[the following is an excerpt from "Before the Welfare State," by Ursula R. Q. Henriques, 1979. The following is summarized testimony to Michael Sadler's select committee in the House of Commons, UK, 1832:]
There were many complaints of ill-treatment [in the factories]. Sometimes overlookers were blamed, while the master was a remote figure, who neither knew nor cared. Sometimes the owner himself was accused of kicking and beating the children. Hanna Brown, who worked in a Bradford factory from 6 a.m. to 8 p.m. without meal breaks, claimed that the master dragged her about by her hair. Eliza Marshall, who had become lame in a spinning mill, said the children were strapped and kicked by the master to get more work out of them. When the pariliament gentlemen inspected the factory the sick children were sent away and the others sent home to put on their Sunday best.
Several onlookers claimed they were forced to flog the children when the were late in the morning, and to keep them awake at the end of the day. Operatives who hired their own pieceners, including fathers with their own children, had to beat them to keep up to their work. Mr Abraham Whitehead, a clothier (domestic clothworker) living near the mills at Holmfirth, claimed that children aged 5 to 6 working from 5 to 6 a.m. until 9 or 10 p.m. were beaten or poked with the billy roller, a detachable iron rod from the top of the slubbing machine. Some had died and others had been blind for two or three days; but if a parent invoked the law the child would lose its situation. Whitehead gave no actual cases.
The witnesses insisted that these evils were either created or intensified by the long working hours. They quoted examples of the effect of the over-long day on small children. Thomas Bennet's eight children worked in the factories from 6 or 7 in the morning, or when 'throng' (in a rush of orders_ from 4 or 5 in the morning, to 9 or 10 at night. The children cried when taken from their beds, and moved their hands when almost asleep. They were too tired to eat at night, dropping asleep with their victuals in their hands. He had to carry the lesser child home half a mile on his back. He had to beat his pieceners to keep them awake, or when they spoiled his work. Stephen Binns, at one time overlooker at Marshall's Water Lane flax mill, said the last but one hour of the day was the worst. The children weere going to see what time it was every five minutes. He stood in the dark and gave them a good lacing.
The witnesses stressed that pressures were increasing. There were more spindles, and finer thread which broke more often. The masters who fined their workers for being late also fiddled with the factory clock to bring them in early, or to cut three minutes off their thirty-minute lunch break. They agreed that the children were very unhappy. 'I have seen at that mill, and I have experienced and mentioned it with grief, said Thomas Bennett, 'that the English children were enslaved worse than the Africans,' They also expressed concern about the decline of education, feeling that an hour's instruction after a twelve-hour day was useless. Short-time committees maintained that the children were longing for a ten-hour day so that they could be educated. When Abraham Whitehead went to the mills the children gathered around him, saying 'When shall we have to work ten hours a day. Will you get the Ten Hour Bill? We shall have a rare time then; surely someone will set up a neet (night) school; I will learn to write, that I will.' This picture of virtue was slightly spoiled by WIlliam Kenworthy's evidence that he had run away from school to go to the mill.
[I presume the Austrian position on the Ten-Hour Bill would be to oppose it, as a socialist restriction on the market?]
The OP does nothing to prove the need for a welfare state. If anything, it proves the need for a free market over a society with the kind of statist restrictions that create the setting for such abuses to happen. You can't reasonably use early 19th century England as an example of free markets.
Political Atheists Blog
This testimony mistakes the symptom for the cause. The privations which spurred our primitive ancestors to devise new methods of production were far more severe than those described above. When a person sells his leisure time to an employer for wages, he is exchanging a present good (leisure) for a future good (more luxurious leisure). The only reason any human ever produced anything for himself, or sold his leisure time to an employer in order to produce something for another, was to improve the quality of his own life. It cannot be the case that children were enduring conditions in factories that were clearly worse than the consequences of forgoing employment (slightly reduced standard of living) because they would have chosen to simply forgo employment. The cause or causes lie elsewhere, this is only a symptom.
Clayton -
This is typical Rachael Maddow logic. Only trying to treat the symptoms and never the cause. If you treat the symptoms by introducing 10 hour working limit bill, you keep the existing monopolists in power. Even if you make it illegal for them to "extort" the worker, so long as there is no alternative on the market, firms productivity will suffer under monopoly and there will be even greater poverty.
