>Unemployment went down, wages went up.
The first is true, the second is resoundingly false. The result was entire families, including children, working 16 hour days 6 days a week and barely earning enough to feed themselves. I'm not sure what happened in England to later adjust, but in the USA we adopted the New Deal which forced employers to instead pay 1 person working 40 hours a week such an exorbitant wage that they could raise an entire family on it comfortably. That was close to an order of magnitude increase in labor cost.
The low wages factory owners paid invented the need to prevent adolescents from starting families. Too many families were literally starving to death because they didn't have enough, even with multiple income streams in the household, to feed another mouth. This was why lower class housing started being built with bedrooms that separated children and adults, to hide sex from kids. Previously, everyone slept, and screwed, in a big common room, sex was just a fact of life. Due to the danger sex suddenly posed (previously the adolescent would just go get a job as an apprentice or work on a farm or similar and earn enough to support themselves and their children) both religious and medical 'science' of the time started decrying the evils of sex. They re-interpreted scripture to be as anti-sex as possible, for the first time ever claiming the story of Onan was an admonition against masturbation, for instance, while the doctors swore that masturbation would make you blind, insane, and eventually kill you. Many lower class families traded their children with other families because they believed they would not be able to beat their own children savagely enough to discipline them properly and they would be lost to their 'base animal urges.'
And if anyone said they deserved higher pay, they would be denigrated and told 'the machines do all the work.'
And, of course, alongside the social adjustments that were made, the basic approach of centralizing production to ease distribution came with its own drawbacks. Catering to niche markets was prohibitively expensive. Personalization of customization simply couldn't be done as a matter of course. All craftsmanship and artistry was removed. Certainly there are cases where this is a benefit, but there are many where people saw it as a sacrifice that simply had to be made in order to achieve the high levels of production and availability of goods and such. That was all because distribution was the hardest problem in the world for centuries. Now, however, it's a solved problem. It's commoditized. So all those drawbacks and sacrifices? They don't make sense any more. And in many, many cases, the centralization of production has very little value any longer.