[exasperaited]

This is literally not true. People did dangerous jobs beforehand but the danger was handled in experienced contexts and with meaningful consequences.

If your ten-year-old apprentice died because of your negligence, it damaged your business both in the day to day, in the long run, and reputationally. So you kept your apprentices alive, and you ultimately had to feed them.

For the first few decades of the industrial revolution, if a kid died in a factory situation because they lost concentration out of hunger and exhaustion, so what? Get another kid. Deaths of semi-skilled labour happened at scale, because the agency of those who were looking after them was taken away.

It really did take mass protests and labour organising to deal with it. Industry has an institutional memory of what that cost them, which is why unions are treated the way they are now, and why they are so urgently needed again.

[grafmax]

Yeah people look at the rise in quality of life in this period and through a simplistic view misattribute it to “factories”. Factories initially lowered living standards among workers and increased productivity. That’s because gains in productivity went to the owners. It’s only the labor movement that was able to shift some of that new productivity to the people who did the actual work and pull the working class out of the horrific conditions capitalism had created - through collective bargaining and the reforms instituted under pressure from labor.

[exasperaited]

Exactly this. The early factory environments were more terrifying than contemporary war zones; objectively dangerous, non-stop, deafening machinery with no safety mechanisms where some jobs done by children were literally life-and-death.