Need help on practice DBQ. Needs to be DBQ format. Evaluate the extent to which the lives of workers changed as a result of industrialization during the nineteenth century.

Source: Memorandum from the governor of Hunan province to the Qing imperial government in Beijing, 1883.

As a result of a long investigation into the abuses of workers at the coal mines of Leiyang district in this province, the following report has been prepared:

The Leiyang district is rich in coal, which has attracted many entrepreneurs. Hundreds of coal pits and mines of various sizes have been dug, but all suffer from flooding, and must be drained by means of mechanical pumps powered by workers using various treadmill contraptions. To manage the water pumps and recruit labor . . . , the mine owners typically hire agents known locally as “water men.”. . . The water men, allied with local gangsters, have established gambling dens where they entrap people with games of chance, leading them into debt and, in the process, selling them opium to which the poor souls become addicted. Eventually, the unhappy victims, worn down by their gambling debts, are forced to sell themselves into bondage and that is how they enter the mines.

The people who are . . . coerced into working . . . spend all of their waking hours in these damp dungeons, pedaling away to power the mine pumps. Their shoes and most of their clothes are stripped off in the process and they work in alternating shifts day and night without respite. Those who look tired are beaten on their backs with whips, and those who try to escape have their feet slashed to make their work even more painful.

Document 3

Source: Adelheid Popp, Austrian feminist and member of the Social Democratic Workers Party, autobiography recounting her experiences as a worker in the 1880s and 1890s, published in 1909.

Soon after my father died—I was ten at the time—I was taken into a workshop where I learned to crochet shawls [by hand]. I used to run to work at six o’clock in the morning when other children were still sleeping and worked diligently for twelve hours.

As the years went by, I moved from one job to another—to a workshop manufacturing bronze goods, to a metal factory, a shoe factory . . . . The work affected my health . . . a great unconquerable feeling of tiredness overcame me, and I had attacks of dizziness . . . my mother took me to see a doctor, who found me undernourished and bloodless to the last degree, and advised exercise in the open air and good nourishment. How was I to follow his orders?

But at last things became better. I was recommended to a great factory, which was regarded as highly reputable. . . . Three hundred girls and about thirty men were employed. We had to sort goods that had already been manufactured, count them, and brand on them the logo of the firm. We worked from 7am to 7pm, but we had an hour’s rest at noon and another half-hour in the afternoon. Besides, there was the prospect of wage increases if one worked diligently, as I did. But even in this paradise . . . every one of my coworkers was poor and trembled at the thought of losing her work. All humbled themselves and would suffer the worst injustices from the foremen rather than complain, so as not to lose this good work, so as not to be without food.

Document 4

Source: Edith Simcox, British trade union activist and social reformer, “Loss or Gain of the Working Classes during the Nineteenth Century,” paper presented at a conference on industrial relations, held in London, 1885.

In comparing the rate of progress in different sections of the working class, we must admit that the standard of comfort over the last decades has risen amongst the skilled class of workers—for example among the mechanical trades such as mechanicians, masons, carpenters, printing press type-setters, and so on—when all goes well, can and do provide for their households on a more liberal scale than their equivalents at the beginning of the [nineteenth] century. The life of the skilled worker today may not yet be perfectly comfortable or picturesque, but it excludes none of the possibilities of real civilization. But we cannot congratulate ourselves on this show of progress until we have examined to what proportion of the manual labor classes this description applies.

Of the more than ten million industrial workers [in Britain] today, I would estimate that no more than two million are skilled enough or securely enough employed to be living habitually in a state of ease and comparative security of the modest sort indicated above. The rest include the many millions of day-to-day wage laborers and less skilled workers, male and female, whose maximum wages only suffice for the barest necessities and decencies of life, and for whom, therefore, any mischance means poverty, turning quickly to long-term pauperism.