Since the 19th century, industrialization has had positive and negative effects on the live of workers. Industrialization is the process of modernization and mass production of most goods. This also includes but not limited to mining and the forging of iron. An area where industrialization had a massive effect was in Eastern Europe. It emerged as a need to modernize and unify Europe. Although Britain led industrialization at first, it quickly exploded from Spain all the way through Russia.
Industrialization had several negative effects, on being that at the international and global level, industrialization empowered the nations of western Europe and North America at the expense of the rest of the world. Another negative aspect of industrialization was the affect it had on the environment. Mostly the environmental changes took place in the towns. The towns boomed with population growth. These rapid growth changes created overcrowding and inadequate municipals services which created severe problems. People were very unclean and threw their sewage and waste out their windows to be washed down the gutters in the streets. Factories and workers' housing were mixed together. Air pollution from burning coal got much worse. This caused the townspeople to breath dense and noxious coal smoke. The water the people drank came from wells and rivers that was contaminated by sewage and industrial runoff. Another thing that became a problem during this era was that railroads invaded the towns, bringing noise and smoke into densely populated neighborhoods. Railroad companies built there stations as close to the inside of cities as they could. On the outer edges of the cities, railroad yards, sidings and repair shops covered acres of lands, surrounded my miles of warehouses and works housing. Under these conditions urban disease spread throughout the cities. Rickets, a bond disease caused by lack of sunshine became common in dark an smoke industrial cities. Steamships brought cholera from India, causing great epidemics that struck poor neighborhoods especially hard. American industry tried to remember their revolutionary ideals but soon became greedy. The manufactures imposed longer hours, harsher working conditions and lower wages. The young women protested and went on strike. The mill owners replaced them with Irish immigrant women willing to accept lower pay and worse conditions. Industrialization required work from many people and they were willing to accept the work no matter how unethical it seemed. Poor families had to work hard to make ends meet and this meant their children had to work as well. The first generation of workers brought children as young as five or six with them to the factories and mines; they had little choice since there were no day cares or public schools. Employers encouraged the practice and even hired orphans. They preferred children because they were cheaper and more passive than adults and were able to tie broken threads or crawl under machines to sweep the dust. In Arkwrights cotton mills two-thirds of the workers were children. In another mill 17 percent were under ten years of age and 53% were between ten and seventeen; they worked fourteen to sixteen hours a day and were beating if they made mistakes or fell asleep. Mine operators used children to pull coal carts along the low passageways from the coal face to the mine shaft. Although the industrialization era brought many good changes to the development of many countries and technological advances it also had several negative effects. Some of these negatives were eventually recognized and changes were implanted to make the industrialization period with less harmful effects.