Nobel Prize-winning economist, Robert Shiller, is typical of many techno -optimists in arguing that we've always managed to absorb workers displaced by new technology — the handloom weavers became factory workers, the factory workers became office workers. This time, he says, will be no different.
I want to suggest that this time is profoundly different. Previous technological revolutions unfolded over generations. For example, the transition from wooden sailing ships to diesel-driven steel ones took the best part of a century, the roll-out of electricity from street lights to industrial uses and finally households, took from the 1890s to the 1940s and it took almost 50 years for cars to become an essential part of daily life, thus giving both workers and societies more time to adapt. Today, change is happening within a single generation or less and unlike previous revolutions which disrupted one industry at a time, AI affects multiple sectors of the economy simultaneously.
My second argument is that even past transitions were nowhere near as smooth or painless as they might look from the comfort of the C21st. To prove my point I want to briefly cast a glance back at some of those earlier transitions to see what we can learn from them. I'm hoping that you too will notice some distinctive patterns and parallels with our present situation. Then we will look at what could be done with respect to the workers which are being displaced now.
The First Industrial Revolution –The Dark Side
The Mechanisation of Farming
The mechanisation of farming and the Enclosure of the Commons 1750 -1780, which privatised land previously held in common and farmed by tenant farmers, drove large numbers of people into the cities. The enclosures were largely so that big landholders could keep more sheep and provide the wool for the mills which were springing up. The period from 1812 -22 was especially harsh with “England suffering more -economically, socially and politically than during the French Wars.” Those who resisted, as in the Captain Swing Riots of 1830, when farmworkers smashed the threshing machines that had stolen their winter work, were hanged or transported. While the burgeoning factories absorbed some workers, many were left with no land or livelihood at all.
Spinning and Weaving
The textile industry was among the next to be mechanised. Before that, spinning and weaving had been a cottage industry for many generations and simply producing a single set of woollen outer garments—from shearing the sheep through to spinning, weaving, dyeing and tailoring—could take up to a year.
The arrival of the spinning jenny (1764), the water frame (1769), and the power loom (1785) systematically transformed the industry and led to the displacement of more workers over the next fifty years, resulting in both destitution and social unrest. Handloom workers in the English cotton industry averaged 240 pence per week in 1806, but by 1820 they were making less than half that and the number of British handloom weavers fell from around 250,000 in 1800 to just 7,000 only 60 years later.
Repression
Amid widespread unemployment and food scarcity, the spinners and weavers too fought
back against the loss of their livelihoods. From 1811 – 1816 bands of men known
as Luddites, after their leader, attacked wool and cotton mills across the
north of England, destroying the machines which had ruined their lives.
Seventeen machine-breakers were executed at York in 1812 and the others were
sentenced to transportation as were the Tolpuddle martyrs who attempted to form
a “friendly society” – a forerunner of Trade Unions, when their wages fell
below one shilling a day and were set to fall further. [The Tolpuddle martyrs were more fortunate than most. After huge public demonstrations and petitions, they were released after 4 years and could return to England].
Proliferation of Workhouses
A 1776 survey showed that there were already 18,000 poor houses in existence with a combined capacity to house 90,000 people, but by the 1830s, churches could no longer cope with demands on their charity and workhouses were established in almost every parish for the ‘deserving poor’ – that is, those who were unemployed through no fault of their own. To discourage mere 'idlers,' conditions inside were extremely harsh with long hours of manual labour. Initially these were privately run by business people who used the unpaid labour of inmates to boost their profits, especially that of children – mainly orphans and those whose parents could no longer support them, thus providing a steady stream of cheap labour for the mills. Because workhouses were so overcrowded, diseases such as smallpox and measles proliferated.
Those who were unable to pay their debts were cast into debtors’ prisons. These were privately run and inmates had to pay for bed and board, leaving some even more destitute when they left, than when they went in, while their debts remained until they or someone else could pay them. At the age of 12, Charles Dickens had to work 10 hours a day sticking labels on shoe polish tins to support his family while his father was in debtors’ prison. The experiences he had then and in the poorer parts of London, were to inform his writing in later years and his articles books and prolific lecture tours, not only in the UK but also in Europe and America, brought attention to the plight of the poor and helped to bring about change.
