Labor Before Improvements

This stop displays the Ball Brothers Glass Manufacturing Company from Muncie, Indiana. The Ball brothers started in Buffalo, New York, and to expand their growing business moved to Muncie, Indiana in the late 19th century. Their facility of factories in Muncie became one of the largest manufacturing plants in the country of glass jars. This stop gives an example of what factories would have looked like in the late 19th century.

Labor in factories in the mid to late 19th century had little regulation. An 1881 Indiana Department of Statistics published a factory condition report stating the average factory worker earned $1.00 to $1.50 in a ten to twelve-hour workday. This is around the average wages for factory and manufacturing for 1881. These factory workers also worked six days a week regularly. The wages would be used to pay for the urban housing nearby and necessities for a five-person family. Some industries in the state would even require a seven-day work week.

People pushing for reform, such as the Prohibition Party in 1872, felt that the state government had a responsibility to regulate working conditions. The government should control and require a certain number of working hours and regulate safety concerns. The state government believed in the freedom of business to work their employees as they saw fit. The businesses of the mid to late 19th century looked further than just the labor of men to fill the needs of the growing industrial market.

There was common use of women in labor. There was division in the type of labor that women did depending on their education and marital status. Married women were discouraged from working in this period. Educated women were employed in administrative work, while less educated women were employed in factories. Children too were prone to unconventional labor practices. One mother of a child that was working in a glass manufacturing factory would rather send her boys straight to hell than send them back to the glass house (glass factory). Although these conditions were seen as a punishment, from as early as 1867 there were regulations put on the labor and conditions children were prone to. These regulations restricted child labor for more than ten hours in factories and the age at which children could work. Unfortunately, these regulations did not stop young kids from working, and it took time for lasting widespread changes in labor to take hold.