#1496870 ANPEC - 1996 - Exame de Seleção Nacional (ANPEC)/"1997"

Part II

Recruitment of Labour for the Mills  in The Early Factory Masters - Transition of the Factory in the Midlands Textile Industry. By  Stanley Chapman. Chapter 9 - pp 156-157.

One of the most difficult problems which entrepreneurs in the early cotton  and worsted-spinning industry had to face was the recruitment and retention of a labour force. The problem was, in part, a consequence of the well-known reluctance of the working-classes to enter the factories, and certainly the domestic framework knitters and weavers of the region were not easily persuaded to exchange their freedom for factory discipline. The scarcity of labour was also a reflection of the general shortage in the manufacturing districts. The hosiery and lace industries were growing very rapidly, and their expansion coincided with that of the spinning industry. Wages appear to have been higher in hosiery and lace than for similar grades of workers (skilled, semi-skilled and unskilled) in the mills. In the rural areas, there was a steady drain of good workers to the towns and large manufacturing villages, where the best-paid work was to be found. The French war also aggravated the labour shortage after 1792 by drawing large numbers of men into the army.

It has already been noted that the wages paid in the spinning-mills were not sufficiently high to attract workers from regular employment in the towns. Farey points out that Derbyshire millworkers earned higher wages than farm labourers in the country and White records that, in Bakewell, 'wages were raised immediately' after Arkwright's mill began production there. Fitton and Wadsworth suggest that Arkwright and Strutt did not employ parish apprentices, and that their labour force was probably recruited in the villages within a four- or five-mile radius of the factories. This explanation is not very convincing since other evidence, overlooked by these two authors, shows that even juvenile and female labour had to be brought into Derbyshire from the main centres of the cotton industry at Manchester and Nottingham.

The author states that:

Item 2 - the French war aggravated the labour shortage after 1792.