Nineteenth-century Western employers often expected workers to spend 12 to 14 hours a day, six days a week on the job. Factories no longer needed many skilled artisans or craftsmen, whose work could now be done by machine. Instead they needed numbers of unskilled or semiskilled workers to operate the machines. In the 1880’s, workers’ organizations, led by the Knights of Labor, joined with political radicals and reformers to organize a national effort to demand an eight-hour workday. Industrialization, immigration, and urbanization became new sources of social conflict and instability. Industrial workers who experienced dangerous or exploitative conditions had little leverage to negotiate fair wages or workplace protections. The Gilded Age produced