After all, exploited coal miners are mining coal to keep other exploited workers warm... the fact that greedy capitalists have nominally 100x the wealth of the average person does not mean they consume 100x more of the same goods. I really honest analysis could indeed skip over the nominal specie economy and simply look at how goods are produced and distributed.
How much coal is being produced? How much of that coal is being distributed to which people?
And all the other simple holes in this logic:
Is this really a free market? I'm not familiar with early industrial british history... Pessimistic anti market bias. Just because it is bad now does not mean working conditions will not improve on their own. See America 1850-1900.
Assuming regulators will automatically make the right regulations.
[edit: And Im just going to point out that given this speech was given as testimony before a political body. There is a high probability this is politically motivated. It also has no general statistics, so we can only know whatever cherry picked facts the author wants us to know. I can make socialism look reallly scary too if I only focus on the bad stuff :I]
"You can't reasonably use early 19th century England as an example of free markets."
I will keep that in mind the next time someone does use them as that example. lol
"statist restrictions"
Could you elaborate a littel futher?
In States a fresh law is looked upon as a remedy for evil. Instead of themselves altering what is bad, people begin by demanding a law to alter it. ... In short, a law everywhere and for everything!
~Peter Kropotkin
I'd go with this:
http://mises.org/media.aspx?action=category&ID=203
Applying economics to America History, (also available through iTunes U), as he explains some of this.
Hear the audio, so missed some of the pictures/etc, also not sure where or if he cites this...
Really? If they weren't free markets, then what was? Laissez faire was official policy at the time, especially early in the century.
Is your argument that "perfectly free" markets have never existed, and thus can never be criticized? That's just a cheap debating trick; the inverse would be to claim that "perfectly free" statism has never existed, and thus statism is only deficient because it's not extreme enough. It's equally nonsense in either case. There were less governmental restrictions on labor markets in early nineteenth century England than nearly anywhere else, ever. You're going to have to use historical evidence if you'd like to refute that.
so long as there is no alternative on the market, firms productivity will suffer under monopoly and there will be even greater poverty.
also from the book:
The masters’ spokesmen maintained that economic and social evils were bound to follow any attempt to interfere with the labour market. Shortened working hours could only result in the triumph of foreign competition, producing lower wages and unemployment.
Notably, none of that actually happened. In fact, banning child labor raised wages for adults, allowing ("social evils" such as) adults being able to support their own children without sending them off to work in factories. Increased wages also encouraged investment in capital - you know - "capitalism."
You are the one making the assertion that 19th century england was laissez faire. The only evidence you offered is from a bleeding heart speech at a court trial. Thanks. We already know that leftist rhetoric exists.
In order to prove this is a free market failure you need to A) show the extent of which self ownership and homesteading were respected, and B) show that THESE RIGHTS lead to bad outcomes. You haven't done either.
It was childish of you to think you could dismiss free markets in one stroke. Thousands of people have studied history and economics their entire careers and come out in favor of free markets, communism/socialism, monarchy etc. You cannot destroy any political or economic system so easily. The proponents of all schools have sophisticated rebuttals ready for all points made regularly against them.
ravochol:The masters’ spokesmen maintained that economic and social evils were bound to follow any attempt to interfere with the labour market. Shortened working hours could only result in the triumph of foreign competition, producing lower wages and unemployment.
ravochol:Notably, none of that actually happened. In fact, banning child labor raised wages for adults, allowing ("social evils" such as) adults being able to support their own children without sending them off to work in factories.
ravochol:Increased wages also encouraged investment in capital - you know - "capitalism."
Child labor was banned because adults didn't want to compete with children for jobs. Real wages went up because worker productivity increased through captial and technology. That capital accumulation was realized by people (including children) working 12 hours a day.
A child + a man could get more work done than the man alone. Would barring the child from working increase economic productivity? Would it make it easier to accumulate capital? The fact of the matter is, increased productivity allowed the family to be able to afford children who didn't work. The labor laws thwarted the realization of this state of affairs. Capital accumulation and technological progress allowed us to realize the better state of affairs.
Saying that labor laws made things better for people in general is like saying that a law that made it illegal to drink cyanide kept them from drinking it.