Manchester Workers Case

In the case of the Manchester workers, conflict struck when the work of spinners and weavers was mechanized and moved to the factory and men replaced women as the core workforce, followed by the replacement of water powered by steam that allowed factories to increase in size and to be built in towns instead of next to village stream, no wage increases and above all, the intolerable mistreatment and working conditions (16). This became a vicious cycle of coercion. Laws that abolished the rights to common land pushed labourers off their countryside were integrated and poverty was criminalized. Overwhelmed with poverty, parents were compelled to give up their offspring to orphanages (16). This situation of despair helped the coerced industrial factories …show more content…
Kids were not only physically abused and forced to work long hours standing without breaks but they were also forced to eat dirty pieced of candle and to lick up tobacco spittle as punishment (17). This power to use this type of brutality was shown by two main parties. The factory oversees and dormitory captains which had the power to beat, give, fire and rape and below them were the skilled male spinners, who hired child helpers and were allowed to terrorize their changes (17). Furthermore, the inhumane living conditions also reflected the impact of global capitalism. Approximately 2,220 out of 7,000 houses did not have a toilet and 900 were inhabitable. However, this was not the worst living condition at the time, there were about twenty thousand people living in basements of these slums, often alongside livestock (18). These are the challenges that obligated workers to take action. When petitions failed and strikes broke out, the government responded by implementing the Combinations Act which outlawed trade unions for the next twenty-five years in 1799