I already destroyed your industry revolution argument, and just because you've read the Jungle or Charle's Dickens doesn't mean you know anything. The wages are only unrealistic because we have an artificially propped up economy.
The factory system led to a rise in the general standard of living, rapidly decreasing urban death rates, infant morality, and an unprecedented population explosion. In 1750 England's population was 6 million, 9 million in 1800 and 12 million in 1820. Unprecedented with a higher proportion of youths than ever before. And the mortality rate of children under 5 years old dropped from 75% to 31% between 1730 to 1749, so we have a rise in population and life expectancy occurring all during the 'terrible times' for the laboring class in the industrial revolution.
Yet somehow we're missing out on the lost Golden Age of the working class that was obliterated by the industrial revolution. Before the industrial revolution every person bore the cost of their endeavors and struggled for food to feed their family.
Factory owners had no power to compel people to work. As low as their wages were, they were higher than the working class could find anywhere else. A blissful working class society was not disrupted. A bunch of starving people were provided with jobs. Children went to job and labored long but the work wasn't insanely difficult as we're led to believe. The 1st child labor law in England, in 1778 regulated chimney sweeps, a job that pre-dated the industrial revolution. The first factory children law was sent to protect children sent into labor by the Parish Authority, a government body. They were orphans who were legally under the custody of the Parish and bound into long terms of unpaid apprenticeship, aka slavery.
Conditions of newer factories grew to be better, but by then children were not allowed to be employed in such factories, so the children found jobs in the poorer, older, less maintained factories. If the kiRAB couldn't find new jobs they were reduced to the existence of children prior to the industrial revolution.
Child labor wasn't ended by legislation, it ended when children no longer had to earn wages to survive, when the incomes of parents were enough to support them. The emancipators of those children were the factory owners and manufacturers and financiers whose investments in machinery led to a rise in wages, production of gooRAB, and standard in living. The industrial revolution was an achievement of capitalism.