publichealth-4 B

file: hph_lec4b.mp3

A History of Modern Public Health: Surveillance - The World of Work

So briefly now I'd like to consider a signature piece of early legislation that was instituted in Britain in the 1830s which, if you remember, was around about the same time that debates and discussions were taking place over the relationship between the environment and health that resulted in the sanitary reforms that we discussed in a previous class.

So in 1833, the First Factory Act was passed in Great Britain. And this just didn't come out of nowhere. It was the result of 3 decades of agitation over the conditions of work and its relationship to health. So for example in 1802, there was an earlier piece of legislation called the Health and Morals of Apprentices Act which forbade night work for (pauper?) apprentices in cotton and woolen factories. This was not strictly a factory act, and it related specifically to apprentices, that is, young people entering and learning a trade. So it didn't apply to the totality of the working population or even the totality of the working population who were engaged in manufacturing cotton and wool.

By 1831, three decades later, some legislation had been introduced relating to night work and to children. So by the early 1830s, anybody who was under 21 years of age was not allowed to work a night shift, and for all workers under 18 years old, there was a limit to the number of hours per week that they were allowed to work. So teenagers were not allowed to work more than 69 hours a week. So by 1831, you had some legislation that regulated particular aspects of work and a particular segment of the working population: adolescents and children.

And this in some ways was legislation that created the way for the 1833 Factory Act in Britain. And this applied to all textile factories except lace. And so given that it applied to all textile factories, it clearly had important consequences for a large proportion of the working population and especially in the towns and cities in England and northern England where factories and mills were a very important source of employment for the working population.

And there were a number of key aspects to this 1833 act. First of all, it prohibited the employment of children under 9 years of age. And for children above 9 years of age, it restricted the hours that they could actually work. So children between the ages of 9 and 13 were not allowed to be employed for more than 9 hours a day or 48 hours a week. Children between 13 and 16 years of age were limited to a 12-hour day or a 69-hour week.

There are other aspects that related not to the hours of work but to the actual processes that took place inside the factories and the mills. So for example, machinery was not allowed to be cleaned whilst it was moving. And for those of you who have ever been, had the opportunity to see a factory or say a cotton mill in action at a museum or at a heritage site, you'll know that the machinery moves very quickly, it's very large machinery, and it is very noisy indeed. A lot of industrial accidents took place because that machinery used to be cleaned while it was actually turned on and working. So there were regulations put into place that said the machinery had to be stopped whenever it had to be cleaned so that you reduced the chances of the loss of limb. And it wasn't uncommon for arms to be chopped off or hands to be lost, especially for children who, because of their, the fact that they were small and they were quick and they could run to

either ends of machines very rapidly and because they could get into difficult-to-reach parts of  machines tended to be those most at risk from that sort of accident.

And also significantly, as well as these work place restrictions on hours, on processes that went on inside the factory, the Factory Act in 1833 appointed 4 inspectors. These were essentially located in London, but they were empowered to enter any factory at any time, they were empowered to call witnesses, to take evidence about particular problems in particular factories, and they were able to pass minor regulations that restricted certain practices in factories and mills. And the information that these inspectors collected was used to produce annual reports on factory conditions.

So clearly the Factory Act is not only about instituting protection for workers, particularly children, for instituting good practices in relation to the cleaning of machinery, it is also important in our consideration of the monitoring of what goes on within factories, the collection of information, how that information is stored, analyzed, and how that information then gets reproduced to inform future legislation.

One of the other aspects of the 1833 Factory Act was that it stipulated that factory owners had to provide 2 hours schooling per day for all the children that they employed. And this image shows one example of the sorts of things that the Factory Act was trying to institute within the factory system. This is a very well-known image of workers at Robert Owen's Spinning Mill in the early 19th century. And Robert Owen was generally - is generally accounted for as one of the founders of British socialism. He had a meteoric career as a cotton spinner after moving to Manchester in 1788. His reputation was built on the success of the mills that he managed at New Lanark. And he tried to combine high profits with experimental efforts to improve the conditions of his workers, especially in housing - so the housing that he provided for his workers was generally considered to be of very high quality - and also in infant and child education.

The image that you can see here is of the children participating in agreeable recreation 3 times a week. And so you can see that the children stood in line or in groups. It looks like they are undertaking some form of dancing instruction. You can see on the right-hand side of the image that there is a map on the wall, a map of Great Britain and Europe. So there is some indication there that the children were being at least taught in some shape or form geography. And that's also indicated by the images that go across the windows in the middle section. And that's also indicated in the murals that appear at the center of the picture across the windows that portray exotic images from the British Empire, and they are bringing these exotic images to the children and probably helping along with the geography education that is indicated by the map on the right-hand side. And you can see also around the side of the hallway the proud parents looking on, maybe also vestors in the factory who are there to observe the classes that are taking place.

And so these are the sorts of things that Robert Owen was undertaking but never really were instituted at a significant level in the factory acts other than the idea that factory owners had to provide 2 hours of schooling per week for all the employed children. So these are the types of things that Owen was attempting to introduce and was operating in his factory environment and, as I said earlier, the educational aspects did find their way into the 1833 Factory Act in that factory owners were compelled to provide 2 hours education per day for all the

children that they employed. But many other aspects of Owen's model factory system didn't find their way into the legislation, and agitators for factory legislation and intervention were generally disappointed that the 1833 Factory Act concentrated almost solely on child employment as opposed to conditions in the factories for not just children, but also women and men.

So that's a brief summary of the earliest legislation that appeared in Britain in the early 19th century. What I want to do in the next section is to go on and discuss the inputs of doctors and physicians and medical opinion to the development and the implementation of legislation in the work place in Britain in the 19th century.