Industrial Revolution

WORKING CONDITIONS

Away from home, working conditions were even worse, the workday could extend up to 12-14 or 15 hours a day, six days a week. The work itself was hard, boring, and tedious. Conditions around the factories, steam engines and in the mines were hot and at times extremely dangerous.
In the absence of safety devices, machines often tore off fingers, hands, and even arms.
Despite of all this, there were often long lines of the unemployed waiting for any available jobs. This surplus (excedent) of labour kept wages excessively low. As a result, families had to send their women and even their children to work in the factories just to make ends meet.
In fact, women and children were preferred as workers because they could be paid less while being worked harder. Occasional depressions in the economy could lead to whole industries shutting down. This left thousands of families with no jobs and no public welfare to see them through such hard times. Even medieval serfs had been assured some rights to a living off their lands, which was more than these people could often enjoy.

The Industrial Revolution also upset old social patterns of life and family. Under the old domestic system of cottage industries, peasants worked in their own homes, produced at their own rates, and were paid accordingly.
Under the new factory system, labourers worked in the factories owned by bosses whom they rarely, if ever, saw. They had to be at work precisely on time and work at the much faster pace of the machines. Nevertheless, they were paid by the hour, not according to their productivity, since that was cheaper for the owner.
Previously, the farm, home and the workplace were one and the same, with men and women sharing in many of the same tasks. In the industrial city, there was a separation of home and workplace and a correspondingly greater separation of the roles men and women played. In middle class families, men went to work while women stayed home with the children. In working class families, men, women, and children all went to work, but usually to separate places. For both middle and working class families, these were added strains that pulled the family apart.
As individual families moved to the city, they left behind the support network of the villages, often living in isolation and having little or no support from their neighbours.

Science Museum, where you can see some engines, as spinning machines used to spin cotton.

Children in the Industrial Revolution- link-

Working conditions USA- link-