People disliked working in factories even when the money was pretty good by the standards of the day; they hated working to the clock, they hated working at a pace set by machinery, and they hated close detailed supervision. (When time-and-motion studies came along, they hated _those_ even more.)

Preindustrial work was usually spasmodic rather than continuous — bursts of intense effort separated by a slow amble, with long but not very intense working days and lots of holidays; reducing Saint’s Days and the like was one of the main goals of early industrialists. Not to mention getting people accustomed to the idea that you couldn’t treat a machine like an ox.

The first-generation factory labor force mostly didn’t want to be there and didn’t want to be doing what they were doing and didn’t like the way they were forced to do it; they were pitchforked into it by stark necessity and social changes beyond their comprehension or control, and they mostly loathed the whole process. They’d really have preferred to stay home in the village, except that there wasn’t work or food enough there, or the common had been enclosed, or something of that sort.

Hence also the pervasive demoralization and mass drunkenness of early-industrial factory towns; “gin is the easiest way to get out of Manchester”, as the saying went. They were collections of strangers thrown together in a lousy environment, with sullen hostility and grinding homesickness the most common emotional states. Not to mention the extreme hostility between the classes.

Before the Industrial Revolution, even if people were poor they usually set the hour-by-hour pace of their own labor — a weaver, for example, could get drunk on Sunday, loaf around with a hangover on “Saint Monday”, then make up for it with a frantic burst of effort towards the end of the week before the agent came around to collect finished cloth and drop off yarn. The idea of having to work hard and regularly _all the time_ was repellant, not simply for its own sake but because it meant the loss of all remaining independence.

Goofing off and things like drinking on the job were cherished rights, especially among skilled workers. There are a couple of illuminating studies of what happened in the 19th century when new management tried to impose rational methods and precise accounting on, for example, small-arms plants in the US; sabotage, work-to-rule and even assassination were the response. In fact, our word “sabotage” comes from this period — textile workers in Belgium used to toss their wooden shoes (“sabots”) into the machinery occasionally to force a slow-down.

Also, standards of “business morality” back then were extremely low, from top management on down to the shop floor; fraud and theft were omnipresent.

_That’s_ an important reason why most business units were so small and so family-based. Even fairly big ones like shipyards or ironworks were broken up into smaller units by sub-contracting nearly everything. You could (sometimes) trust your relatives or members of the same close-knit ethnic or religious minority; you couldn’t trust, eg., a hired accountant or manager not to rob the till and abscond. Most workers were intensely hostile to technical innovation, and often rioted or killed people who tried to introduce innovations. They’d only work well if given the hairy eyeball 24/7 by someone with an immediate interest in keeping them up to scratch.

It took generations to produce a labor force used to industrial conditions.