Did the industrial revolution of the 19th century lead to a significant deterioration in the working conditions of laborers? Why did workers accept to work in miserable conditions?

Question

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?

In: 5

Answer 1

Seasonal farm laborer or a pre-mechanized manufacture laborer were pretty miserable jobs already, but mechanizing those jobs greatly reduced labor requirements for the same production and so drove down the wages. Workers had to take bad conditions or lose the job(and starve, unemployment benefits weren’t a thing)

Traditional production methods just couldn’t compete in the production volume and cost to the new ones, so returning to them wasn’t going to return workers to the good conditions, just bankrupt the business that’s clinging to them.