factory jobs for so long We folks on HN (well, anyone who's even remotely related to tech) just tend to forget how good we have it. You might want to look up working conditions in meat plants, healthcare, warehouses, construction... in today's day and age. Sure, it's not as bad as painting with Radium (although, back then they did not know how bad it is), the jobs might not be an immediate health hazard, but there are still plenty of people out there working under miserable conditions for terrible wages.
- twelve40 4y agothis lecture on how "all of us folks in tech" are ungrateful bastards does not seem relevant to the question asked, or particularly necessary here.
- Anthony-G 4y agoOne major factor in Britain was the Inclosures Act[1] which led to the dispossession and displacement of many peasants. In my country, the Irish Potato Famine[2] forced many peasant farmers to leave the land as an alternative to disease and death. Since the industrial revolution only really took off in the north-east of the island, many emigrated to the industrialising cities of Britain and North America. The driving factor was that the natives did not have any rights to the land they farmed; ownership of land was concentrated in the hands of Anglo-Irish absentee landlords. This situation was not unique in 19th Century Europe: the Prussian Junker[3] class had landed estates in much of the Baltic region, e.g., modern day Estonia and were not known for their humanitarianism. The lands of Polish farmers were owned by Prussians, Russians and Austrian landlords. Modern-day Czechia was ruled by the Austrian Empire and Slovakia by Hungarians. In Russia, the peasants were serfs as until 1861 when they were emancipated and (nominally) became free citizens[4]. For the other side of the pond, I suspect that the large numbers of Europeans emigrating to North America in the hope of a better life contributed to a surplus of labour, allowing industrial capitalists to get away with treating their workers so badly. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inclosure_Acts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inclosure_Acts 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland) 3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junker_(Prussia) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junker_(Prussia) 4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emancipation_reform_of_1861 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emancipation_reform_of_1861
- twelve40 4y agothe Irish Potato Famine happened 40 years before the time the article describes, so that doesn't really explain the population movement in the UK and Ireland in 1888.
- mc32 4y agoWe see this repeating itself in China. However bad and dreary life is in a factory, working on a subsistence farm is worse with worse outlook than most factory jobs in the city. A factory job give you the opportunity to advance. Maybe you sneak in some study time here and there, maybe you meet like minded people, maybe you meet the person you _want_ to spend your life with. In a rural setting with isolation and insularity and lacking transportation, your options are severely curtailed and likely end up like your parents or worse.
- eru 4y agoI'd say mostly we 'saw' this repeating itself in China. China has made most of that transitions already by now.
- mc32 4y agoYeah, but it's still happening and you have dirt poor farmers in the hinterlands --they are hidden from view (not talked about much) and cityfolk are willfully blind to their very existence.
- irrational 4y agoBut, we still have that in the USA in the hinterlands of the Appalachian mountains.
- mc32 4y agoAll I'm saying is were seeing the same movement from farms to terrible factory work that e saw in the West during the ind revolution as we're seeing today in China because despite the awful conditions these conditions are better than working on a farm. We're talking about the desperation that drives these young adults from their farms to work in factories under poor conditions.
- makeitdouble 4y agoI'm not versed into the question, but 19th century 13 yo girls or even early 20th century women don't feel like having a lot of say on what job they will take and won't be pounding the fist on the table when things don't go the way they want. Which makes it so much more poignant when they go on strike. My hunch would go towards poor families being ok with the girls working away somewhere for 14 hours, even for very low wages, as they won't have money to send them to school anyway, and won't benefit from having them stay at home either. My mental image of being a poor kid in that period,, especially a girl, is pretty grim to be honest.
- eru 4y ago> [...] won't be pounding the fist on the table when things don't go the way they want. I think what zokier was aiming at was that even meek people will quietly pick a better option, when it's available. Especially when it's available before you even sign up at the factory. Some people might have been surprised once by the working conditions in these factories. But news travels and people gossip, so people in general will have had reasonably accurate expectations: yet, they still accepted those jobs. Zokier asks: why?
- makeitdouble 4y agoMy best guess would be a that lack of news traveling and general awareness, combined with horrible conditions all over the board, making other low level jobs not that much better. From the article: > The 1888 match girl strike [...] most tangible impact was perhaps the growing public awareness about the conditions, lives and health of some of the poorest in society whose neighbourhoods were a far cry from those of the decision makers in Westminster.
- twelve40 4y agoGreat question! 1888 was way after the famines, so the food supply was relatively steady and there was no outright death and hunger in the UK and Ireland's countryside. So, why? The only thing I can think of is that with this steady food supply and improvements in agriculture, the population of England, for example, almost doubled in the second half of the 19th century. So even if the city dwellers (whether born poor in the city or transplanted from Ireland) wanted to go back and get a safer (but not necessarily easier) job at a farm, their services may have simply not been required there, since all cultivated land was already taken care of by the existing workforce (again, improvements in agriculture and rural population growth, too). So even if they went on this "job hunting" trip into the countryside, which itself was pretty monumental since they probably had to beg to survive along the way (they didn't have Linkedin or what have you back then to look for jobs), it probably would have resulted in nothing, so they had to settle for a low-qualified city job.
- qwertyzxcvmnbvw 4y agoRead about the "enclosures" and about the "draining of the fens" in Britain. In many cases, rural life had to be destroyed before factory work became necessary for survival (not desirable).