After the first few decades of the Industrial Revolution, a pattern of hiring whole families to work in the new factories emerged. Although this system meant that the amount of wages necessary for subsistence was kept to a minimum, it at least allowed the working-class family to stay together. By the middle of the nineteenth century the practice of hiring families and children was declining, but life for the industrial working class remained oppressive. The factories and mines were dark, dirty, and dangerous. The dwellings of the workers were likely to be hovels clustered around smoky, noisy mills or mine entrances. The workers were frequently compelled to spend their wages at company stores, paying monopoly prices arbitrarily set by the owners. Work lost its dignity. The factory workers were disciplined to the clock and the machine. The dull, monotonous, robotlike repetition of a single operation on a machine brought workers none of the satisfaction and pride of skilled craftsmanship. Many historians and social scientists argue that statistics show that the early factory workers received higher wages and enjoyed a better standard of living than they had ever had as agricultural or urban workers. Clearly, industrial workers were reaping material benefits from the Industrial Revolution after 1850, but in the years before 1850 workers may have lost more than they gained. The longer hours, greater insecurity, limits on freedom, and more frequent unemployment of the uprooted slum-dwelling factory worker of the early nineteenth century do not appear in statistics of wages and prices. The overall pictures of the industrial proletariat during the first half of the nineteenth century is dismal and can justly be characterized as a new kind of slavery—slavery to the machine and the machine owner.