America In Guilded Age

America In Guilded Age

American businessmen will ultimately accept such demands as the eight hour day
and forty hour week, not because they were forced to do so, but because it was
good for business. I agree with this statement 100%. During the first years of
the 20th century, the companies had total control over their workers. Take the
coal mining industry for example. It started the workers off young, often around
the age of 8! This made sure that for the rest of their life, they’d never
know anything other than mining, therefore keeping them down. The people who
grew up in the mining community were downtrodden, and kept that way. Sure, they
were afforded "luxury’s", such as housing and free heat (a monthly supply
of coal). This may seem great on the surface, until you realized that the
housing was often poorly built, and often just a shanty town set up to pacify
the cry’s of the employees. The coal was often the stuff left over after the
good coal was sold to industry. Sometimes it was nothing more than rock. But
this is what they worked for. This is what these people were forced to, most of
the time for their whole life. But then something happened. The factories that
the coal companies sold their product too started to close. Why, you may ask?

BECAUSE EVERYONE WAS TO POOR TO BUY ANYTHING FROM THEM! This got the bosses
thinking. If they don’t work the people so hard, they wont be so tired that
they may go shopping. And if they pay the people more, so that way they get
compensated for fact that their working less hours, they’ll have that money to
spend on the products, this keeping the economy rolling. After many years of
changing schedules, the standard 8 hour day and 40 hour work week were adopted.

Now, I’ve worked an 8 hour day and a 40 hour week during the summer, and I did
not like it! It was very long and dragging, and now I think about what these
people had to go through with, and I realize that I can’t complain. They were
doing 70 hour weeks, 12 hour days for less than I make in an hour. It took a
long time to fix the ills suffered by the working man, but once the ball got
rolling, there was no stopping it. Another reason why this workweek was adopted
was because the less time you work, the less tired you are. This increased
productivity. And the extra money added to their salary increased moral. As you
can see, as we go farther into the 20th Century, these things have to change, or
else it would have been chaos. Workers revolted all the time, and many times the
police and military had to intervene. The fact of the matter is though that
there was way more common workers than anything else, and henceforth could have
started their own army. An army for the common man. It was all the employers
could do was meet their demands. They knew the risk.

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