All the managers and superintendents and clerks of Packingtown were all recruited from another class and never from the workers. They scorned the workers . .
On the absence of strong unions, workers were treated brutally and paid wages much too low for a family to live on. However, the workers dared not complain. Outside the packing plants, newly arrived immigrants men and women desperate for jobs offered to work for even lower wages. All day long the gates of the packing houses were besieged by starving and penniless men and women. They came by the thousands every single morning, fighting with each other for a chance for life. Blizzards and cold made no difference to them, they were always on hand. Sick pay and unemployment benefits, standard in the 1980's and 1990's didn't exist for the average worker in 1904. When the bread-winner lost his job or was too sick to work, his family often went hungry. At that time, thee were few laws governing healthy living and working conditions. The packing plants were dangerous places--sites of accidents and sources of all kinds of diseases from pneumonia and blood poisoning to deadly tuberculosis. The levels where stockyard workers lived were overcrowded firetraps. The unpaved streets in the slums became open sewers when rains flooded the cesspools behind the houses. To survive, workers in the meat-packing plants were forced to take part in a horrendous fraud, one that affected nearly every American. Sawdust and rat droppings were mixed into the sausage meat and deviled ham that .
killed about three thousand U.S. soldiers during the Spanish-American war in 1898. Moreover, the poor and uneducated workers were frequently swindled into buying furniture, houses, insurance, and other things they couldn't afford, usually signing contracts they couldn't understand. .
Purpose of the research: .
I have chosen this book The jungle by Upton Sinclair because I think that working class people of the 1990's.