The labor movement

The labor movement
The labor movement
Since the mid-eighteenth century were changing, especially in England, working conditions. When freedom takes the ancient craft production lost all their privileges. The owners fixed the conditions of production and hiring.
The new manufacturing workers were peasants who had migrated to the city to find work, and also, urban population, especially artisans ruined because they could not compete with the introduction of the new machines. They became proletarians who needed work and were hired by the proletariat of the workshop or factory to comply with working time in exchange for a wage.
Paid work was setting up a new working class that would consolidate especially since 1820, was at the start of the factory. Factories, workshops local older and more powerful machines driven by steam power or hydraulics staked out a new work order: days up to 15 hours, a constant work rate and also relentlessly applied to women and children, harsh discipline and wages very low.
Changes in the world of work led to conflicts and even riots isolated. Emerged workers associations formed mainly by officers in the process of proletarianization artisans. First, workers were organized in the same office and at local level were joined later various localities and different trades. Before the formation of workers' societies and collective action, government intervention became a repressive nature.
Radical movements were developed, which called for democratic reforms and demanded rights and freedoms. In the English cities was prompted protests, marches and rallies involving workers for political reform and the abolition of laws antiasociativas.
At night, in protest, were burned over 60 looms. The destruction was associated with a leader, Captain Ned Ludd, who soon acquired a mythic dimension.
Luddism spread to the industrialized regions of England and Europe, from Britain to Alcoy and Barcelona. He was persecuted by government and went into decline from 1817, although in the 1830s was revived in the English countryside with attacks on threshing machines.