Did workers gain or lose from the Industrial Revolution?

The short answer

• Factories pulled workers into towns. The mills offered a reason to move. Steam power allowed works to gather where coal, canals and railways met, while higher town wages attracted people from farming. In the countryside, enclosure—the fencing of common land into private farms—joined falling demand for hand spinning and population growth in leaving many underemployed. England and Wales grew from about 8.9 million people in 1801 to 17.9 million in 1851, and most of that increase went to towns.
• No one was in charge of the towns. Building houses did not automatically create a body responsible for serving them. The Municipal Corporations Act of 1835 gave old boroughs elected councils, yet many new industrial towns still lacked councils with power over building, water and drainage. Builders and landlords faced almost no regulation, while private water companies supplied those able to pay. Under those conditions rapid growth could continue for decades without sewers, until disease made inaction impossible to ignore.
• Families needed children’s wages. Rent and food had to be paid for even when a father was sick, dead or unemployed, and one adult wage rarely covered them. Families therefore relied on several earners. Jane Humphries found in working-class autobiographies that children from large or fatherless families began earliest, often before ten. Employers had uses for them, including piecing broken threads in mills, and paid them little. Family need and employers' demand brought children into work.
• Evidence made the costs visible. Reformers gained ways to bring conditions before Parliament. Censuses began in 1801, civil registration of births and deaths in 1837, and inquiries and inspectors collected testimony as well as numbers. Chadwick's mortality tables and evidence after the flooding at Huskar Pit, where 26 children drowned, made suffering that MPs might never see in a mill or mine into public evidence for action.

What it changed

Protest grows from hardship. People brought together in industrial towns could organize around shared grievances. Hunger, low wages and the loss of skilled trades fed protest from machine-breaking to Chartism, the mass movement demanding votes for all men. Meetings filled the towns' moors and squares; the concentration of hardship also made collective action possible on a new scale.

Living standards rise after 1850. The clearer improvements in real wages, life expectancy and height came after about 1850, as food became cheaper, sanitation spread and hours were limited. Most workers thus received gains a generation or two after the costs. Their share depended on power as well as productivity: trade unions and the vote, won by many working men in 1867 and 1884, helped them claim more.

Regulation spreads abroad. Britain's experience gave later industrial countries examples of factory and public health legislation. Prussia, the largest German state, limited child labor in 1839, and France followed in 1841. By the end of the century most industrial countries had factory inspectors and public health boards, as chapters 7 and 8 show. Regulation of industry became a lasting legacy as other countries encountered similar problems.