Factories and the Industrial Revolution

A. The Textile Industry and the Domestic System of Production
1. Advantages of the System
a) Abundance of Labour
b) Elasticity of Production
c) Low capital investment
2. Disadvantages
a) Poor quality control
b) Poor labour discipline
B. The Effect of Poor Laws in England
1. Elizabethan Poor Laws
a) Parish responsible for welfare of its poorest members and has right to expel outsiders
b) Most indigent are sent to workhouses, sorts of jails where the poor were put to work under strict discipline
c) In spite of later laws (1723) that demand that all the poor be confined to workhouses, there is increasing aid given to families at home and to the poor, not just the destitute
2. Adam Smith protests
a) The law that reduces mobility of labour and increases misery: People from poor parishes prevented from going to richer parishes to work.
3. Speenhamland system 1795
a) Restrictions on mobility abolished
b) Support calculated on the basis of food prices: the right to existence is acknowledged
c) Effects
(1) Positive
(a) Social insurance for the upper classes
(b) Survival for the poor
(2) Negative
(a) Downward pressures on wages
(b) Demoralization of working poor
(c) Harder on country than city. Promotes rural emigration
4. The Workhouse and the Factory (Before Speenhamland system)
a) Some of inmates of workhouses were eventually "sold" to factory owners, e.g. some of the contracts specify that so many idiots per group of able bodied people were to be taken
b) Some similarities in their organization
C. Military arsenals and manufactories
1. Concentration and surveillance of personnel
2. Some division of labour
3. Production gains do not come from advanced technologies
4. Some examples
a) Venetian arsenal
b) Gobelins and Sävres Factories
D. The Manufactory
1. Manufacture and machinofacture
2. Division of labour: Adam Smith's three advantages for increasing quantity of production [Wealth of Nations, p.112]
a) "The increase of dexterity in every particular workman"
b) "The saving of the itme which is commonly lost in passing from one species of work to another"
c) "The invention of a great number of machines which facilitate and abridge labour, and enable one man to do the work of many".
d) Cf. the method of detail and the analytical approach of Galileo in science. Not only applied to Nature but to the artificial world of production

A. Features of the factory
1. Division of labour
2. Use of machinery
3. Use of cheaper and less skilled labour
4. Strict hierarchical organization and discipline
a) Control on the movements of people
b) Control over their time
B. The Commodification of Time
1. Major changes in the apprehension of time occur in Europe 1300-1650
a) Partially associated with development of better time measurement and clocks (technological)
(1) Clocks appear around end of 13th c.
(2) Watches with escapement and spiral mechanism appear after 1674
(3) Middle of 18c. watches and clocks still for upper classes and gentry but start to penetrate lower classes at end of 18c.
b) Partly associated with mental attitudes: Protestant ethic lays greater stress on work, condemns loafing and wasting time
c) Natural traditional rythms of pre-industrial, e.g. agricultural rythms paid relatively little attention to our mechanized and uniform time.
(1) Many traditional medieval saints' days persist and people celebrate them
(a) Each trade has its own saint, e.g. Shoemakers - St. Crispin; Smiths - St. Clement; Woolcombers - St. Blaise.
(b) The most important saint is probably St. Monday, much celebrated and much condemned by upper classes
(2) Bursts of hard work alternate with bouts of idleness
"You know that Monday is Sundayes Brother;
Tuesday is such another;
Thursday is half-holiday;
On Friday it is too late to begin to spin;
Saturday is half-holiday agen" [Thompson 72]

2. New conceptions of time are enforced on factory workers by machines and men
a) Control of workers and their time by factory managers
b) Regularity and uniformity and indefatigability of machine actions
C. The Quantification of Labour
1. The factory clock and the bell
a) Sometimes misused by employers
b) Eventually used by workers who complete the commodification of time as something to be bargained over and whose value was expressed in terms of money: time and a half, restriction of hours.
D. Technology as the Ally of Capital.
1. Andrew Ure's Definition of a factory
"... a vast automaton, composed of various mechanical and intellectual organs, acting in uninterrupted concert for the prpoduction of a common object, all of them being subordinated to a self-regulated moving force." [The Philosophy of Manufactures, p. 13]
2. Ure's analogy of factory's features with those of human body and social order:

a)	BODY	FACTORY	SOCIETY
b)	Muscles	Mechanical	Labour
c)	Nerves	Moral	Science
d)	Blood	Commercial	Capital

3. Technology as the enemy of sloth
a) Machines will set the pace
4. Technology as the enemy of incompetence
a) Machines will do the skilled work. Human skill will be reduced
5. Technology as tamer of the unruly
a) Humans cannot compete with the productivity of machines and owners of machines have the upper hand in the social struggle. Cf. Marx and the means of production