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If the salary of an industrial worker was so low that they barely survived and couldn't even dream of ascending to upper classes¹, what kept them from revolting all the time? One could argue that there was always a great number of unemployed workers just waiting to substitute employed ones when these went on strike, but how did those unemployed workers survive if they had no income?
¹Mentioned in Hobsbawm's "The Age of Revolution: 1789-1848" and further explained in "The Age of Capital: 1848-1875"
Even the most violent places on earth these days have a murder rate below 200 murders / 100,000 population. For Example the city with the highest murder rate these days is Caracas with 119 murders per 100,000. That means that there are 999,881 who were not murdered. Here is a more historical source. People are just not that violent. Most people are not killers. It's a lot of work organize peasants into a viable military organization.
Violence does not necessarily correlate with murder. Also, you must remember that 19th century Europe was known to have lots of revolutions, so it was almost certain that a big part of the industrial worker's class had living memory of a revolution, and most certainly could think of doing another. Why they didn't is what I'm asking for.
@Júlio Zampietro I come from a farm myself. I can assure you it is hard, endless and dirty work in all weathers. Only growers do not work in winter, and in the old days if the crops failed they just starved. Farmers work all hours every day, and more at harvest time. Before machines it was back-breaking and dangerous. Remember only the oldest son got the farm. The rest were thrown out or had to work as serfs.
There seems to be an opinion in historical and military circles that people who are barely getting by don't revolt. They are too busy putting food on the table. You get a revolution when people have a hope that things are getting better, and when that hope is frustrated. Not absolute poverty but relative and subjective poverty.
There is another line of thought which relates revolution to the bread prices, so that's not the only explanation for revolutions ...
I don't have time to look for many sources, just this for the first case and this for the second.
Multiple factors contributed to the enthusiasm of 19th century factory workers. For starters, many preferred working indoors in a factory than outdoors in the fields in all weather like they had been in their farming villages prior to the Industrial Revolution. Also, the work ethic was far stronger during the 19th century than it is today, so much so that vagrants were regarded as the lowest of the low. This ethic was encoded into law in much of Western Europe and North America, and led to the creation of things like workhouses, institutions that were designed to be as unpleasant (and even cruel) as possible to make it the option everyone wanted to avoid like the plague. Increased police presence in most industrial cities and towns made it much harder to get away with petty theft, which would often be punished with the new in vogue Victorian penalty, imprisonment with hard labor.
As for revolts, police and military officers would be sent in to crush them. The penalties for revolting or striking could be severe, from both the justice system (which heavily favored the industrialist class) to extrajudicial punishments meted out by the boss and officers. You'd at a minimum lose your job if you went on strike or revolted. This would have left you out in the cold, with the only options to not starve to death being to get committed to a workhouse or similar institution, or to resort to crime.
