Factory Acts (United Kingdom)
공장법 (영국)
A series of acts passed by the Parliament of the United Kingdom from 1802 onwards to regulate the conditions of industrial employment. The early acts dealt with the hours and moral welfare of young children in cotton mills but were effectively unenforced until the act of 1833 established a professional Factory Inspectorate. Regulation was extended to women in 1844 and, from the 1860s, to industries beyond textiles, and the Factory and Workshop Act 1878 consolidated and repealed sixteen earlier acts.
In depth
The first was the Health and Morals of Apprentices Act 1802, introduced by Sir Robert Peel. It answered concerns raised by Manchester doctors about the health of mill children, but it covered only apprentices and left enforcement to the discretion of local magistrates, so it went largely unenforced. Cotton mills acts followed in 1819, 1825, 1829 and 1831.
The Factory Act of 1833 (Althorp's Act) barred children under nine from factories other than silk mills, limited children of nine to thirteen to eight hours a day and young persons of fourteen to eighteen to twelve, and banned night work under eighteen. Children of nine to thirteen could be employed only with a schoolmaster's certificate of two hours' schooling a day. Above all it created a Factory Inspectorate under the Home Office, with the right to enter mills and the authority to act as magistrates.
Graham's Factory Act of 1844 extended the existing protection of young persons, a twelve-hour day and no night work, to women of all ages. The Ten Hours Act of 1847, with the acts of 1850 and 1853 remedying its defects, met the millworkers' long-organised demand for a ten-hour day. When the ten-hour day had none of the dire consequences its opponents had predicted, theoretical objection to the principle of factory legislation effectively ended.
The scope then widened quickly. Similar acts covered bleaching and dyeing, lace and finishing between 1860 and 1864; the Factory Acts Extension Act 1864 brought in potteries, lucifer-match making, percussion-cap and cartridge making and other trades; and in 1867 the Factory Acts were extended to every establishment employing fifty or more workers, while the Workshop Regulation Act put smaller workshops under local authorities. The Factory and Workshop Act 1878 consolidated sixteen earlier acts, and the acts of 1891 and 1901 raised the minimum working age to eleven and then twelve. The Factories Acts of 1937 and 1961 continued the line into the twentieth century.
The campaign was led by Tory reformers such as Lord Ashley, Michael Sadler and Richard Oastler, with a minority of millowners such as John Fielden; most factory owners opposed it on laissez-faire grounds, arguing that the market should settle conditions of labour. In the Inaugural Address of 1864 Marx wrote that most of the continental governments had had to accept the English Factory Act in more or less modified forms, and that the English Parliament itself was every year compelled to enlarge its sphere of action.