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Articles: Business | World Economy & Child labour
- Mr. T.R.Sridhar Prasad. Uppalapati.
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In The Making of the English Working Class, a classic of labor history, E. P. Thompson lends support to Marx's analysis. Thompson takes pains to distinguish the work of children in industrial settings from agricultural labor conducted under the supervision of parents. The apologists for child labor are indeed correct that it was not a new phenomenon associated only with industrialization. 'The child was an intrinsic part of the agricultural and industrial economy before 1780, and remained so until rescued by the school.' Climbing boys and ship's boys were subjected to very bad conditions.
But most child laborers before the industrial revolution worked at 'home or within the family economy.' Fetching and carrying by very small children or work alongside parents in cotton spinning were common. 'So deeply-rooted was child labor in the textile industries that these were often held up to the envy of laborers in other occupations where children could not find employment and add to the family earnings...'
Thompson acknowledges that conditions in farm labor, even under family supervision, could be very poor. 'In agriculture, children -- often ill-clothed -- would work in all weathers in the fields or about the farm.' But this is very different from the factory system, emphasizes Thompson. 'There was some variety of employment (and monotony is peculiarly cruel to the child).' Work was 'intermittent: it would follow a cycle of tasks, and even regular jobs like winding bobbins would not be required all day unless in special circumstances...' Children were gradually introduced to work, and any manufacturing work they did was 'interspersed with running messages, blackberrying, fuel- gathering or play.
Above all, the work was within the family economy and under parental care.' It was not only the development of the factory system, but two other factors, one material, the other ideological, that contributed to the rise of child labor: First, the growth of specialization, 'the increasing differentiation of economic roles,' and the 'break-up of the family economy'; and secondly, the 'breakdown of late eighteenth century humanitarianism.'
The breakdown of the family, and the erosion of extended kinship ties, had been underway since at least the fifteenth century. The demise of kinship networks made way for the nuclear family ideal in the heyday of industrial capitalism. Today, the unfettered market has eroded the family even further, as it has eroded all other institutions of social protection.Under the piece rate system children came to be employed in 'monotonous application for ten, twelve or more hours' per day. 'The crime of the factory system was to inherit the worst features of the domestic system in a context which had none of the domestic compensations: 'it systematized child labor, pauper and free, and exploited it with persistent brutality...'' Common was a working day of 12 to 16 hours for children, 'in the last hours of which children were crying or falling asleep on their feet, their hands bleeding from the friction of the yarn in 'piecing', even their parents cuffing them to keep them awake, while the overlookers patrolled with the strap. In the country mills dependent upon waterpower, night work or days of fourteen and sixteen hours were common when they were 'thronged'.'
Under circumstances of great poverty, working class parents, then as now, had to view their children as economic resources. Many industrialists surely saw them that way. 'The mixture of terror and of fatalism of the children comes through in the laconic reports. An eight-year-old girl, employed for thirteen hours a 'day' to open and close traps: 'I have to trap without a light, and I'm scared...Sometimes I sing when I've light, but not in the dark; I dare not sing then.'
Industrialization, the application of increasingly complicated machines to the production process, drew land, labor and money inexorably into the market system. The factory system above all else transformed human society because it intensified the process of commodification of labor. 'All along the line, human society had become an accessory of the economic system.' Polanyi argues persuasively that the creation of a labor market in England necessitated the 'wholesale destruction of the traditional fabric of society.'
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