The Factory and Workshop Act 1878 (41 & 42 Vict. c. 16) was an act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom that consolidated enactments relating to factories and workshops in the United Kingdom.
Background In the debates on Mundella's bills and the Factory Act 1874 (37 & 38 Vict. c. 44), it had been noted that years of piece-meal legislation had left factory law in an unsatisfactory and confusing state; the government had spoken of the need to consolidate and extend factory law by a single act replacing all previous legislation, but had not felt itself able to allocate the necessary legislative time. In March 1875, a royal commission (headed by Sir James Fergusson) was set up to look at the consolidation and extension of factory law. It took evidence in the principal industrial towns, and published its report in March 1876. It recommended consolidation of legislation by a single new act. The new act should include workplaces in the open air, and carrying, washing and cleaning; however mines and agriculture should be excluded. Work by protected persons should be within a twelve-hour window (between 6am and 7pm: exceptionally for some industries the window could be 8am to 8pm). Within that window: in factories two hours should be allowed for meals and no work session should exceed four and a half hours; in workshops work sessions should not exceed five hours and meal breaks should total at least one and a half hours. Sunday working should be permitted where both worker and employer were Jewish. All children should attend school from five until fourteen; they should not be allowed to attend half-time, nor be employed under the new act, until ten. From ten to fourteen employment would be conditional upon satisfactory school attendance and educational achievement.
The government announced that the report had been produced too late for legislation in the current parliamentary session, but legislation would be introduced in the following one.
Passage The Factories and Workshops Law Consolidation Bill had its a first reading in April 1877, but made no further progress; at the end of July it was postponed to the following year.
In 1878, the bill was given a higher priority. Leave to bring in the Factories and Workshops Bill to the House of Commons was granted to the Home Secretary, R. A. Cross , and Sir Henry Selwin-Ibbetson on 19 January 1878, as soon as Parliament convened. The bill had its first reading in the House of Commons on X, presented by Home Secretary, R. A. Cross . The bill had its second reading in the House of Commons on 11 February 1878, introduced by R. A. Cross, and was committed to a committee of the whole house, which met on 21 February 1878, 25 February 1878, 28 February 1878, 1 March 1878, 7 March 1878, and reported on 7 March 1878, with amendments. The amended bill was considered on 22 March 1878, with amendments. The amended bill had its third reading in the House of Commons on 29 March 1878 and passed, without amendments.
The bill had its first reading in the House of Lords on 1 April 1878. The bill had its second reading in the House of Lords on 9 April 1878 and was committed to a committee of the whole house, which met and reported on 12 April 1878, with amendments. The amended bill had its third reading in the House of Lords on 16 May 1878 and passed, with amendments.
The amended bill was considered and agreed to by the House of Commons on 21 May 1878.
The bill was granted royal assent on 27 May 1878.
Provisions The act replaced all previous acts (it listed sixteen acts repealed in their entirety) by a single act of some hundred and seven clauses. The Chief Inspector of Factories described it as much less restrictive than the legislation it replaced:Mr (Alexander) Redgrave, reported in "The hard and fast line [drawn by the previous acts] is now an undulating and elastic one, drawn to satisfy the absolute necessities and customs of different trades in different parts of the kingdom.""Annual Report for 1878 of Her Majesty's Chief Inspector of Factories and Workshops", quoted in
The protected persons fell into three categories:
'Children' (aged 10–14, but a child of 13 who had met required levels of academic attainment and had a good school attendance record could be employed as a 'young person') 'Young persons' (aged 14–18, of either sex: as noted above 13-year-olds satisfying educational requirements could be employed as young persons) 'Women' (females aged over 18; it had been urged that women did not require protection, and their inclusion in factory legislation deterred their employment. The countering arguments (that married women required protection from husbands, and unless unmarried women were subject to the same protection, Parliament would be legislating to promote immorality; and that the restrictions were in the interests of public health, since they ensured some maternal attention for the children of working women) had generally prevailed.)
