Factory Work, Globalization of

Factory work has been long considered one of the key characteristics of the modern society and economy in Europe that emerged from the Industrial Revolution of the 18th century. In fact, the factory system, with the gathering in individual workplaces of a mass of workers in order to take advantage of the new possibilities made available by new power sources (e.g., steam) and machines (e.g., power looms), played an important role in eroding the ties between rural workers and their areas of residence, and dismantling traditional work patterns in agriculture, often linked to semi-feudal obligations and accompanied by local support schemes in case of need (e.g., the Speenhamland system in England between the end of the 18th century and the first decades of the 19th century).

A corollary of the factory system is the establishment of subordinate employment as the standard form of work, so that free persons (free from feudal obligations) could voluntarily enter into a contractual relationship to “rent” their work capacity to another emergent social actor, the “capitalist” entrepreneur, in exchange for a wage. In this sense, the advent of factory work is closely linked to the establishment of a self-regulating labor market. The conditions of subordinate employment and factory work have contributed to the growth of new social actors, which greatly [Page 264]influenced economic and political developments in the following decades for instance, with the trade union movement and working-class parties.

The “working class” concept specifically refers to the mass of unskilled or low-skilled workers employed in large factories. Sociology, or work and industrial sociology, throughout the 19th century focused attention on the analysis of work in large manufacturing factories, because it represented the source of the main economic and social transformations, if not the core aspects of progress and modernization. Critical approaches, including Marxist analyses, underlined the subordinate position of workers in the employment relationship, their “exploitation” by employers as well as their “alienation” because of a passive and fairly limited involvement in the production process. At the same time, factories have been seen as places where the industrial social compromise between labor and management originated, with the support and participation of political authorities, in the 19th century.