The Late 19th Century: A Case Study

The United States is known for its expansion amid its industrial plants in the late 19th century. At the centre of this development was the automation of the production industry. People were replaced with machines. One of the companies that perfected this in the United States was British textile manufacturer (Boorstin, 2010). As a result, workers advocated unions to solve their workplace issues. The deterioration of the workplace status changed as the country approached its last years of the century. Considering the above facts, this paper will discuss workers working conditions during the century as well as the approached the unions used to curb the problems or the workers. In the century, mechanization had started machines had started replacing most of the skilled people in various industries (Lichtenstein, 2013). By the end of the century, machines had replaced skilled manpower in knitting stockings, stitching leather shoes and manufacturing nails. Mechanization had less benefiting effects (Boorstin, 2010). First, the machines replaced the way the people worked. It was evident that the craftspeople of earlier days had job satisfaction seeing a product from the onset of the production process to the last stage of production. When they saw a shirt, a knife or a …show more content…
Despite the fact that craft guilds had been around for quite some time, there was a rapid need for workers to join labour unions (Reich, 2010). The unions were not successful in organizing as well as helping in curbing the problems of works in the late 19th century. However, unions were able to unify various strikes and other work related stoppages that were mandated to publicize the grievances of the workers working conditions and wages. Nevertheless, the unions were not able to equalize the problems that the worker by then faced until the onset of the economic chaos of the 1930s (Lichtenstein,