Thursday, March 26, 2009

How did work change society after the Industrial Revolution?

By reading Chapter 2 of Grint’s book The Sociology of Work (2005) regarding the history of work, Chris, Antonella, Katya and I noticed certain features of change in society brought by the Industrial Revolution.

In the Pre-Industrial Society the only method of earning a living was through agriculture. Families used to live in villages working at cottage industry. In Britain, their property consisted of their home as well as their agricultural land. Thus, work was done within reach of home and had no specific time or rituals when they start their work. All members of the family participated in work for their financial necessities. Therefore the work of this Agrarian Society depended on all elements such as the seasons. The number of children within the family also had a large impact on the production. In such a patriarchal society, men dominated the family’s economical system. It was a common issue that when the husband died only the first male offspring inherited major possessions and even the dominant role.

“In the second half of the eighteenth century, and the beginnings of Industrial Revolution proper, the occupational structure alters quite markedly: manufacturing, or rather textile manufacturing, mushrooms in size, with the numbers of men engaged tripling in fifty years, while the number of weavers doubles. Relatedly, building, mining, the professions and the armed forces all expand rapidly, while the numbers of unskilled rose only marginally and agricultural employment drops to the point where, very approximately, just over a third of the population were engaged in agriculture in some form by the beginning of the nineteenth century.”
Grint, 2005; 57

As proved by this quotation, there were radical changes by this revolution. This was surely reflected in society especially regarding the world of work.

During the Industrial Period, capitalists invested in their land by building factories where they installed machinery to change raw materials into products sold to the consumer market. The problem was that machines needed to be handled by man. Therefore man had to abandon his village life and family for a number of hours a day to work in a factory. Stevenson denotes how the industrial revolution has also brought about the decline of the family as a collective work unit (Grint, 2005). Distance prohibited families to settle in small house creating industrial towns.

However, we must note that in Pre-Industrial Society “As Mathias notes, it was not just economic need which maintained the family-based industry but also ‘the cohension of family employment [and]… the values of a whole way of life’.” (Grint, 2005; 56)

Such changes brought by this revolution affected people in several ways. In Pre-Industrial Society people depended on agriculture, so they were more environmental friendly. On the other hand, after this transition people became detached from natural environment living in urban areas that by time started to get polluted because of factories. As a consequence this lead to a lot of health problems.

This type of work in the industrial area used to create alienation, exploitation and individualism. Women were not on equal terms as males. Women’s job was not considered as valuable because the men perceived it as a role. In fact, when trade unions were created, even though they were supposed to stand up for all workers, women were discriminated from this right. The actual aim of trade unionism was “to bring about a condition…where wives and daughters would be in their proper sphere at home, instead of being dragged into competition for livelihood against the great and strong men of the world” (Grint, 2005;72). Even though they tried to protect women from being abused of employers like for example over working and under paying them for all the hard work, only men were considered as workers.

To sum it up, the history of work was always focused on men. Several changes occurred both in society and its environment due to the advent of the Industrial Revolution.

No comments:

Post a Comment