Blog 9

     The lyrics from the "Song of the Shirt" shows how factory work really was. The employees were extremely over-worked, poor, hungry and dirty. They worked all day, from morning until night. There were no labor laws during that time, so conditions could be completely unsafe without actually violating any laws. One part of the song tells us how dangerous the tasks they had to perform by saying "It is not linen you're wearing out, but human creatures' lives." Because children were smaller and had tiny hands, they were the ones called upon if a machine needed to be fixed. It wasn't uncommon if they got injured or even lost a hand while doing this either. The "Song of the Shirt" was sung by workers probably to express their exhaustion and misery brought upon by the laborious tasks they had to perform daily at the factories.