"Why Workers Welcomed Long Hours of Industrial Revolution"

...And did the Countenance Divine,
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here,
Among these dark Satanic Mills?...

-William Blake, "And did those feet in ancient time"

From Bloomberg Echoes:

Despite longer hours and harsh conditions, many workers celebrated the Industrial Revolution. 

Source: British Library 

Writers and academics often show an interesting ambivalence about industrialization. Today, they regard it as a blessing, the single-most-effective way to lift people out of poverty. But in thinking about Britain’s Industrial Revolution, they have tended to reach the opposite conclusion: The rise of the factory, they argue, caused the end of more “natural” working hours, introduced more exploitative employment patterns and dehumanized the experience of labor. It robbed workers of their autonomy and dignity.

Yet if we turn to the writing of laborers themselves, we find that they didn’t share the historians’ gloomy assessment. Starting in the early 19th century, working people in Britain began to write autobiographies and memoirs in ever greater numbers. Men (and occasionally women) who worked in factories and mines, as shoemakers and carpenters, and on the land, penned their stories, and inevitably touched on the large part of their life devoted to labor. In the process, they produced a remarkable account of the Industrial Revolution from the perspective of those who felt its effects firsthand -- one that looks very different from the standard historical narrative.

More Hours First, working-class writers put a very different spin on the increase in working hours that accompanied industrialization. The autobiographies make clear that in pre- industrial Britain, there simply wasn’t enough work to go around. As a result, few people were fully employed throughout the year. This gave them leisure time, but it also left most families eking out an uncomfortable living on the margins.

The lack of consistent employment also forced workers to stay in positions that were unsuitable or grossly exploitative. William Chubb, living in the sleepy Wiltshire village of East Harnham, spent four years working as a glove maker, despite fearing that the work was destroying his eyesight. As he glumly noted, he had “no better, or indeed no other way, to get a livelihood.” And in rural Scotland, James Ferguson stayed at his post as a miller’s assistant even though the miller was a drunkard and left him “almost starved.” What other choice did he have? There was no point in returning to his father, “who I knew full well could not maintain me.”
This situation changed dramatically with the onset of industrialization. In the factory heartlands, there was a lot of work that needed to be done, which benefited anybody with a strong back and healthy body. There were jobs not only in the factories, but in building them. The industrial workforce needed homes, shoes, clothes, furniture, bread and beer -- it all meant jobs for large numbers of workers, skilled and otherwise, and incomes that greatly exceeded what could be earned from the land....MORE

Blake's poem was set to music and becomes the anthem Jerusalem. Here's one version: