I have been reading some quite harrowing accounts of enforced child labour (and working class exploitation in general) before and during the Victorian era of the UK (1750s to early 1900s), especially during the height of the Industrial Revolution and the lack of any laws protecting the rights of workers and children.
But I want to focus on the working class children, most of whom were forced to work in mills, factories, coalmines or sweep domestic and industrial chimneys in order to earn a meagre income for their families. But their wages were so poor that they had to work almost 18 hours per day for anything up to 7 days a week in order to earn sufficient money that would provide basic family meals.
Of course there were no unions back then, which meant rich bosses could exploit children with little or no redress. Children who were late to work or didn’t put in a good shift were caned or beaten by their employers and would find deductions in their wages.
On returning home they would be beaten again by inconsiderate parents for not bringing in their full wage!
Needless to say there was no health and safety practices in these factories and as such injuries and deaths were common place. Access to hospitals was quite often impossible and/or expensive for the working class (no NHS back then) and in some reports bosses would dump dead children in shallow graves or rivers/canals miles away and tell the parents their child had run away!
To add to their misery young girls were quite often sexually abused and/or raped by employers. But again they were forced not to speak out otherwise they would have no wages and/or would receive intense punishments. (And it is best not to describe what happened to young teen and preteen working girls who ended up pregnant!)
Yes, things improved vastly over the last 150 years with the advent of new laws, Acts and unions. But the sad fact is the working classes of the late 1700s through to the mid 1900s were treated like scum – slaves in fact!
And yet to some modern day thinkers, such events never really happened. Or if they did they were never as bad as for those “usual victims” from overseas.
There is a photo in the link below, which I hope Admin will use as my header pic. It shows two “slum” children, possibly sisters, alone in the streets of London (circa 1890), alone and afraid, just ripe to be exploited.
It makes me terribly sad to see this imagery; but equally annoyed when I hear woke types dismiss such things as secondary and that this kind of history should be “revised” and “revisited” to tell the truth from a more diverse multicultural/colonial angle.
Clearly these two children are showing off their “white privilege”, and should be utterly ashamed of themselves!
Nominated by: Technocunt
