Anyone modestly familiar with labor and economic history would know that the actual poor / working class got screwed by the industrial revolution. It took a very long time (on the order of perhaps a century) for them to see improvements in standard of living; instead, they lived in squalor and suffered a significant increase in disease. Which doesn't even get into the use of force by government to drive them into cities. In sum, the claim that the "poor got a lot out of mechanization, even at the time" couldn't be more wrong.