The Industrial Revolution: The Will Of The People

“..the more they want to earn the more they must sacrifice their time and perform slave labour in which their freedom is totally alienated in the service of avarice...” (Bottomre; 1963, pg 71)

Slavery was a system of forced labor popular in the 17th and 18th century that exploited and oppressed blacks. Slavery was an issue in the US that brought on many complex responses. Slave labor introduced to the United States a multitude of issues that questioned political, economical, and social morals. As slave labor increased due to the booming of cottage industries with the market revolution, reactions to these issues differed between regions, creating a sectional split of the United States between industrial North and plantation South. Historiographers Kenneth Stampp, Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman, and Eugene Genovese, in their respective articles, attempt to interpret the attitudes of American slaves toward their experiences of work as well as the social and economic implications of slave labor.

Thus, slavery pulled white workers down in two ways: one, by direct competition with slave labor in the South, and two, by associating all the industrious efforts of workers with those of the degraded slaves.”

Indentured servants were used in early colonial times as a means of passage to the new world. The cash crops of the early settlers were exhaustingly labor intensive. In fact, U.S. History (2015) indicated that “the growth of tobacco, rice, and indigo and the plantation economy created a tremendous need for labor in Southern English America” (p. 1). The technology did not exist at the time for machinery that clears the ground and works the land as it does today. The work had to be done by hand; from clearing and prepping the fields to harvesting the crops, it was all manual labor for which the new land did not have ample supply of.

This eventually makes the reader realize countless of possessions and benefits that every citizen uses daily was in fact from the hard work of immigrants. But not many truly knows this with how many claim that ‘immigrants will steal their jobs’. Also many don’t realize how easy immigrants can lose their jobs. Because companies are aware of the fact who is illegal or not, when an employee, who came in illegal, is not seen useful to them anymore, the company will easily deport them right back to the country they came from. Now this where similarities of slavery start showing up. First, there’s the jobs themselves, the work immigrants do is described as dirty, unpleasant, heavy, and dangerous. This is very much how slave’s jobs were detailed to be like as well. Another parallel between these ideas is the income these groups make, or rather how very little they made. When slavery was declared illegal, congress start a new labor code called Free Wage Labor where former slave owners had to paid former slaves in addition housing, food, and healthcare, like many companies presently to provide for immigrants. But what those former owners did back then is they’d barely pay their workers anything and with addition of taxes, former slaves were in too much debt to live on their own and find a different job. Essentially they were trapped in working for the

Within the two books Uncle Tom’s Cabin and The Jungle - respectively written by Harriet Beecher Stowe and Upton Sinclair - there are slaves, albeit two very different types. One, the wage slave, is one who works for a salary in order to survive, and to have their families survive. In contrast there is the slave, which does not receive pay and is treated as property by wealthy owners. In the event that I was forced to make a decision as to which sort I’d become, I’d more than likely choose to become the wage slave, because at least I’d have some semblance of freedom.

Frederick Douglass' narrative reveals a lot about the work of the slaves. Some few slaves worked in the master's house, some more worked in the master's production huts around the farm, but most of them worked in the field under the watch of an overseer with a whip ready in hand. The slaves would be punished, sometimes very severely, if they weren't working early in the morning. They could also be punished if they didn't work fast enough or well enough. After a long day of work, they would have to go to their huts and do their own cooking and washing. They could only sleep a few hours a night after doing all the work they had to do. When they were finished with their work they would fall down on their beds and "sleep till they [were] summoned to the field by the driver's horn." (48) Looking at the slaves as property, the master wanted to use them as much as he could to get his money's value. He didn't think of them as human beings who had needs, but as machines

“Indentured servitude declined over the century, and most of these domestic servants were now either free women or slave women” (Coryell, pg. 104). Those who worked in a servitude role were indentured servants, who had the ability to work a number of service years in order to earn their freedom and they would be given a small plot of land, afterwards, to continue to thrive. Eventually, in order to compensate for the growing American need of lower overall costs to purchase labor workers, longer time in servitude, and to decrease the need to give land lots, the term of indentured servant changed to slave, which limited potential freedoms and humanity. This demand for labor changed the owner and slave relationship. “Owners began providing minimal clothing and food. Owners viewed all of slaves’ labor as their own” (Coryell, pg. 105). By forcing a dependent relationship, owners were able to maintain their

