Also, industrialization saw the rise of the skilled workforce. People started earning more the more they could use their brain. It makes sense that they wouldn't want to numb it as much as they did before.
There was a switchboard with buttons for emergency breaks (e.g.toilet break). If you used it the machine stopped, a yellow light flashed and the foreman shouted at you.
I don't write this to complain, actually for me doing this for a couple of weeks during summer recess was quite fun. After this experience I also totally see how you just cannot do a job like that for 40+ years without alcohol.
At that factory drinking previously had been common among workers. They banned alcohol during weekdays after one worker fell into a spinning milling machine. But even after that those workers who came in on Saturdays were allowed to consume a limited quantity of beer.
Many didn't cope well with this and in the building I was working they had thrown out the contents of the first aid boxes to hide the beer bottles there.
Beer works well against acute dehydration.
Not neccessarily. The whole Luddite revolution/movement was trying to fight industrialization _because_ it required less skills, and reduced workers' wages. For example, before the automatic looms were introduced, cloth was produced by hand, by people of significant dexterity and skill. After automation, it was mainly produced by machines which needed only very basic (and low paid) human input here and there.
I'm not so sure. Before industrialization, most jobs were skilled. For one, most people were farmers, and it required a lifetime of knowledge (usually passed on from previous generations). Whereas today, lots (most?) of people are employed in jobs which don't require much training. In factory work jobs, it's enough that you are literate and can do basic arithmetic. In many office jobs and service jobs, it's that plus possibly some basic computer skills. The actual training often takes one day and teaches you everything you need to know to perform the job well.
Pretty soon the demand (and pay) for skilled craftsmen rocketed back up because the newly affluent workers could now afford to buy more items and some of those were not yet mass-producable.
That’s the exact opposite of reality. They worked 12-16 hour shifts for unlivable wages, crammed several families per room, and lived without any of the infrastructure that makes high densities livable like modern sewer systems. It was the age of cholera and truly awful living conditions.
People didn’t move into the cities because it was better for them but because industrialization forced them to. Peasants didn’t start asking for worker’s rights until the industrial revolution because it was so much worse than working conditions in subsistence farming.
Weren't inclosure acts a big reason why people moved to the cities, at least in England?
So you had industrialists setting up factories needing cheap labour to run the machines, and a mass exodus of the countryside population to the cities desperate for work. Hello Dickens.
This is how you get an explosion in petty crime, disease, poverty, hulks, and eventually, transportation of the troublesome poor to Australia.
The industrial revolution was so destabilising to society that colonialism was a very convenient solution. Just go somewhere else, shoot the natives who resist, and the poors can have that land.