Following the rhythm of the machine

The painting "Good morning" is placed above the lockers at the DASA. Lockers give employees the opportunity to "preserve" their “individual” personality in the modern working world. However, during the industrialisation, people had to go to work in their private clothes, because no work clothes had been provided by the employer.

That required a high degree of discipline. This had to be established by a variety of measures.

One of these measures was time tracking. Time tracking is still an important tool to record and check the the workers' attendance. Today, however, more modern time recording devices are used to calculate the working time. However, what these devices cannot measure is productivity.

Wage reduction was another measure which was used. The master precisely monitored what happened in his factory. If machines stood still for too long, if the workers had too many breaks or if they needed too much time for certain operations, their wages were cut without a discussion.

In another room, the stoker had to provide pressure. He had to shovel between two and twelve hundred pounds of coal per hour to run a steam engine of about 100 hp. This all happened under enormous heat, deafening noise and high humidity. These burdens were accompanied by additional stress and a high risk of accidents: lethal boiler explosions were not uncommon.

The energy of a steam engine was distributed by transmission belts in the factory. Many transmission belts ran across the factory to the individual machines. They were a source of danger because they darkened the production areas and could also come off or break. If a worker came too close to a belt, he even could be caught, too.

For a long time,textile work has been considered as easy work. Therefore, this work could be done by women. But the loom is definitely not a safe workplace. Piecework defined the daily schedule.

The shuttle flew through the warp threads at 70 km / h. If the weft thread ripped and the weaver flew out of the weaving chair, the workers could be seriously injured by the metal cap. The deafening noise was an extreme burden for most of the female workers, and the high humidity and low hygiene standards in the factories favoured the spread of diseases.

Dust had been ignored for a long time as a cause of diseases such as pulmonary fibrosis in the textile industry. Only in 1929, after many applications and investigations, pneumoconiosis was recognized as an occupational disease.