Labor Unions
Within the 40-year period of 1859-1899, the value of American manufactured products rose from $1.8 million to over $13 billion--mostly due to the industrial growth during the 19th Century and the captains of industry or Robber Barons. Soon factories, mines, and mills sprouted out across the map with cities developing around them. But without a work force, there wouldn’t be such a rapid growth of industry or urban areas. So these Robber Barons turned to the European immigrants for the cheap labor they needed. These immigrants thought of America as a land of opportunity and felt they only needed to cross the ocean to be successful. They came with great dreams and goals but ended up working for these Robber Barons for extremely low wages and living in awful living conditions. Soon workers became sick and tired of these unfit conditions and wanted their demands to be met, so it was necessary for workers to unite and form unions in the later part of the 19th Century. Urban industrial workers were bombarded with many problems, a major one being long working hours. They not only had to endure endless hours of labor and turmoil, but receiv
In conclusion, industry depends on workers and the vice versa. So to get balance on both sides and to get a better standard of living for all, labor unions were necessary to achieve goals of both the ruling class and the proletariats. Long laborious efforts became more and more common in the US and the result of that was one of the highest industrial accident rates in the Western industrial world. Between 1880 and 1900, 35,000 workers were killed annually and another 536,000 were injured. There were more deaths in the working field of railroads and coal mines. There were at least 2000 fatal injuries and one of every 399 railroad men was killed. In addition, unsafe working conditions played a major role in the suffering of the industrial workers. And without work compensation from the employers, workers would be just fired and get no benefits. Without unions, today wouldn’t be the same. Industry would have declined due to the strikes of the workers. And according to Karl Marx’s theory, the proletariats (working class) would rise up and take over the ruling class. So if it wasn’t for the development of labor unions, we could have a totally
Some topics in this essay:
Century Urban,
Debs ARU,
Karl Marx’s,
Robber Barons,
President Cleveland,
Labor Unions,
Barons Soon,
Barons European,
Red Barons,
Company Chicago,
sleeping cars,
labor unions,
robber barons,
handle sleeping,
19th century,
handle sleeping cars,
government unions,
railroad officials,
concerted action,
mail cars,
industrial workers,
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Approximate Word count = 784
Approximate Pages = 3 (250 words per page double spaced)
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