life of proletariat after labour movement

Their living conditions were improved.

Poor people lived in very small houses in cramped streets. Disease was spread through a contaminated water supply. Conditions did improvement during the 19th century as public health acts were introduced covering things such as sewage, hygiene and making some boundaries upon the construction of homes. Not everybody lived in homes like these. However, as a result of the Revolution, huge numbers of the working class died due to diseases spreading through the cramped living conditions. Diseases from the mines, cholera from polluted water were common and that was smallpox. Strikes and riots by workers were also relatively common.

The Industrial Revolution created a larger middle class of professionals such as lawyers and doctors. The conditions for the poor improved over the course of the 19th century because of government and local plans which led to cities becoming cleaner places, but life had not been easy for the poor before industrialisation. They had a clean place and the death rate was decreased because of the better medical treatment.

The Industrial Revolution concentrated labour into mills, factories and mines, thus facilitating the organisation of combinations or trade unions to help advance the interests of working people. The power of a union could demand better terms by withdrawing all labour and causing a consequent cessation of production. Employers had to decide between giving in to the union demands at a cost to themselves or suffer the cost of the lost production. Skilled workers were hard to replace, and these were the first groups to successfully advance their conditions through this kind of bargaining.

The main method the unions used to effect change was strike action. Many strikes were painful events for both sides, the unions and the management. In England, the Combination Act forbade workers to form any kind of trade union from 1799 until its repeal in 1824. Even after this, unions were still severely restricted.

In the 1830s and 1840s the Chartist movement was the first large scale organised working class political movement which campaigned for political equality and social justice. Its Charter of reforms received over three million signatures but was rejected by Parliament without consideration.

Working people also formed friendly societies and co-operative societies as mutual support groups against times of economic hardship. Enlightened industrialists, such as Robert Owen also supported these organisations to improve the conditions of the working class.

Unions slowly overcame the legal restrictions on the right to strike. In 1842, a General Strike involving cotton workers and colliers was organised through the Chartist movement which stopped production across Great Britain.

Eventually effective political organisation for working people was achieved through the trades unions who, after the extensions of the franchise in 1867 and 1885, began to support socialist political parties that later merged to became the British Labour Party.