Legislation and Trade Unions

Abstract

The terrible conditions under which the majority of nineteenth-century homeworkers laboured were not as visible as those under which workers laboured in the factories or mines. It was not until the 1880s that the iniquities of the sweating system carried out in the homes of the workers became widely known to those outside the working class itself. This concern about homework must be seen against the background of the socio-political climate of the late nineteenth century. One of the most important issues of the 1880s was the poverty debate. Charles Booth’s East End survey brought a new and more scientific approach to the study of poverty and coupled with this new investigative approach to poverty was a change in social attitudes. The 1880s also witnessed the growth of socialism and the development of the ‘New Liberalism’ women’s movement, the trade union and labour movements and the settlement movement all made important contributions as pressure groups, so it became possible for a change in social thinking to develop. There was a shift of emphasis from individualism in social policy to greater pressure for state intervention and collective responsibility. Poverty was no longer seen to result purely from individual weakness of character, and specific environmental factors were isolated as causes of poverty.