1. The Changing Workplace Chapter 8 – Section 4
Mitten – CSHS
AMAZ History
Semester One
The Changing Workplace Chapter 8 – Section 4

2. Review & Preview Women and Reform The Changing Workplace
Abolition – Grimke sisters
Temperance – prohibit alcohol consumption
Women’s rights -- Declaration of Sentiments
The Changing Workplace
Industry expands rapidly
Work force - problems in factory system

3. Section Objectives
Demonstrate how new manufacturing techniques shifted the production of goods from home to factory
Describe the conditions female employees endured in factories
Summarize the attempts of factory workers to organize unions

4. Industry Changes Work Rural manufacturing Cottage industry
manufacturers supply materials
goods made in homes
Francis Cabot Lowell – entrepreneur
opens weaving factories in Massachusetts
by 1830’s, 8 factories – 6000 employees
As late as the 1820s, skilled craftspeople, known as artisans or mechanics, performed most manufacturing in small towns and larger cities. They made shoes and men's clothing, built houses, and set type for printed material. These craftspeople manufactured goods in traditional ways--by hand in their own homes or in small shops located nearby--and marketed the goods they produced. Matthew Carey, a Philadelphia newspaperman, personified the early 19th artisan-craftsman. He not only wrote articles and editorials that appeared in his newspaper, he also set the paper's type, operated the printing press, and hawked the newspaper. The artisan class was divided into three subgroups. At the highest level were self-employed master craftspeople. They were assisted by skilled journeymen, who owned their own tools but lacked the capital to set up their own shops, and by apprentices, teenaged boys who typically served a three-year term in exchange for training in a craft.
Urban artisans did not draw a sharp separation between home and work. A master shoemaker might make shoes in a 10-foot square shed located immediately in back of his house. A printer would bind books or print newspapers in a room below his family's living quarters. Typically, a master craftsperson lived in the same house with his assistants. The household of Everard Peck, a Rochester, New York, publisher, was not unusual. It included his wife, his children, his brother, his business partner, a day laborer, and four journeyman printers and bookbinders.
Nor did urban artisans draw a sharp division between work and leisure. Work patterns tended to be irregular and were frequently interrupted by leisure breaks during which masters and journeymen would drink whiskey or other alcoholic beverages. During slow periods or periodic layoffs, workers enjoyed fishing trips and sleigh rides or cockfights, as well as drinking and gambling at local taverns. Artisans often took unscheduled time off to attend boxing matches, horseraces, and exhibitions by traveling musicians and acrobats.
The first half of the 19th century witnessed the decline of the artisan system of labor. Skilled tasks, previously performed by artisans, were divided and subcontracted out to less expensive unskilled laborers. Small shops were replaced by large ``machineless'' factories, which made the relationship between employer and employee increasingly impersonal. Many masters abandoned their supervisory role to foremen and contractors and substituted unskilled teenaged boys for journeymen. Words like employer, employee, boss, and foreman--descriptive of the new relationships--began to be widely used.

5. Industry Changes Work Early 1800’s – Artisans Produce Goods
master – highly experienced artisan
journeyman – skilled worker employed by master
apprentice – young worker learning craft
Factories Revolutionize Industry
cost of household goods drops
machines replace artisans
unskilled workers run machines
During the first half of the 19th century, unmarried women made up a majority of the work force in cotton textile mills and a substantial minority of workers in factories manufacturing ready-made clothing, furs, hats, shoes, and umbrellas. Women were also employed in significant numbers in the manufacture of buttons, furniture, gloves, gunpowder, shovels, and tobacco.
Many women found the new opportunities exhilarating. Eleven-year-old Lucy Larcom went off to the Lowell textile mill enthusiastically: "The novelty of it made it seem easy, and it really was not hard, just to change the bobbins on the spinning-frames every three quarters of an hour or so.... The intervals were spent frolicking around among the spinning-frames, teasing and talking to the older girls, or entertaining ourselves with games and stories in a corner."
Unlike farm work or domestic service, employment in a mill offered female companionship and an independent income. Wages were twice what a woman could make as a seamstress, tailor, or schoolteacher. Furthermore, most mill girls viewed the work as only temporary before marriage. Most worked in the mills fewer than four years, and frequently interrupted their stints in the mill for several months at a time with trips back home.

