Title: Factory System | Encyclopedia.com
Headings: Factory System
Factory System
Factory System
BIBLIOGRAPHY
factory system
factory system

Content: Whereas in preindustrial societies, all members of the family were involved in production work, the advent of the factory system created a gendered division of labor for middle- and working-class families, whereby men went to work for a wage and women were relegated to household work. In poor and nonwhite families, women worked for a wage outside the home in both formal and informal settings. Men were nearly always wageworkers, while women were either relegated to unpaid work to support the work of the men in their families or themselves worked for wages as a means of survival. The link of the wage system to factory production created not only a different work process and a gendered division of labor, but also a new form of work. Whereas work under preindustrial forms of organization was often exploitative, particularly under systems of slavery and feudalism, the development of the factory system as a defining feature of capitalism created alienated work for the first time. Work is said to be alienated when the worker is in a relationship of production whereby he or she has no autonomy or control over what he or she is producing, where the goods being produced belong exclusively to the owner of the factory, and whereby this process makes the worker alien to himself or herself and his or her community. Marx, in his book Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (1867) argued that workers are alienated to the same extent that they are subject to livelihood exclusively through the wage labor market. This same process has created a social life whereby workers are more fundamentally tied to the workplace than to their homes in terms of livelihood and dependence. This process has also created levels of bureaucracy that divide labor into segmented, de-skilled tasks.