Transport
The new mills also needed large quantities of raw materials including coal and iron, and a way to get their massive output to market, so there was a frenzy of canal building in the 1790s which employed up to 50,000 workers at its peak. Unfortunately, rampant speculation collapsed share prices by 80% in 1810 and the railways rendered them obsolete almost overnight.
From the 1820s onwards, the building of railways provided some relief. By 1850 a quarter of a million workers — a force larger than the Army and Navy combined — had laid 3,000 miles of track across Britain and the great Locomotive Works were the biggest employers of engineers. The same was happening all over Europe and in the USA. Despite some rationalisation after the switch from steam and the arrival of the car, the railways remained major employers in both Britain and Australia until the advent of economic rationalism in the 1980s. Shipping and shipbuilding to bring resources from the colonies -and send convicts for cheap labour, also absorbed excess labour. There were other outlets for the excess workers too.
Migration and The Gold Rushes
The hungry beast that was the Industrial Revolution needed vast quantities of raw material from the colonies. When Cornish tin mines ran out some 250,000 Cornish miners came to Australia between 1841 and 1901. Thousands of Scottish bricklayers, carpenters and engineers were also brought in to build the buildings, making up around 12% of the Australian population.
The Great Potato Famine 1845 -52 reduced the Irish population from around 11 million to 8 million either through migration or starvation. By the mid-to-late 19th century, the Irish and their immediate descendants made up roughly 25% of the Australian population. In other European countries which did not have this safety valve, similar distress and discontents led to peasant uprisings and revolutionary fervour.
Beginning in California in 1848 and Australia in 1851, the discovery of gold provided another reason to emigrate. Between 1851 and 1871, the Australian population quadrupled from 430,000 to 1.7 million as migrants from across the world arrived in search of gold or a better life. When the gold ran out in Australia towards the 1890s a major depression followed.
Birthrates fell to almost half -so low in Australia that the government was obliged to introduce a baby bonus. They also fell sharply during the Great Depression reaching a low 2.11 in 1934, despite the absence of reliable contraception.
War and Disease
Constant wars and disease also took their toll. The Napoleonic Wars
(1803–1815) alone killed 3.5–6 million, including 916,000 Frenchmen, while the American Civil War (1861–1865) saw 620,000+ dead. Other
conflicts—such as the Crimean War (1853–1856), Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871),
and colonial wars (e.g., Zulu Wars, Boer War, Indian campaigns)—further reduced
populations, alongside recurring epidemics like cholera and smallpox.
The First World War (1914–1918) claimed over 20 million military and civilian lives globally and the Spanish Flu which followed (1918 to 1920), claimed an estimated 17 million to
50 million, and possibly as high as 100 million, worldwide, including an estimated 228,000 in the UK.
1890s – 1910“The Gilded Age” – for some
This is the era our present -day capitalists and technocrats dream of because there was little interference from government and for those with means, this was the time when great fortunes were being made by industrialists, businesses and landlords. However, for the mass of people, conditions were appalling - even worse than before the Industrial Revolution.
We know this not just from contemporaneous accounts, but
from graveyard anthropometry – measuring skeletons, which shows that people
actually got shorter during this period, reflecting poor diet and their injuries revealed the dangerous
conditions in which they worked. [Average height is now used as a
standard proxy for population welfare over time]. In 1845, 43% of cotton workers were under 18 years of age. These children showed severe growth delays and pathological lesions indicative of early life
adversity, as well as respiratory disease from mill work.
In London's East End, malnutrition and
disease were so widespread that children had only a fifty percent chance of
surviving beyond the age of five. Evidence indicates very widespread rises in
early childhood mortality in the second quarter of the 19th century, persisting until around 1870 — indicating that the period 1830–70 was one of heightened
exposure and suffering, even as industrialisation boomed. Prostitution, exploitation and petty crime were rife.
