I’ve been reading the record of the IWW founding. Found this, in a pamphlet presented to the convention:

"A minority of the members of society own and control the means of production and distribution, and, as a result, are able to dictate the terms of life to the many. The workers having aspirations above a life in which the conditions are hard and precarious, and in which the life of the toiler is sacrificed without stint that the cupidity of the capitalist may be satisfied, look for something better, and inquire as to the right of him who produces nothing receiving the greater part of the product of the community.

In the struggles of the rising capitalist class with decadent feudalism the worker was told that the master in the shop was his friend and the baron his enemy, and, as a consequence, the toiler fought the battles of his immediate exploiter to a successful issue. This accomplished, it was found that he had but changed one master for another, and that he was more mercilessly exploited under capitalism than had been the case under the old regime."

(via). 

Quotes from The Making of the English Working Class

"[W]hen we follow through the history of particular industries, and see new skills arise as old ones decline, it is possible to forget that the old skill and the new almost always were the perquisite of different people. Manufacturers in the first half of the 19th century pressed forward each innovation which enabled them to dispense with adult male craftsmen and to replace them women or juvenile labor. Even when an old skill was replaced by a new process requiring equal or greater skill, we rarely find the same workers transferred from one to the other, or from domestic to factory production. Insecurity, and hostility in the face of machinery and innovation, was not the consequence of mere prejudice and (as authorities then implied) of insufficient knowledge of "political economy." The cropper or woolcomber knew well enough that, while the new machinery might offer skilled employment for his son, or for someone else’s son, it would offer none for him. The rewards of the "march of progress" always seemed to be gathered by someone else. (…) [T]hese particular insecurities were only a facet of the general insecurity of all skills during this period," which encompasses much of the 19th century, certainly its first half.

In addition, "the very notion of regularity of employment - at one place of work over a number of years for regular hours and at a standard wage - is an anachronistic notion, imposed by 20th-century experience upon 19th-century realities. (…) [T]he problem in agriculture was that of chronic semi-employment. This was also the problem in most industries, and in urban experience generally. The skilled and apprenticed man, who owned his own tools and worked for a lifetime in one trade, was a minority. It is notorious that in the early stages of industrialisation, the growing towns attract uprooted and migrant labour of all types; this is still the experience of Africa and Asia today. Even the settled workers pass rapidly through a succession of employments." (246-248.)

In comparison with skilled workers, "less is known about the unskilled workers, in the first decades of the 19th century, since they had no unions they rarely had leaders who articulated their grievances, and few parliamentary committees investigated them except as a sanitary or housing problem (….) Distinct from the labourers were those for whom "casualty" had become a way of life: street-sellers, beggars and cadgers, paupers, casual and professional criminals, the Army." (264.)