Factory workers were severely impacted socially and economically during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries due to horrendous working conditions. A report from the Meiji Government in Okaya, Japan in 1900 revolved around the long hours and harsh conditions that came with factory work. An average work day consisted of thirteen to fourteen hours, where workers would wake at 4:05 AM, and go to work until 7:30 PM; in which they would only receive 3 breaks of 10-15 minutes from their total of 14 hours and 20 minutes of work. When it was particularly busy, workers were even kept until the late hours of 10 PM (Document C). The purpose of this report was to display the intense working conditions people would have to work through, which consisted …show more content…
These long hours caused the workers health to deteriorate, where they had a permanent loss of sleep because workers would only get a couple of hours to rest on their own time only when they were able to finish their night shift (Document D). Friedrich Engels’ point of view surrounding the working conditions is that workers should not have to suffer and become ill because of their work environment. He thought that employers wanted to solely benefit themselves economically and did not invest attention towards the dreadful conditions the workers faced. Engel was strongly against how it was thought that the sole purpose for the working class was to help the upper class benefit. He, later on, joined Karl Marx with writing the Communist Manifesto and became a founding member of the Communist International. They wrote to persuade the working class to work against the system and follow communism, which however, did not come to be true. Factory workers were severely impacted socially and economically during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries due to horrendous working conditions and long working hours, causing sleep deprivation and deteriorations in