A History of the European Working Class

England, 1820s. After decades of exploitation, the British working class start fighting back.

In continental Europe, Belgium was the only country that adopted the Factory System and economic liberalism, already well established in Great Britain, so the country became heaven for capitalists, but hell for workers. France's industrial revolution, on the other hand, was far slower, without large factories or a massive rural exodus. But it was nonetheless this group of workers that militantly campaigned for better living and working conditions.

By the end of the 19th century, factory owners realized that workers are just as much part of the company's capital as the machines are, and thought of ways to make these human machines work better, with nutrition and exercises. But the production line, invented in Chicago in 1871, did not catch on in the rest of the world until the World War I. Shortly after, the crises of the 1920s and 1930s saw the worker dramatically lose bargaining power.

As democracy in Europe faltered, so did worker's rights. Nazi Germany used the workers of the countries it defeated as forced labor, and systematically worked dissenters and Jewish people to death. During the Cold War, in the West, social peace was bought by improving working conditions; while, in the East, the worker, supposedly so central to communism, lost many basic rights. There was renewed hope in the seventies that things would get better for workers, but it turned out to be a false dawn.