Question

What was referred to as the “10 hours movement”?

Answer 1

Hint: Apart from frightening avarice, this struggle over the legal restriction of working hours raged all the more fiercely because it revealed the great contest between supply and demand laws' blind rule, which forms the political economy of the middle class, and social production controlled by social foresight, which forms the political economy of the working class.

Complete answer:
The struggle for the ten-hour day, quite the other issue, was the point of interest for several workers organizations within the 1840s. By 1845, factory workers in Lowell were spending a mean of 12.5 hours per day performing dreary, exhausting add onerous conditions. When the time spent visiting and from the mills was factored in, the times approached 14.5 hours.

The long hours worsened the already physically and mentally debasing factory life. Operatives wrote that the hours of labour were “sufficient to impair health, induce disease, premature maturity, and death...to say nothing of the intellectual degeneracy which must necessarily result from the want of mental recreation.”

The Factories Act of 1847, commonly known as the Ten Hours Act, was a British law that limited the working hours of women and young people (aged 13 to 18) in textile mills to ten hours a day. Because of the practicalities of running a textile mill, the Act should have effectively set the same limit on the working hours of adult male mill-workers, but due to faulty drafting, a subsequent Factory Act in 1850 imposing stricter restrictions on the hours that women and young people could work was required to achieve this. With this minor caveat, the Act of 1847 marked the end of a nearly fifteen-year battle to enact a 'Ten Hours Bill,' a major Radical cause at the time.

Richard Oastler was a prominent and early advocate; the most famous Parliamentarian involved was Lord Ashley, who campaigned long and tirelessly on the issue; however, the eventual success owed much to the mobilisation of support among mill workers by organisers like John Doherty and sympathetic mill owners like John Fielden, MP, who piloted the Act through the Commons.

Note: The 1847 Act was passed shortly after Sir Robert Peel's Conservative government fell from power, but the 'free trade' Liberals, such as John Bright, were staunch opponents of all ten-hour bills; the same economic doctrines that led them to oppose artificial tariff barriers also led them to oppose government restrictions on the terms on which a man could sell his labour.