Industrial Revolution: Changes in Working Life

Mills Changed Workers Lives

• Mill owners could not find people to work in factories because other jobs were avaliable

• Slater (mill owner) began hiring entire families

  • Filled labor needs at low cost

  • Adults and children worked in mills

  • Children worked for cheap allowing a profit

  • Rhode Island System: Hiring families and dividing factory work into simple tasks​

• ​Samuel Slater and his brother created a mill town Slatersville

  • Mill working families moved there to live and work​

  • Was a fully functioning town​

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​Slatersville

​This advertisement appeared in a Massachusetts newspaper in 1823 requesting that families come work at a factory.

• The Lowell System was based on water-powered ​textile mills that employed young, unmarried women from local farms. The system included a loom that could both spin threat and weave cloth in the same mill.

  • A chance to earn their own money

  • "Lowell Girls"​

• Lived in boarding houses, room and meals provided

  Encouraged to take classes in their free time at the women's club​

• Cotton dust began causing health issues​

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The Lowell System

• Factories produced low-priced goods, hard for shops to compete.

• Worker wages dropped, immigrants from poorer countries were willing to work for less

  • Financial Panic of 1837: many unemplyed competed for jobs​

• Trade Unions: groups that tried to improve pay and working conditions

  • Employers didnt want to hire union workers= cost eliminated competition

  • ​Strikes: staged protests refusing work until demands are met

  • Police and courts generally suported factories, not those on strike​

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Workers Organize