The labour movement

The story

Factories and working-class districts

With the Industrial Revolution, between the 18th and 19th centuries, millions of people left the countryside to work in the factories, mines and building sites of the new cities. Living conditions were very hard. People worked twelve, fourteen, even sixteen hours a day, six days a week, for low pay. Machines had no guards, and accidents were frequent. Children worked in spinning mills and mines too, sometimes at six or seven years old, because they cost little and could squeeze into narrow places. Families lived crammed together in crowded, unhealthy districts, with little clean water and a lot of disease.

Workers had no rights at all: if they fell ill or got hurt, they were sacked; if they protested, they risked prison. In many countries workers' associations were banned: in England, for example, the “Combination Acts” were repealed only in 1824.

The first protests

Workers began to organise. At first there were spontaneous revolts, like that of the “Luddites”, who in 1811–16 in England smashed the machines that were leaving them without work. Then the first trade unions were born, and mutual aid societies, in which workers paid in small sums to help each other in case of illness or unemployment. In 1844, at Rochdale, in England, according to tradition twenty-eight workers founded the most famous consumer co-operative, a shop where goods were sold at fair prices and the profits were shared among the members.

Workers also demanded the right to vote: in the 1830s and 1840s, in England, the “Chartist” movement presented Parliament with a “People's Charter” carrying millions of signatures, to demand the vote for all men. Some laws improved workers' conditions a little: in 1833 the English Parliament limited child labour in textile factories, and in 1847 the Ten Hours Act was passed for women and young people.

The International

On 28 September 1864, in a hall in London, St Martin's Hall, English, French, Italian and German delegates met to found the International Workingmen's Association, later called the “First International”. The idea was to unite workers of all countries, because their problems were the same and employers, it was said, worked together across borders: for example, when there were strikes, they could bring in other workers from abroad. The “Inaugural Address” was written by a German philosopher living in London, Karl Marx, and ended with the slogan: “Workers of all countries, unite!”.

The International had tens or hundreds of thousands of members, and far greater influence, but it was divided by clashes between its currents: the followers of Marx, who wanted to win political power, and those of the Russian Mikhail Bakunin, an anarchist, who rejected every state. After the Paris Commune of 1871, a revolutionary government that lasted a few weeks and ended in blood, it was persecuted by governments and dissolved in 1876.

After the International

The workers' movement carried on growing. In 1889 a Second International was born in Paris, which chose 1 May as a day of struggle for the eight-hour working day, in memory of a strike in Chicago in 1886 that ended in deaths and convictions. Since then 1 May has been Workers' Day. In many countries socialist parties and trade unions were born: in Italy the Socialist Party was founded in Genoa in 1892, thanks to Filippo Turati and Anna Kuliscioff, and in 1891 the first Chamber of Labour had been set up in Milan.

There were strikes, some of them violent, and repression. But little by little the demands were met: laws on child labour, on the weekly day of rest and on accidents at work, and the first social insurance and pensions, introduced in the 1880s by the German chancellor Bismarck, to reduce support for the socialists.