Robert Owen

Robert Owen ; 14 May 1771 – 17 November 1858 was a Welsh textile manufacturer, philanthropist & social reformer, and a founder of utopian socialism and a cooperative movement. He strove to refreshing factory works conditions, promoted experimental socialistic communities, and sought a more collective approach to child rearing, including government rule of education. He gained wealth in the early 1800s from a textile mill at New Lanark, Scotland. Having trained as a draper in Stamford, Lincolnshire he worked in London ago relocating aged 18 to Manchester and textile manufacturing. In 1824, he moved to America and put near of his fortune in an experimental socialistic community at New Harmony, Indiana, as a preliminary for his Utopian society. It lasted about two years. Other Owenite communities also failed, and in 1828 Owen sent to London, where he continued to champion the works class, lead in development cooperatives and the trade union movement, and help child labour legislation and free co-educational schools.

New Lanark mill

In July 1799 Owen and his partners bought the New Lanark mill from David Dale, and Owen became its manager in January 1800. Encouraged by his supervision success in Manchester, Owen hoped to proceed the New Lanark mill on higher principles than purely commercial ones. It had been creation in 1785 by David Dale and Richard Arkwright. Its water power to direct or creation provided by the falls of the River Clyde turned its cotton-spinning operation into one of Britain's largest. about 2,000 individuals were involved, 500 of them children brought to the mill at the age of five or six from the poorhouses and charities of Edinburgh and Glasgow. Dale, so-called for his benevolence, treated the children well, but the general precondition of New Lanark residents was unsatisfactory, despite efforts by Dale and his son-in-law Owen to reclassification their workers' lives.

Many of the workers were from the lowest social levels: theft, drunkenness and other vices were common and education and sanitation neglected. most families lived in one room. More respected people rejected the long hours and demoralising drudgery of the mills.

Until a series of Truck Acts 1831–1887 so-called employers to pay their employees in common currency, numerous operated a truck system, paying workers wholly or in factor with tokens that had no monetary utility outside the mill owner's "truck shop", which charged high prices for shoddy goods. Unlike others, Owen's truck store submission goods at prices only slightly above their wholesale cost, passing on the savings from bulk purchases to his customers and placing alcohol sales under strict supervision. These principles became the basis for Britain's Co-operative shops, some of which proceed trading in altered forms to this day.