ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the development of factory legislation up to the 1833 Factory Act and the establishment of the Factory Inspectorate. It examines the contradictory relationship between the working class movement and factory inspectors during the early stages of factory reform. The chapter looks at the Act of 1844, which included women as a restricted group; and explains about patriarchy and protective legislation. It considers the revolutionary transformation that took place in the consciousness of factory inspectors as they worked to implement the Acts, especially the famous Ten Hours Act of 1847. The chapter discusses the vital contribution of political economy to capital’s attack on state intervention. It investigates the biographical similarities that created the peculiar union between the communist Karl Marx and the factory bureaucrat Leonard Horner. For Marx, ferocious exploitation of children and women by capital and large-scale introduction of machinery decisively transformed the labor contract in the first half of the nineteenth century.
