Work in a Changing World

by Mark Mello

Teleworking. A term which few were familiar with just 4 short years ago has now become commonplace. The COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 dramatically changed the rates of remote work and how people interface with their work. As I sit on my couch, on a cold winter day, and type away at emails, planning documents, and updating webpages, I’m struck by how foreign it still feels to work from home.  

            Living in a post-industrial society, most have come to accept the realities of a 9 to 5 job, 5 days a week. In recent years, these rigid time standards have weakened a bit. Now many people work flexible schedules, and the lines between home life and work life become increasing blurred. For some people this means more freedom, and for others, the loosening of certain standards means that work increasingly spills into leisure time. This type of blurriness feels new, but it would not have been all that uncommon for our ancestors living in a pre-industrial society.  

            At Old Slater Mill National Historic Landmark, we often focus on the early years of industrialization in this country. In 1790, the industrialist Samuel Slater found the necessary elements to allow for the first successful water-powered cotton spinning mill in America to flourish: a community of skilled machinists, accessibility of waterpower, available sources of iron, and proximity to coastal shipping. But we must not forget the available source of labor to work in this mill: children. These child laborers provided the necessary human power to keep operations in motion. 

            One of these children was Ann Arnold. Ann was just ten years old when she first came to work in Slater’s Mill in 1790. She was among the first generation of hourly wage earners in this country. Ann is a prototypical worker of sorts.  Ann and her co-workers (other children around her age) were compensated for their time, not for what they produced. Child labor was nothing new in human history, but this type of work would have been alien for most living in the Untied States at that time. In this way, Ann Arnold is not the best example of what wage work would become, but rather an example of how the transition from home-based labor to industrial labor progressed. 

           We can imagine what Ann’s workplace looked like in the 1790s. It was a small, wood-framed mill structure with a large open room, filled with an assortment of machines thrust into motion by a series of gears and driveshafts connecting to a wooden waterwheel. In between this complex system of machinery stood small children watching these machines, replacing filled bobbins, and pushing carts of cotton between the machines. The children were not creating the thread produced by the mill; the machines did that. But children performed the critical work that kept the machines in motion.  

            It is striking how different this type of work was from the farms and village households from which most of these children came. In the mill, machines were the key to production rather than the human reaping the benefits of nature’s work. As more transitioned from farm life to factory work, their lives were forever changed, along with the national economy. This transition did not happen overnight, but rather it evolved over decades. But the changes wrought in individual’s lives from the simple process of making thread in an industrial mill, were profound and lasting.  

            My living room is a far different type of space than Slater’s Mill, but we too have experienced and continue to experience a period of profound change. As technology improves, things like Artificial Intelligence and robots shape the way we interact in our places of work and the availability of jobs. The pandemic has also brought a tremendous change in the way we work and where we work. It is easy to think of the experiences of children like Ann Arnold as distant or unique from our own times. Yet—learning how to work in a changing world is an experience equally shared by Ann Arnold and us. 

Mark Mello is an historian and Park Ranger at Blackstone River Valley National Historical Park. One of the Park’s most important sites, Old Slater Mill National Historic Landmark, is located in Pawtucket, RI. For more information about the park visit www.nps.gov/blrv