What Was The Role Of Industrial Workers During The Industrial Revolution

During the Industrial Revolution of 19th century Britain, many people suffered the hardships of going from farmers to factory workers. Men, women, and children worked from early in the morning to late at night every day in the mines and in the factories. The ramifications the Industrial Revolution had on the people were dreadful. Men, women, and children worked in harsh conditions for long hours in factories and mines that most of the time weren’t safe to work in. Through the later years of the 19th century, unions were formed and laws were passed to make life working in a factory or a mine easier on the people. When the Industrial Revolution began, many people raced to work in these brand new factories. Many families moved to work in these …show more content…
These workers were soon out of a job and had no choice but to move their families into the cities in order to work in the factories and workshops. The whole family would soon end up working in the factories just to earn more money than what little they did earn. The conditions in these factories were terrible a lot of the time, though sometimes they were manageable. The men and women would work long grueling hours just to make little earnings, with men making about 10-15 shillings per week and women making only 5 shillings per week. Children on the other hand were a cheap source of labor, only making about 1 shilling per week, and because of this they were made to work long hours in dangerous jobs under terrible conditions. The jobs the children worked were dangerous …show more content…
Some might even go as far as saying it was worse than working in the factories. Like the workers in the factories, the miners worked under harsh conditions, like waking up at early hours, working an outrageous amount of hours a day, little to no breakfast or dinner, and little to no break as well. But, one thing the factory workers had an advantage over the miners was they didn’t have to crawl everywhere. The gates of the mines were no more than a yard high, and the tunnels were only about 2 feet high. The miners would have to crawl to move around the place and either lay down on their sides or kneel in order to work. The miners would sometimes work in suffocating heat and have coal dust get everywhere on them, even in their lungs which caused many miners to die. In some mines, the heat would be so bad that the miners would work naked, only wearing knee pads. By the time they would get home, their entire bodies would be covered in coal dust. Sometimes they would be so tired, they would go to bed without washing it all off. There were also jobs that both women and children performed in the mines. Many of them included transporting the coal to the top of the mine and dumping it. The women and children would have to push the mine cart full of coal to the top. But, sometimes even they would pick the coal from the mine as well as the men, and even they would sometimes work