Why Things Improved
The French Revolution (1792 -1802) driven by extreme inequality and hunger brought on by poor harvests, was a catalyst for early reforms in the UK which, being the most industrialised country in Europe, feared similar upheavals. This brought new labour laws, child education, and eventually political rights for workers.
Improved Working Conditions
The Factory Acts (1802 -1878) improved conditions for workers, initially only in the textile industry, but later included other workers. The Factory Act of 1802 for example, limited the working hours in textile mills for apprentices who were often children, to 12 hours a day and required at least 2 hours a day of education. The Factory Act of 1833, banned children under 9 from working in the mills and limited the working hours of children 9 -13 to 8 hours a day. It also introduced factory inspectors to enforce the law.
In 1842, the Mines Act banned women and children from working in mines and the Factory Act of 1844 not only further reduced their working hours , but introduced basic safety measures. The 1847 Factory Act, better known as the Ten Hours Act, limited their working day to 10 hours per day. In 1867, this was extended to all workers, not just those in textile mills and in 1878, the 56 -hour week became the norm.
Worker’s Rights
Combination Acts (Repeal, 1824–1825)
The Combination Acts (1799–1800) had banned trade unions and collective bargaining, fearing they would incite revolution. However, in 1824 these acts were repealed, allowing workers to organise and bargain collectively, though new laws were introduced in 1825 to regulate unions and prevent strikes from becoming violent or disruptive.
Trade Union Act (1871) legalised trade unions and allowed them to bargain collectively.
Employers and Workmen Act (1875) enabled workers to sue employers for breach of contract and introduced penalties for employers who violated labour laws.
The Public Health Act (1848) addressed the squalid living and working conditions in industrial towns, which were seen as breeding grounds for disease and unrest. It established local boards of health and improved sanitation. In 1850 life expectancy was 40 years for men, and 42 for women. By 1900, it had risen to 45 for men and 50 for women, though this was at least in part due to improved nutrition with meat and dairy foods such as butter coming the colonies.
The provision of clean water and sewerage was driven as much by enlightened self-interest as by compassion. Prince Albert's death from typhoid in 1861 showed that even royalty wasn't safe from disease bred by poor sanitation, just as Hobart's authorities only acted once industrial pollution of the Hobart Rivulet (Tasmania) resulted in typhoid epidemics which spread upstream into wealthier parts of town.
The smog from coal burning factories and domestic fires was often thick enough to block out the sun and eased only with the coming of electricity though legislation did not address this until 1952, after killer fogs had killed 4,000 people in four days.
Education Act (1870) improved access to education for working-class children, which was seen as a way to reduce social unrest and improve productivity.
The Rise of the Middle Class
The Right to Vote
Before 1832, the vote was largely restricted to landowners, though a patchwork of older borough franchises meant some tradesmen and other non-landed men could vote too. The Reform Act of 1832 abolished the worst of the "rotten boroughs" and standardised a property qualification, still excluding most working men. The Representation of the People Act of 1867 extended the vote to male householders in urban areas, though many working-class men — lodgers, and those in smaller properties — still didn't qualify. By 1918, all men over 21 gained the vote, and in 1928 women's suffrage was equalised with men's at age 21.
With rare exceptions such as the Sunlight Soap manufacturer, William Lever (1888) who built homes and schools for his workers and their children and believed that they should have 'bright sunshine, flowers and plants,' or later Henry Ford, who paid his workers double so they could afford the cars they were building, these reforms did not come about spontaneously or generally through the benevolence of employers, but because people fought and sometimes died for them and because of public pressure on Governments either by the middle class or the workers themselves.
The United States
Growing Inequality
For the most part, similar developments were occurring in other industrialised countries though the pace varied. In the 1890s in the newly re -United States, industrialisation, the coming of the railways and the discovery of oil, brought immense wealth to the few with very little “trickling down” to workers or the rest of society. By 1897, the richest 4,000 families in the US — less than 1% of the population — held roughly as much wealth as the other 11.6 million families combined and controlled one quarter of the nation’s assets and 75% of the country’s wealth. By 1900 the richest 10% owned an estimated 90%.
