Reference no: EM133606512

PROMPT:

Industrialization brought to bear a number of consequences some of which were positive others of which were negative.

Defend or Negate the following statement: Industrialization's positive consequences outweighed its negative consequences.

I must also include a quote from this passage: The Industrial Working Class Comes of Age

"When I first went to learn the trade," John Morrison told a congressional committee in 1883, "a machinist considered himself more than the average workingman; in fact, he did not like to be called a workingman. He liked to be called a mechanic." Morrison identified one of the great changes in nineteenth-century America. "Today," Morrison lamented, the mechanic "is simply a laborer." Technological innovations replaced artisans with semiskilled or unskilled factory laborers. For traditional mechanics, this felt like downward mobility.
Because most factory workers and common laborers were migrants (or children of migrants) from small towns, farms, or abroad, few experienced factory work as a degradation of their traditional skills, as Morrison did. They had a chance to move upward from unskilled to skilled positions. Shop foremen might become storekeepers. Working-class families took comfort that their children had a still better chance of moving into the middle class. But industrial labor was a harsh existence for all factory operatives, who toiled long hours in difficult conditions performing repetitious tasks with little job security. Most luckless and hardest pressed were the common laborers, earning their keep by physical exertion. Their numbers grew throughout the century until by 1900 unskilled labor made up a third of the industrial workforce.
In 1900, women accounted for nearly one of every five Americans gainfully employed, mostly in unskilled or semiskilled labor. In northern middle-class homes, young Irish women worked as domestics, jobs held in the South by African American women. Jewish women sewed garments for as little as three dollars for a six-day week, and Italians worked on lace and paper flowers in their tenements. A smaller proportion of women held white-collar jobs, as teachers, nurses, or low-paid clerical workers and salesclerks behind department store counters.
The same hierarchy that favored men in the white-collar and professional labor force existed in the factories and sweatshops. In the clothing industry, for example, units dominated by male workers were higher up the chain of command than those dominated by women. Indeed, as the textile industry became a big business, the proportion of women working in textile mills steadily declined. The reverse trend affected white-collar workers. As department stores expanded in the 1870s and 1880s, they hired women, often Irish immigrants, for jobs with low wages and none of the prospects for promotion men still had. White-collar work did not confer middle-class status upon women as it did upon men in the late nineteenth century.
Few working-class wives and mothers took jobs outside the home, but many took in boarders or did laundry. The poorer working-class families survived by sending their children to work. The rich sent their daughters to finishing schools and their sons to boarding schools; middle-class parents sent their children to public schools; anything beyond grade school ranked as a luxury among those less well off than that. Ten-year-olds could be found tending the cotton spindles or picking shale off the conveyor belts coming up from the coal mines. They ran barefoot through New York's streets hawking newspapers and lugged red-hot, newly cast bottles from the furnaces in glass factories. Only in Horatio Alger novels did "Mark the Match-Boy" strike it rich.
Division of labor allowed more goods to be made for much lower per-unit labor costs. The introduction of the sewing machine in the 1850s, for example, gave rise to sweatshops where work was subdivided into simple, repetitive tasks. One group produced collars for men's shirts, another produced sleeves, and another stitched the parts together. Division of labor saved employers on training, and in industries where turnover was high, it kept the machinery running. Factory work was at best insecure, subject to swings in the business cycle. But unskilled workers also lacked the leverage to improve their own conditions. If Carnegie's workers, blinded or crippled on the job, got nothing more than the privilege of begging at the mill gates-if lung diseases were as common in textile factories as the "mill child's cough" and gangrene of the jaw among boys making matches-workers had no options beyond leaving and being fired.
Workmen's compensation was rare, and retirement pensions were unknown. Helplessness and the pool of surplus labor made organizing unions a challenge among the unskilled. Men laying railroad track or digging subway tunnels were always moving on, with common labor often seasonal and factory turnover high. In some meatpacking houses, turnover came close to 100 percent annually. A strike depleted workers' savings quickly. Exceptionally mobile and easily replaceable, immigrants increasingly came from places unfamiliar with the idea of organized labor and from cultures where religion defined identity more than class. Employers knew that by using them or, better still, Black Americans as strikebreakers, they could turn race against race, native against foreigner. Scabs, as those taking strikers' places were called, faced insult and threat. Some were beaten, others killed. Some firms built private armies to enforce control, but they could usually count on the police and state militia to help them win a strike.