Factory Acts

The Factory Acts were a series of UK labour law Acts passed by the Parliament of the United Kingdom to regulate the conditions of industrial employment. The early Acts concentrated on regulating the hours of work and moral welfare of young children employed in cotton mills but were effectively unenforced until the Act of 1833 established a professional Factory Inspectorate. The regulation of working hours was then extended to women by an Act of 1844. An Act in 1847 (the Ten Hour Act) (together with Acts in 1850 and 1853 remedying defects in the 1847 Act) met a long- standing (and by 1847 well-organised) demand by the millworkers for a ten-hour day. The Factory Acts also sought to ameliorate the conditions under which mill-children worked with requirements on ventilation, sanitation, and guarding of machinery. Introduction of the ten-hour day proved to have none of the dire consequences predicted by its opponents, and its apparent success effectively ended theoretical objections to the principle of factory legislation; from the 1860s onwards more industries were brought within the Factory Act, until by 1910, Sidney Webb reviewing the cumulative effect of century of factory legislation felt able to write