To justify their extreme wealth they cited a variant of Darwin’s Theory of Evolution espoused by Herbert Spencer, which held that economic success was the result of their superior fitness to survive.
Much of the wealth generated by America's early cotton industry rested on the free labour of enslaved people — the very issue the Civil War (1861–1865) was fought over, with full legal abolition not coming until 1865.
Meanwhile, conditions in the factories were appalling. Child labour was big feature and 35,000 workers a year were being killed in industrial accidents. In 1873 massive over- investment in railways resulted in the financial panic of 1873 and brought on a five year Depression, a long slow decline, unlike the one we call the Great Depression, although the latter was more severe and its effects lasted almost ten years. Eighty - nine railroads companies and 18,000 businesses failed. Unemployment rose 14%. Many more were underpaid and wages dropped to 45% of previous levels.
Depression and Strikes
One in four labourers was unemployed, causing widespread unrest. In 1877 after wages were cut for the third time in a year, troops were used against striking workers as in the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 which involved many parts of the country and resulted in hundreds being killed. Large companies such Rockefeller's and Carnegie Steel brought in armed detectives from private agencies such as Pinkerton's to break up strikes and unions. Sometimes they were also killed as in the Homestead Strike (1892) and the Pullman Strike of 1894. Newspapers of the day sided mostly with the industrialists rather than the strikers.
Improvements in Living Conditions
Between 1890 -1900 Newspaper writer Jacob Riis, who had spent
a good part of his early years as a
struggling itinerant immigrant from Denmark before landing a newspaper job, took
photographs of life in the slums and through his articles, books and lecture tours, made it his mission to improve conditions in the slums where disease, vermin, garbage and poor sanitation made them a
breeding ground for diseases such as typhoid and cholera. In 1900, tuberculosis was the leading cause of death in NYC.
In his early days on the police beat, Riis had become acquainted with Theodore
Roosevelt, who was then police commissioner and they remained friends when Roosevelt became President. They shared the view that the origins of crime lay in the poverty and squalor of the slums. Because Riis also believed that education was the path by which young people
could improve their fortunes and immigrants would become good American citizens,
industrial schools were established and, inspired by his work, Progressive
movements and benevolent societies began to replace many of the airless and windowless tenements and add parks and playgrounds.
Efforts to Curb the Imbalance of Power
Because large companies colluded to set prices and crush competition, the Sherman Antitrust Act was passed in 1890 — the first significant government intervention to break up the great monopolies. This sparked the biggest frenzy of mergers the USA had ever seen as companies sought to sidestep the law. In 1914, the Clayton Anti -trust Act was passed to prevent such mergers if they reduced competition. These however, did little to improve the lives of workers.
Although white men had won the right to vote in 1856, when North Carolina became the last state to drop its property qualification, and women in the 1920’s* nothing really changed because of the close relationship between industrialists and politicians, who were often drawn from the same social class, repeatedly struck down any attempt at reform in the courts. It was to take another two economic downturns before things began to change.
*Black men officially gained the right to vote in 1870 but not in practice until the Voting Rights Act of 1965.The Recession of 1920 -21
In the USA, the Gilded Age came to screeching halt because of a short, sharp Recession in 1920 -21. This was brought on by an abrupt reversal of wartime monetary and industrial policy, returning troops flooding the labour market and the Federal Reserve raising interest rates hard to choke off wartime inflation. Worse was to follow.
The Great Depression – 1929 - 1939
The period immediately after the Recession was one of great optimism and technological progress. Mass production put technologies such as radios, cars, music, film and cars within reach of the middle class. During the “Roaring Twenties” as the period became known, it also became possible to buy shares with only a small deposit – a ‘margin,’ assuming that they would only go up in price. Although 1% of Americans still owned half of the wealth in 1929, many of the remaining 99% had gone into debt, including business people, overseas investors and even the proverbial ‘Mum and Dad” investors, to buy shares.