6. Farm Worker to Factory Worker
The Lowell Mill
most mill workers are unmarried farm girls
under strict control of female supervisor
Owners hire females – paid lower wages than men
alternative pay less – teaching, sewing, domestic work
most girls stay at Lowell for only a few years
mill girls take new ideas back home
By the 1830s, increasing competition among textile manufacturers caused deteriorating working conditions that drove native-born women out of the mills. Employers cut wages, lengthened the workday, and required mill workers to tend four looms instead of just two. Hannah Borden, a Fall River, Massachusetts, textile worker, was required to have her loom running at 5 A.M. She was given an hour for breakfast and half an hour for lunch. Her workday ended at 7:30 P.M., 14.5 hours after her workday had begun. For a 6-day work week, she received between $2.50 and $3.50.
The mill girls militantly protested the wage cuts. In 1834 and again in 1836, the mill girls went out on strike. An open letter spelled out the workers' complaints: "sixteen females [crowded] into the same hot, ill-ventilated attic"; a workday "two or three hours longer a day than is done in Europe"; and workers compelled to "stand so long at the machinery ... that varicose veins, dropsical swelling of the feet and limbs, and prolepsis uter[us], diseases that end only with life, are not rare but common occurrences."
During the 1840s, fewer and fewer native-born women were willing to work in the mills. "Slavers," which were long, black wagons that criss-crossed the Vermont and New Hampshire countryside in search of mill hands, arrived in Rhode Island and Massachusetts milltowns empty. Increasingly, employers replaced the native-born mill girls with a new class of permanent factory operatives: immigrant women from Ireland.

7. Working Conditions Work days = 12 hours in hot and dark rooms
poor ventilation
conditions deteriorate
800 mill girls conduct a strike
work stoppage forces employers to respond to workers demands
Strikes at Lowell
1834, strike over pay cut; 1836, strike over higher board (food & rent)
company fires strike leaders both times
1845, Lowell Female Labor Reform Association
In January of 1850, police arrested John McFeaing in Newburyport, Massachusetts, for stealing wood from the wharves. McFeaing pleaded necessity and a public investigation was conducted. Investigators found McFeaing's wife and four children living "in the extremity of misery. The children were all scantily supplied with clothing and not one had a shoe to his feet. There was not a stick of firewood or scarcely a morsel of food in the house, and everything betokened the most abject want and misery." The quickening pace of trade and finance during the early 19th century not only increased the demand for middle-class clerks and shopkeepers, it also dramatically increased demand for unskilled workers, such as carters, coal heavers, day laborers, delivery people, dockworkers, draymen, longshoremen, packers, and porters. Such unskilled workers earned extremely low incomes and led difficult lives. In many of these families, wives and children were forced to work to maintain even a low standard of living. In 1851 Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune, estimated the minimum weekly budget needed to support a family of five. Essential expenditures for rent, food, fuel, and clothing amounted to $10.37 a week. In that year, a shoemaker or a printer earned just $4 to $6 a week, a male textile operative $6.50 a week, and an unskilled laborer just $1 a week. The only manual laborers able to earn Greeley's minimum were blacksmiths and machinists.
Frequent unemployment compounded the problems of the unskilled. In Massachusetts upward of 40 percent of all workers were out of a job for part of a year, usually for four months or more. Fluctuations in demand, inclement weather, interruptions in transportation, technological displacement, fire, injury, and illness all could leave workers jobless.
Typically, a male laborer earned just two-thirds of his family's income. The other third was earned by wives and children. Many married women performed work in the home, such as embroidery and making artificial flowers, tailoring garments, or doing laundry. The wages of children were critical for a family's standard of living. Children under the age of 15 contributed 20 percent of the income of many working-class families. These children worked, not because their parents were heartless, but because children's earnings were absolutely essential to the family's survival.

