SADLER-REPORT

1. Based on the Report, summarize the conditions in the factory.

Conditions were negligent at best, the workers were treated as what you would call today a “sweatshop worker” which deals with slave trade. The common theme seems to be beating. The worker explains to Sadler that there was rarely a moment where he wouldn’t hear crying, and he explains that the machines were held in higher regard than the workers themselves. His only source of impulse to get work done was to not get beaten by the overlooker or the slubber.

2. What effect did factory work have on other aspects of the workers live?

The dangerous factory work had negative effects on the health of children.

Doctor Turner Thackrah described the children leaving the Manchester cotton mills as “almost universally ill-looking, small, sickly, barefoot and ill-clad. Many appeared to be no older than seven. The men, generally from sixteen to twenty-four, and none aged, were almost as palid and thin as the children”.

The experience of immiseration came upon them in a hundred different forms; for the field labourer, the loss of his common rights and the vestiges of village democracy; for the artisan, the loss of his craftsman’s status, for the weaver, the loss of livelihood and of independence, for the child the loss of work and play in the home, for many groups of workers whose real earning improved, the loss of security, leisure and the deterioration of the urban environment.

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