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Why Is The Industrial Revolution Harmful

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The Industrial Revolution was a time period between the 1800s and the 1900s where there was many new inventions and ideas. During the Industrial Revolution factories started to be more popular all over the United States. Also, new types of transportation like the steamships, trains and automobiles brought safer and faster traveling. The Industrial Revolution was a time that encouraged change, but that change was not always a good one. The period of rapid industrial growth during the 1800s and into the early 1900s was more harmful because pollution, poor working conditions and labor strikes (Homestead Strike, Haymarket Affair, Pullman Strike). The Industrial Revolution caused a lot of pollution from the factories and coal. The following quote, …show more content…

In the Helpful and Harmful reading it talked about how terrible the factory life was. The narrator states, “Other Industries like meat packing for men and textiles for children often resulted in injuries like fingers being cut off.” This is no joke at all. In the meatpacking industry men would have to work long hours for little pay. Not only that, but if they used knives they had no gloves. That resulted into arms being white with frost and fingers growing numb. One muckraker named Upton Sinclair shattered the meat packing industry when he wrote “The Jungle.” In the reading Men in Meat Packing it talked about what were the working conditions like. Upton Sinclair states, “For that matter, there was very little heat anywhere in the building, except in the cooking rooms and such places- and it was the men who worked in these who ran the most risk of all, because whenever they have to pass to another room that it goes through ice cold corridors, and sometimes with nothing on above the waist except a sleeveless undershirt.” These working conditions were terrible and humans had to work through it everyday. It was so cold in these places that whenever the boss would turn around the workers would dash to the hot ares. One hot area was the hot water jets and the steaming hot carcass of the steer. Carcass means a dead animal so to be clear the workers would cover themselves in dead …show more content…

In the Homestead Strike reading it described how the strike started and who started it. It states, “In 1892 the contract between the AAISW and the Carnegie Steel Company expired (White). At the same time the price of steel in the early 1890s was falling. Frick, worried about the price cuts, decided to use the expiring contract to cut wages and take power away from the employees. The disputes between the Union and Carnegie’s company led up to what came to be known as the Homestead Strike of 1892.” Wage cuts to workers were not helpful, and it wasn’t fair to workers who were working many hours a day, in horrible working conditions to lose pay. After Frick made labor cuts workers decided to negotiate, but these negotiations went nowhere. So, the workers started to protest demanding higher wages and barricading themselves in the factory. When Frick saw what the workers were doing he hired Pinkertons to come and break up the strike. This ended up with multiple deaths and many injuries. Another huge labor dispute was the Pullman Strike in 1894. The Struggle Between Business and Labor reading described the Pullman Strike. The narrator states, “When the Pullman Company refused to negotiate, American Railway Union president Eugene V. Debs called on all U.S. railroad workers to refuse to handle Pullman cars. Rail traffic in much of the

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