The Full Story
In the early nineteenth century, factory children worked brutal hours. In the worst cases described to parliamentary committees, children worked sixteen-hour days. Some started at age five. They operated machinery that could maim them. They breathed cotton dust that destroyed their lungs. They never saw sunlight.
The campaign for a ten-hour working day lasted decades. Robert Owen proposed it in 1810. Factory owners said it would destroy British industry. Parliament agreed with the owners.
But reformers persisted. Richard Oastler, a Tory radical, launched the 'Short Time Movement.' Workers organised. Children testified before parliamentary committees about beatings, exhaustion, and friends killed by machines.
Slowly, change came. The Factory Act of 1833 limited children's hours and banned the youngest from factories. The 1842 Mines Act banned women and girls, and boys under ten, from underground work. Finally, in 1847, the Ten Hours Act limited women and young people aged thirteen to eighteen in textile mills to ten hours a day.
Mill owners did not give up. Many ran relay systems, staggering workers' shifts so the machinery kept running and the limit was almost impossible to enforce. The compromise of 1850 traded a slightly longer day, ten and a half hours, for fixed working hours that inspectors could actually check.
Factory owners had predicted catastrophe. Instead, productivity rose. Healthier workers worked better. The ten-hour day became standard, then the eight-hour day that most workers have today.
Every limit on working hours exists because reformers refused to accept that children should die in factories.
Why This Matters
The Ten Hours Act established that workers had rights, that profit couldn't justify unlimited exploitation. Every workplace protection we have today traces back to this principle.