By September 1929, astute investors began to realise that the actual investments which underpinned the stocks were never going to return enough
to pay back the huge amounts which had been borrowed and began withdrawing their
funds. Within a month this ended in the Wall Street Crash of October 1929. The
stock market plummeted by 48%. Because the buying frenzy had also drawn in foreign
investors, the resulting downturn affected other countries as well. It was
especially severe in places such as Australia as foreign investment
funds dried up and demand and prices for their exports fell.
High
unemployment followed. Living standards fell and people
stopped buying goods, thereby causing other businesses to fail. To
relieve the suffering of the unemployed and their families, President
Franklin D. Roosevelt (a distant cousin of the first), who'd been elected in 1932 when unemployment stood
at 25%, ushered in the New Deal (1933), no doubt building on progressive ideas Theodore Roosevelt had championed a generation earlier.
These included reforms to the banking sector such as preventing manipulation of the share market and guaranteeing the safety of deposits, as well as public works schemes and relief for those out of work, such as electrification and the building of roads, dams, parks and libraries an idea which was also taken up by other countries and marked the beginning of the welfare state. The Great Ocean Road in Victoria, (Australia) is a legacy of this era, as is the road to Milford Sound in New Zealand and the Pinnacle Road up Mt. Wellington in Tasmania.
New Labour laws also came into force, such as the National Labor Relations (Wagner) Act of 1935 which gave workers the right to form unions and bargain collectively and the Fair Labor Standards Act (1938) which guaranteed minimum wages, put an end to the worst forms of child labour and enshrined the forty hour week, The Occupational Health and Safety Act however, did not pass until 1970.
The Age of Electrification (1890s -1940s), and the coming of the “horseless carriage” may well have successfully absorbed surplus workers displaced from earlier professions - coachmen, carriage makers, farriers and horse breeders, along with gas workers, coal merchants and lamplighters, but by then they would also have been absorbed first by the war effort (1914 -1918), then by its casualties and finally, in its aftermath by reconstruction and the conversion of wartime factories to the production of consumer goods.
Indeed, there was such a shortage of labour after WWI that even more mechanisation was the only solution in rural areas and the availability of factory work, meant there was no return to the days of servants which meant that labour -saving devices became a necessity, rather than an optional extra for the extremely wealthy.
The rise of the American middle class did not come about naturally as a product of unregulated capitalism, but through deliberate government policies which encouraged mass consumption, private home ownership and the building of infrastructure.
In 1939 -45, War once again intervened, but this time most western countries adopted a different economic model when soldiers returned from the front. Determined to avert such a global catastrophes in future, new institutions were created such as the United Nations -for peace and security, and the International Monetary Fund to oversee financial affairs. They also adopted a new economic model proposed by respected economist,John Maynard Keynes. This held that governments should provide first and then the economy would recover as money was earned and spent.
In the USA, government-backed loans under the 1944 GI Bill gave ex-servicemen priority access to cheap, no-deposit mortgages, fuelling a suburban housing boom, while the 1956 Federal-Aid Highway Act launched the country's huge Interstate Highway System, employing tens of thousands and reshaping the whole economy around the car and the commute. Although Black, Mexican American, and Native American veterans alike were often excluded from GI Bill housing benefits, veterans also received free education and health care.
In the UK, the government built over a million new homes between 1946 and 1951, mostly council housing, and created entirely new communities under the New Towns Act (1946) to replace slums and bomb-damaged housing. In Australia, the Commonwealth-State Housing Agreement (1945) funded public housing with priority for returning servicemen, while the Snowy Mountains Scheme, begun in 1949, employed some 100,000 workers, many of them postwar migrants and displaced persons, building the country's largest-ever engineering project.
The ensuing baby boom — a sustained surge in the US and Australia through to the early 1960s, and a shorter, sharp spike in Britain — helped keep the economies growing, as a rising population needed more food, clothing, footwear, schools and consumer goods.Much the same trajectory was followed by other western countries and their citizens lived more or less happily ever after, until the 1970s.
Because this section is already much too long, I will continue with the more recent events in the next post.
This post has been created with help from Copilot (image), lengthy discussions with Claude, also research, together Ecosia and ChatGPT for fact checking and verification.
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