The author makes the mistake of projecting their modern attitude towards free time towards those living in preindustrial societies to conclude that people were better off as peasants that overworked factory workers. Every example of industrialization in history proves this wrong, however. Poor farmers that move to cities aren't idiots. They move to terrible factory jobs because it's what benefits them are their families the most. Any moderate illness, accident, or natural disaster spark disaster for a poor farmer's family, so they'd prefer to work a shitty factory job for 80 hours a day for the sake of the small amount of security.
> Poor farmers that move to cities aren't idiots. They move to terrible factory jobs because it's what benefits them are their families the most.
That might be the case today, but at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, it was less so. What drove people who might have been subsistence farmers in the past to work in factories were deliberate policies to privatize the land common people needed to work in order to survive, along with laws that made previously landed people landless and criminalizing their abilities to sustain themselves. Early factories were known to maim and kill, the hours were long, cities were full of deadly disease and the quality of life upgrade you might see today didn't exist as wages were so low. People needed to be incentivized to work in factories, and it wasn't fair compensation that was the incentive. The incentive was being driven from the lands that had sustained workers and their ways of life for generations, and systems of laws that forced them into workhouses.
I wish I remembered the quote from around that time, but from memory it went something like, "It might take a commoner a weekend to make himself shoes that will last him years for free, but for that same person working a factory, it would take a month's wages just to buy a pair of shoes that fall apart in the rain."
>What drove people who might have been subsistence farmers in the past to work in factories were deliberate policies to privatize the land common people needed to work in order to survive, along with laws that made previously landed people landless and criminalizing their abilities to sustain themselves.
Enclosure laws certainly were a massive factor into workers moving to factories. However, I reject the Marxist historian's implication that some aristocrats we're inspired by capitalist ideals to become greedy, which allowed them to take lands from the poor farmers. Rather, they were always this greedy, and market conditions simply let them actualize that greed.
The Black Plague decimated the population of Europe, which allowed the peasants to gain more leverage and gave them common land. However, by the early 1600s (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demography_of_England#Histor...), the population had grown back to its height, and the aristocrats had the leverage to claw back these privileges. Indeed, that was when the first formal enclosure acts were introduced (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure).
Moreover, my point about preindustrial/early industrial workers not placing much importance in free time still stands. They could have worked for the enclosure and had more free time but still chose factory work.
I witnessed this on a trip to Vietnam 15 years ago, the rural kids had a life of leisure but much less material wealth. The city kids (or farm kids moved to the city) worked for more but had cell phones and scooters (cars in the west), they could ride their scooter to the KFC.