THE MAN WHO INVENTED THE TOMORROW OF WORK
ROBERT OWEN
New Lanark, a textile village carved out of a gorge on the River Clyde, was already one of Scotland's larger mills when Owen took charge. What he inherited was everything the early Industrial Revolution had licensed; children working from the age of five, workers housed in conditions closer to pens than homes, gin as the primary comfort, and exhaustion as the primary state. It was legal, it was normal, but to Owen it was an abomination.
Owen was convinced that people are not born good or bad, industrious or idle, virtuous or criminal. They are made that way by the conditions around them. Change the conditions, change the person; change enough people, change civilization. It sounds simple, almost no one acted on it.
Owen acted. He banned the employment of children under ten; he reduced the working day to ten and a half hours, something that was extraordinary for the era. He built schools, insisted attendance was free, and designed a curriculum around song, dance, and nature rather than rote and the rod. He built decent housing, opened a store that sold goods at cost. He eliminated the fines and petty punishments that kept workers in a permanent state of low-grade dread, and he made money doing it.
Visitors came from across Europe to see New Lanark with their own eyes. Statesmen, philosophers, the Tsar of Russia sent an envoy. They came expecting a curiosity and found a refutation of every excuse that had ever been offered for cruelty masquerading as economic necessity. Owen had not sacrificed efficiency for ethics. He had discovered, empirically, that they were the same thing.
New Lanark was a demonstration for Owen, he wanted a movement, he spent decades of his life, much of his fortune, and a great reservoir of political goodwill pushing further. He lobbied Parliament for factory reform and helped force through the Factory Act of 1819, the first law in British history to restrict child labour. It was inadequate, full of loopholes, and bitterly opposed. It was also a beginning.
He proposed cooperative communities, villages of cooperation as an alternative to competitive industrialism. Owen was wrong about many things, but he was right about the one thing, that poverty is not a law of nature, it is a policy choice. What he began two hundred years ago is still being strengthened today, what if he never started?
365 men who changed the world.
Kamikun John, Author 366 days of wisdom.
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