The Workers' Movement

From the early 18th century to the present day, Stan Neumann traces the history of the European working class in this documentary series in four installments. In this first episode, ARTE looks at 1820s England, when 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. And so the country became heaven for capitalists, and 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 realised 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, didn't catch on in the rest of the world until the First World War. 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 labour, 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 rigths. There was renewed hope in the 70s that things would get better for workers, but it turned out to be a false dawn.