Factory System

FACTORY SYSTEM. The system under which modern industry is carried on is often spoken of as the "factory system," and contrasted with a preceding "domestic system," or system of household industry. This contrast is in fact true only in a very broad sense ; for the name "domestic system" is by no means generally applicable to the forms of industrial organization before the great changes of the late i8th and early 19th centuries. There were many factories, usually small, and still more fairly large workshops in which the workers laboured under the eye of a master or his manager long before the days of the Industrial Revolution. The case of the famous Jack of Newbury (i6th century) as an early factory owner is well known; and there were many others, the number of fairly large industrial establishments steadily increasing, even before the advent of steam power. The contrast between domestic and factory industry is indeed in the main a generalization drawn from the rapid transformation of the spinning and weaving trades in the late 18th and early i9th cen turies under the stimulus of mechanical invention and the develop ment of steam power. If these cautions are borne in mind, the factory system can be regarded as the typical organization of in dustry since the Industrial Revolution. Steam power is, indeed, the very basis of the factory economy as it has appeared in the modern world. Only with the coming of power-driven machinery and the power-house did it become an economic necessity in one manufacturing trade after another to collect the operatives to gether under the roof of the employer, and to insist on regular hours of labour and a regular discipline. Thereafter, increasingly, the power-plant set the pace and governed the conditions of la bour. Under the "domestic system," it mattered relatively little to the capitalist what hours, or with what intensity, the worker laboured. He was paid by the piece, and how much he produced in response to the piece-work incentive was in the main his own affair. But as soon as the factory, with its power-plant, had to earn its keep, the intensity and duration of labour became mat ters of direct economic concern to the employer. Hence the ex cessively long hours, and the barbarous speeding-up of the early days of the factory system, when it was not uncommon for chil dren, as well as adults, to be worked as much as 14 hours a day. Similar conditions have to some extent reproduced themselves in the Eastern countries now in process of industrialization.

Rise of Trade Unions.

As the factory system spread, and the workers were collected into large masses in the new factory towns, trade unionism naturally arose among them, partly as the re sponse to evil conditions, and partly as the expression of an in stinctive desire for association. To a great extent, the factory system called trade unionism into being, supplementing the much older small trade clubs of the skilled artisans by the larger-scale combinations which arose, and won their way to toleration, in the earlier half of the 19th century in England, and later else where, as the factory system developed in other countries. At first the typical factories were, by modern standards, small; but with the development of industrial technique they grew rapidly in size, and their organization was transformed. Increasingly, the limited company took the place of the personal employer ; and working conditions came to be regulated by State intervention (Factory Acts of 1802, 1819, 1833, 1847, 1867 . . . to 1901, Mines Acts, Truck Acts, etc.), and by collective bargaining, as the employers, especially after the Trade Union Act of 1871, grow ingly recognized trade unions and entered into (unenforceable) collective agreements with them. To-day, save in a few surviv ing "sweated" trades, in which "home-work" still lingers, the fac tory system is practically universal in developed industrial coun tries, and is rapidly spreading in such countries as India and China. In the advanced countries its evils have been a good deal mitigated by trade union custom, and by industrial legislation ; but in the more recently industrialized areas conditions are still very bad. One of the main functions of the International Labour Organization founded, as an integral part of the League of Na tions, in 1919, is the regulation of factory conditions throughout the world by means of international conventions ratified and made effective by corresponding national legislation. But progress in this respect has been so far (1928) very slow.

BIBLIOGRAPHY.-R. W. Cooke Taylor, The Factory System, old, but Bibliography.-R. W. Cooke Taylor, The Factory System, old, but still worth reading (1886) ; B. L. Hutchins and A. Harrison, History of Factory Legislation (19o3, later ed. 1926) ; H. A. Mess, Factory Legislation and Administration (1926) ; A. Redgrave, The Factory Acts (1891, 13th ed. 1924) ; F. Tillyard, The Worker and the State (1922) ; Industrial Law 0916). For early factory conditions, see the numerous Blue-books containing reports of enquiries during the early Nth century, and F. Engels, The Condition of the Working Classes in England in 1844 (1892) ; and for modern conditions, the Annual Reports of the Chief Inspectors of Factories and the publications of the International Labour Organisation. (G. D. H. C.)