8. Workers Unionize Artisans Form Unions Immigration Increases
1830’s – 1840’s
1 – 2% of workers organized – dozens of strikes
employers use immigrants as strikebreakers
Immigration Increases
European immigration to the U.S. increases
1845 to 1854 – 3 million arrive
German immigrants – upper MS/OH valleys
Irish immigrants settle in large Eastern cities
disliked – Catholics, poor; work for low pay
In 1806 journeymen shoemakers in New York City organized one of the nation's first labor strikes. The workers' chief demands were not higher wages and shorter hours. Instead, they protested the changing conditions of work. They staged a "turn-out" or "stand-out," as a strike was then called, to protest the use of cheap unskilled and apprentice labor and the subdivision and subcontracting of work. To ensure that journeymen did not resume work, a "tramping committee" patrolled the shops. The strike ended when the city's largest shoe employers asked municipal authorities to criminally prosecute the shoemakers for conspiracy to obstruct trade. A court found the journeymen shoemakers guilty and fined them $1 plus court costs. By the 1820s, a growing number of journeymen were organizing to protest employer practices that were undermining the independence of workers, reducing them to the status of "a humiliating servile dependency, incompatible with the inherent natural equality of men." Unlike their counterparts in Britain, American journeymen did not protest against the introduction of machinery into the workplace. Instead, they vehemently protested wage reductions, declining standards of workmanship, and the increased use of unskilled and semiskilled workers. Journeymen charged that manufacturers had reduced "them to degradation and the loss of that self-respect which had made the mechanics and laborers the pride of the world." They insisted that they were the true producers of wealth and that manufacturers, who did not engage in manual labor, were unjust expropriators of wealth.

9. Workers Organize National Trades’ Union
1830’s – trade unions unite
standardize wages – working conditions
1834 – 6 industries form National Trades’ Union
Bankers, owners form associations; courts declare strikes illegal
Court Backs Strikers
1842, Massachusetts Supreme Court upholds right to strike
1860, 5000 union members – 20,000 in strikes
In an attempt to raise wages, restrict hours, and reduce competition from unskilled workers, skilled journeymen formed the nation's first labor unions. In larger eastern cities like Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, as well as in smaller western cities like Cincinnati, Louisville, and Pittsburgh, they formed local trade unions and city trades' assemblies. House carpenters, handloom weavers, combmakers, shoemakers, and printers formed national societies to uphold uniform wage standards. In 1834 journeymen established the National Trades' Union, the first organization of American wage earners on a national scale. By 1836 union membership had climbed to 300,000.
These early unions encountered bitter employer opposition. To counter the influence of the newly formed unions, employers banded together in employers' associations, which claimed that union methods were "most obnoxious, coercive, and detrimental to the peace, prosperity and best interests of the community." Employers also requested prosecution of unions as criminal combinations. In 1806, in a case involving Philadelphia shoemakers, a Pennsylvania court established an important precedent by ruling that a labor union was guilty of criminal conspiracy if workers struck to obtain wages higher than those set by custom. Other court decisions declared union’s illegal constraints on trade. In 1842, in the landmark case Commonwealth v. Hunt, the Massachusetts Supreme Court established a new precedent by recognizing the right of unions to exist and restricting the use of the criminal conspiracy doctrine.
In addition to establishing the nation's first labor unions, journeymen also formed political organizations, known as Working Men's parties, as well as mutual benefit societies, libraries, educational institutions, and producers' and consumers' cooperatives. Working men and women published at least 68 labor papers, and they agitated for free public education, reduction of the work day, and abolition of capital punishment, state militias, and imprisonment for debt. Following the Panic of 1837, land reform was one of labor's chief demands. One hundred sixty acres of free public land for those who would actually settle the land was the demand and "Vote Yourself a Farm" became the popular slogan.