[zombot]

> It wasn’t really realistic to expect hard physical labor for 70 hours a week

That makes no sense at all. If it was common, it was obviously realistic.

[port11]

People were, in a very literal sense, working themselves to death. The birth of the industrial age is documented as one of the worst periods in Humanity’s record for quality of life.

[disgruntledphd2]

To be fair, the industrial revolution also produced more books and other records, so there's a bias there in that without the changes to technology, there might not be as many books written about that period remaining.