Why couldn’t they immediately unite to demand better conditions or stop working otherwise and return to traditional jobs from the pre-industrial era if conditions were supposedly better then?
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Eeehh…. while early industrial cramped cities and poor factory conditions were quite visibly bad in comparison to modern times, the comparison to prior living and working conditions is not quite so obvious. In preindustrial Europe famines were quite a regular thing, life as a peasant was not fun at all. Urbanization and industrialization was in many ways an upgrade already back then.
You can for example compare a Bangladeshi sweatshop to poor rural Indian village. It’s not so obvious which ones are worse off, but in general the urbanized and industrialized are at least not very likely to starve to death even if their working conditions are a horror show in general. Hunger is still a serious hazard in poorest and more rural regions of the world even to this day.
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