The premises being regulated were now separated into five categories: Factories fell into two types;
'textile factories' – those within the scope of the Factory Act 1874 (37 & 38 Vict. c. 44) 'non-textile factories' – workplaces carrying out a number of specified processes ((textile) print works, bleaching and dyeing works, earthenware works (excluding brickworks), lucifer match works, percussion cap works, cartridge works, paper staining works, fustian cutting works, blast furnaces, copper mills, iron mills, foundries, metal and india-rubber works, paper mills, glass works, tobacco factories, letterpress printing works, bookbinding works) and additionally any workplace in which mechanical power was used (replacing the former distinction between factory and workshop on the basis on the number of employees)
Workshops were places in which the manufacture, repair or finishing of articles were carried out as a trade without the use of mechanical power and to which the employer controlled access (it was irrelevant whether these operations were carried out in the open air, and shipyards, quarries and pit banks were specifically scheduled as workshops, unless factories because mechanical power was used). Laundries (originally in the bill) were excluded from the final act; in Ireland much laundry work was carried out in convents and Irish members objected to inspection of convents by an (allegedly) exclusively Protestant inspectorate. Three types of workshop were distinguished:
Workshops Workshops not employing protected persons other than women Domestic workshops (workshops carried out in a private house, room etc by members of the family living there)
The act excluded domestic workshops carrying out straw-plait making, pillow lace making or glove-making and empowered the Home Secretary to extend this exemption. The act also excluded domestic workshops involving non-strenuous work carried out intermittently and not providing the principal source of income of the family.
Requirements and enforcement arrangements were most stringent for textile factories, least stringent for domestic workshops (and the inspectorate had no powers to secure entry into dwellings). The act gave the Home Secretary some latitude to vary the requirements for specific industries (but not individual workplaces) to accommodate existing practices where these were not detrimental to the underlying purpose of the act.
The act followed the recommendations of the Commission by setting a limit of hours on the hours worked per week by women and young persons in textile factories, 60 hours in non-textile factories and workshops (except domestic workshops, where there was no restriction on the working hours of women), but allowing greater flexibility on how those hours were worked for non-textile factories and workshops. The ban on Sunday working (and on late working on Saturday) was modified to apply instead to the Jewish Sabbath where both employer and employees were Jewish. Except in domestic workshops, protected persons were to have two full holidays and eight half-holidays The full holidays would normally be Christmas Day and Good Friday, but other holidays could be substituted for Good Friday (in Scotland and for all-Jewish workplaces, substitution for Christmas Day was allowed; Ireland kept Saint Patrick's Day as a holiday). Half holidays could be combined to give additional full-day holidays; it had to be clarified later that the act's definition of a half-holiday as "at least half" of a full day's employment "on some day other than Saturday" was to give the minimum duration of a half-holiday, not to prohibit one being taken on a Saturday.
Children were not to be employed under the age of ten, and should attend school half-time until fourteen (or until thirteen if they had a good record of school attendance and satisfactory scholastic achievement). (In Scotland, for factory children only, this overrode attempts by local school boards to set standards of scholastic attainment to be met before a child could cease full-time schooling; the Scottish education acts ceded precedence to the factory acts. In England and Wales it was unclear whether factory acts or education acts had precedence until the Elementary Education Act 1880 (43 & 44 Vict. c. 23) settled the matter in favour of school board bye-laws, but without any standardisation of criteria between different boards. Specification of a minimum educational attainment before a factory child could work half-time then became enforceable in England, but remained unenforceable in Scotland until passage of the Education (Scotland) Act 1883 (46 & 47 Vict. c. 56).) 'Half-time' could be achieved by splitting each day between school and work, or (unless the child worked in a domestic workshop) by working and attending school on alternate days. If the former, the child should work morning and afternoons on alternate weeks; if the latter the schooldays in one week should be workdays the next (and vice versa). No child should work a half-day on successive Saturdays. Surgeons no longer certified the apparent age of a child (or young person), age now being substantiated by a birth certificate or school register entry, but (for employment in factories) they were required to certify the fitness for the work of children and young persons under the age of sixteen.
Protected persons should not be allowed to clean moving machinery, the requirement to guard machinery now extended to the protection of men as well as protected persons, and the Home Secretary might direct that some or all of the fine imposed for a breach of this requirement be paid to any person injured (or the relatives of any person killed) as a result. (Guarding was now only unnecessary if the position of machinery meant it was equally safe if unguarded, but hoists still only needed to be guarded if a person might pass close to them.) There were restrictions on the employment of some classes of protected persons on processes injurious to health. Young persons and children could not work in the manufacture of white lead, or silvering mirrors using mercury; children and female young persons could not be employed in glass works; girls under sixteen could not be employed in the manufacture of bricks, (non-ornamental) tiles, or salt; children could not be employed in the dry grinding of metals or the dipping of lucifer matches. Inspectors were given powers to require the mitigation of dusty atmospheres by mechanical ventilation or other mechanical means.
Repealed enactments