Slavery lives on all era in world history till lately, but its life has not constantly had the similar economic trait. Two questions ought to be answered to properly examine any definite cause of slavery: (1) what further systems of labor live in the civilization also to slavery? And (2) what system of labor is leading? In this manner we can make a difference among ancient slavery (e.g., in Greece and Egypt where free farmers live together with slaves, but slavery was leading) and antebellum slavery in the United States (which live together with free farmers, but was conquered by the industrially-based capitalism of the urban North). The past dominance of capitalism in the United States made antebellum slavery the most uncivilized system of slave work. Not

While we can now see how slavery embodied and shaped modern American capitalism from analysis of Baptist and Johnson’s texts, it is even more important to emphasize that this form of capitalism did not end with slavery— it was re-packaged into the more furtive wage slavery after emancipation. In “Legends of Contract Freedom,” Amy Dru Stanley explains that the idea of the contract emerged from Enlightenment ideas of consent, exchange and, particularly, self-ownership . However, abolitionists reframed the concept of wage contract in such a manner that dissociated labor from the self, so that it could be sold without the connotations of slavery. Abolitionists did this by focusing on the idea that the enslaved could work, and in some cases even more productively, in contract

In the existing world we are used to thinking of work as something done for wages outside the home. This distinction did not hold for the vast majority of laborers in colonial America. Colonial America was overwhelmingly countryside. Many native Americans and blacks be came slaves to the white settlers and by that is how Slavery started in the country and this county has had issues with that for 100s of years. Households were made up of a dwelling place for a family, which often included servants and slaves, a garden, shelter for livestock, and fields for crops. While it was rarely their primary responsibility, many women worked in the fields alongside their husbands, fathers, and brothers, as well as the household's male and female indentured

Working for a wage is demeaning slavery According to the French writers Félicité Robert De Lamennais, "The work is everywhere and suffering is everywhere only there are sterile and fertile work, some infamous suffering and glorious suffering." Nowadays it’s becoming common for families, in our society, to independent their children and helped them find their way in life. Since the beginning of life, human evolution makes us work and think about our future, so sine our youth we have been conditioned to go to school, learn a job and try to be the best in what we were doing, but some are still finding their way out of life. It is in this optic that ‘the vastness of the darkness’ by Alistair Macleod, ‘complexion’ by Richard Rodriguez, and ‘MacDonald’s:

The Industrial Revolution is a technological phenomenon that still continues to this day, in the form of its fourth to fifth wave. Ever since the late 1700s, our society has evolved over nearly two and a half centuries, for better or for worse. However, most of the negatives then have disappeared into obscurity and the positives have only grown more and more. So while some might argue that Industrialization had primarily negative consequences for society because of child workers and the poor conditions, it was actually a good thing for society. Industrialization’s positive effects were the availability of goods, the advancements in technology and the new job market.

This happens when people give themselves into slavery as payment for a loan or when they inherit a debt. It sometimes looks like an employment agreement but one where the worker starts with a debt to repay but repayment of the loan is impossible. Then, their enslavement becomes permanent. Oftentimes this debt is passed down from generation to generation, similar to slavery in the 18th and 19th centuries. Employers force the children of employees to labor in the same situation as their parents in order to help pay off their parents debt. Or when parents or family members pass away. Employers require another body to repay the debt. The process begins with a debt, either acquired or inherited, that cannot be paid. Then, the slave works to repay the debt but the employer adds on additional expenses. As an example, a laborer starts with a debt of $1500. The slave is not able to leave, and needs shelter, food and water. The owner adds $30 per day to the debt to cover those expenses. While only getting payed $150 per week. Migrant laborers are the most vulnerable to this form of enslavement. Looking for an economic opportunity. Instead of a fair term of employment, some recruiters or employers exploit the initial debt by adding other

Today slavery is known as being a retail worker for one of the biggest companies in the U.S. were as they make you work and work until you just want to give up. In most cases they will under pay or they will treat an employee like there nothing to the company, they also will lay you off or terminate an employee for no reason at all just so they will stay at the top of the list. Slavery today can also be known as volunteer work where you receive no pay and you’re just working to work in most cases the individual will think otherwise until they see the reality where that’s something that they don’t want to do “Many retailers have recently stepped up efforts to identify and prevent forced labor and slavery in their supply chains through social