Before the Welfare State

Economics Economics Questions
1

[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?]

2

Im really less than an ameteur, but I would think the workers would strike. With no government to pacify the strikers, it would be on whether the owner could hire enough “scabs.” Or if he could find a new, more subservient population to relocate his factory to. Only if neither of these happen would the workers win their 10 hour day.

…

3

http://mises.org/daily/2443

Perhaps an explanation of the point of view of the authorities just referred to can be found in the weight they attach to the evidence given before what has come to be known as “Sadler’s Committee,” in 1832.[2] The report of this committee gives us a dreary picture of cruelty, misery, disease, and deformity among the factory children, and this picture is generally accepted as authentic.

[…]

To say that the report is one-sided as regards the evidence contained in it would be a mild criticism. It consists chiefly of individual and carefully selected instances. Moreover, Sadler had made use of an effective propagandist device in calling evidence of what happened in earlier times and presenting it in such a way as to suggest that the same abuses were still in operation.[7] This was particularly unfair, as the previous thirty years had been accompanied by considerable material improvements and advances, both within and outside the factories, and these changes had been followed by adjustments in social standards. A serious defect in the evidence is that it was not given on oath. If we take into account the religious feeling of the day, the importance of this must be clear. Of the three witnesses who came from Manchester,[8] only one could be got to repeat his evidence before the subsequent commission, and then he would not do so on oath. His evidence was found by the commission to be “absolutely false.”

These are not merely charges made by interested manufacturers. The unsatisfactory nature of Sadler’s Report was freely admitted by most of the earlier opponents of the factory system who had not become involved in party politics. Even Engels, Karl Marx’s comrade-in-chief, describes the Report thus: “Its report was emphatically partisan, composed by strong enemies of the factory system for party ends. … Sadler permitted himself to be betrayed by his noble enthusiasm into the most distorted and erroneous statements.”

… and so on. Check it out.

4

Hahaha yeah, the book says later on that the Sadler committee was biased - they selected testimonies to highlight some of the worst examples. And so what? The worst cases should be highlighted, they’re terrible!

Also, the context is evidenct from the testimonies - an environment where a factory owner can work a 9 year old child 12 hours a day, nonstop. THAT is not controversial - in fact, the only reason the “Ten Hour Bill” was controversial is because factory owners wanted to retain their “freedom” to employ “free labor” without government interference as to how old or how long.

So? Would an Austrian Economist support a law which would limit the maximum working day of a child to ten hours, or insist on laissez faire?

5

Laissez faire, no doubt. That doesn’t mean that any person who is an Austrian economist would necessarily condone this type of behaviour.

6

Laissez faire, no doubt. That doesn’t mean that any person who is an Austrian economist would necessarily condone this type of behaviour.

To condone means to regard or treat as acceptable. If you advocate doing nothing about something, and don’t believe anything should be done about it, you are condoning it, regardless of whether you dislike it subjectively.

What you’re saying is “an Austrian economist would condone this behavior, but that doesn’t necessarily mean he would condone this behavior.”

antonyms of condone: forbid, not allow, prevent

7

To forbid a child from working more than 10 hours per day is to condone the state forcing an individual to use his 11th hour of the day in a less satisfactory manner than his demonstrated preference.

8

Ok, I minced my words a little there. That’s not what I meant.

9

The limitation of working hours is an act of aggression against the labourer, not aprotection of the labourer.

Even assuming that these tall tales are anything like truth, nobody was forced to whip anyone. They chose to take the wage and chose to whip, as a soldier chooses to take a wage and shoot.

10

I don’t know that the definition of condone is relevant to the argument compared to the actions being taken (or not taken as may be the case). I think it’s clear that it’s just a semantic disagreement/confusion.

11

This feeble attempt to cherry-pick antonyms from a thesaurus to suit your sinister agenda only serves to cut your credibility as an honest fellow down to size.

12

That would mean everyone that supports freedom of speech is condoning racist speech. Is that right?

13

Yes. You are condoning it. You may not agree with it, but you condone its use. This is a semantic argument that doesn’t break the original poster’s idea. Perhaps he should have said “support” instead.

14

con·done

[kuhn-dohn] Show IPA

–verb (used with object), -doned, -don·ing.

to disregard or overlook (something illegal, objectionable, orthe like).

to give tacit approval to: By his silence, he seemed tocondone their behavior.

15

There are some really nasty car accidents every year. The Sadler committee appears to be the 19th century equivalent of showing non-stop video footage of disfigured car accident victims in Congress to make them ban cars.

You know, it’s really easy for a 21st century person to speak contemptibly about the business practices of yore, but at the time, it was not uncommon for a 9-year-old to bear the responsibilities of an adult. This included working.

And certainly, not all was good at the time. But some of the stories about 19th century working conditions simply need to be revised. The one about malicious factory owners denying their workers the pleasure of a window, for example, when this was caused by a government tax on windows. Or stories about how evil industrialists chained underage workers to their benches when really, they chained them up to rest because they wouldn’t stop working on their own (I think this was covered in Robert LeFevre’s series on the Industrial Revolution).

And what’s the benefit of a 10-hour-day when you need 12 or 13 hours of wages to make ends meet?

16

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 -

17

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.

18

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]

19

“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?

20

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…