The Pre Industrial Working Class

The first downside to working in a factory in the 1800’s is the outrageous hours that men, women, and children have to work. They can work up to fifteen hours in a day, and many workers fought for a full day of work to be considered ten hours at most. This problem in the industry affected every worker physically, because if a worker got very few hours of sleep, then the next day his work ethic would not be at his full potential. That could then cause their boss to fire them, and hire another man who is stronger and more willing to work. An incident like that happened to Jurgis. He worked so hard to keep his family fed, then he had to take time off of work due to an injury. (Sinclair 116) When he tried to come back to work, they replaced him

During the time frame of the Industrial Revolution there were 3 main social classes: The upper class, the middle class, and the lower class or the working class.

The pre-civil war era included the industrial revolution, the transportation revolution, and the market revolution. The industrial revolution involved a change in the methods of production and manufacturing. The transportation revolution had changes in the way people or things move from one place to another. the market revolution caused a change in the way we give and receive resources. The factors that promoted the pre-civil war industrial revolution in the US were technology like the canal which impacted the entire American economy by expanding the market, internal improvements are improvements in transportation and communication networks which make migration and importing easier, government funded the internal improvements, capital is the money that the government uses to fund the internal improvements, and population because more people equals more consumers which leads to more demand and theres also more workers which means more labor equaling more supply.

Throughout history many people, such as politicians, officials, and generals, have been noted to have molded the United States, neglecting the fact that workers have also played an important role in shaping this nation’s history. During the 1870s to the 1930s, laborers faced many hardships; they had trouble keeping their jobs, had their wages decreased, and were forced to work sixty-hour weeks without insurance. Over time, workers began to feel aggravated by their employers’ demands and began to voice their opinions. Only by forming into unions and standing up to what employers’ thought was “freedom” in the workplace were the laborers able to change working conditions more favorable for them.

Being an industrial worker in the late 19th-century in America was not a simple life. Even at the best times the pay was small and the time spent at work was long in dangerous conditions. Most of the money derived in America went to the actual workforce. Women and children suffered the most however, making up the majority of the workers and only receiving a small percentage of what a man could make. Different periods of economic crises tokk the nation by storm, also breaking down the amount of wages from industrial work and increasing the total population of the unemployed.

The Industrial revolution started in Britain around 1750 and by 1850 it will make Great Britain the wealthiest country in the world. The revolution also spread to other European countries and the New World. Both Germany and United States will surpass Britain in the next fifty years. What was the effect of The Industrial Revolution on the working class?

In the early 1900’s many young children had to work in factories and mills to help provide for their families. These children often died due to exhaustion and malnutrition. I do not feel that children were an acceptable source of labor, but I think I can understand why some kids had to work and why some employers would hire them. Some families may have not been able to afford to send their children to school because the money their kids made from working was important part of their families income. It probably would have been a hard decision for parents to send their children to work because they knew the bad work conditions of factories and mills. Employers would have hired children because they did have to pay them as much as adults at the

Working hard to surive is something we all have to do. In America today, we are very privledged compared to our written history. During the Industrial Revolution, women and children were employed in factories with terrible and unsafe working condtions. These fragile, hardworking people worked around 12 hours per day, 6 days per week. Once these individuals hours were cut down to eight hours a day and their pay was increased, they became more productive and excited about their work.

In his book, “Class and Community the Industrial Revolution in Lynn”, Alan Dawley carefully examines the structure and culture of Lynn shoemakers. The key issue Dawley wants to address and convey to the reader is that the American Revolution opened the doors for different radical actions and ideology to take place. Overall, the book explores the causes and effects of the 19th century revolution in the shoemaking community of Lynn,

“In 1900, 18 percent of all American workers were under the age of 16” (Yellowitz, http://www.history.com/topics/child-labor). For years people have gone back and forth on whether or not labor unions are actually beneficial to workers or if unions are harmful to the economy. Labor unions first started popping up as early as 1794 and started catching on in the 1880s with the introduction of The Knights of Labor. (Staff, http://www.history.com/topics/knights-of-labor) Unions grew in response to terrible working conditions, long hours, zero benefits, very low wages, and child labor. The opponents of labor unions were around even before then. When the industrial age began and people started moving to the cities, many employers took advantage of the high numbers of people in search for work and treated them more as numbers and expendable machines than people. The workers maybe got enough to live on after working for most of the day, everyday, for most of their lives. Even the children had to work those same hours instead of enjoying their childhood. The flip side to all of that is that the economy expanded and there were many people who got rich through that system. Overall, labor unions were extremely beneficial not only to American workers but also to the American economy because they improved working conditions, eliminated child labor, and because the more money workers received, the more money they spent and put back into the economy.

In the first nineteenth century, the class system is defined by people's background. People in the upper class like aristocrat did not have to work, and their income was from inherited land and investment. People in the middle class's salary was paid monthly, and most of them worked on the decent work such as bankers, ship owners, doctors, and teachers. Physical labour, carpenter and sailor belong to the working class and these humble occupation's salary paid daily or weekly wages. In other words, these occupations are not steady. It was unfortunately for people in the underclass, most of them were beggars, thieves and criminals and did not have work.

During the early twentieth and late nineteen century the period in which the new industrialization took place in the united states of America economy affecting just about everyone, whether it was the steel, textile, agriculture railroad or the industry everyone was affected, more so than every employees were treated unfairly. Changes were seen in the workplace as machine become the norm and the vast demand for unskilled worker attract new group of people into the workplace, including women, children and immigrants. The number of women and children in the workforce increase drastically during the 1920.

Trueman, C N. “The Domestic System.” The History Learning Site. Moocow, 2016. www.historylearningsite.co.uk/britain-1700-to-1900/industrial-revolution/the-domestic-system/. Accessed 17 February 2017.

The Factory Act, 1833 was an attempt to set up a normal working day in

Friederick Engels in The Condition of the Working Class in England describes the inhumane and atrocious living and working conditions for the proletariat in England. He describes life in England before the Industrial revolution and how there was a shift in population from rural farmland to urban cities. Engels describes as factories grew, the demand of labor increased, and the population in cities increased the quality of living for those people in factories deteriorated. The descriptions that Engels uses to describe the smells and the appearance of streets filled with human waste ghastly because it creates these images that it is unimaginable that someone could live that way. There are buildings filled for from “cellar to garret” by Engels but he also gives us the disturbing number of around 50,000 humans looking for housing in the refuges for the houseless. The living conditions and the areas of the cities where these poor living conditions are found lead to diseases among the population of the working class. The breaking apart of families because they are working twelve to thirteen hour days at times more so they do not have time for family. As a result of the exhaustion and stressful low paying work the working class turn to drinking as the only escape for the miserable work they must go through on a daily basis. The book describes the workers as nothing but hands at times, they are seen as interchangeable pieces to