America In Gilded Age Essay Example For Students

America In Gilded Age Essay 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, theyd 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 luxurys, 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 crys 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. Now, Ive worked an 8 hour day and a 40 hour week during the summer, and I didnot like it! It was very long and dragging, and now I think about what thesepeople had to go through with, and I realize that I cant complain. They weredoing 70 hour weeks, 12 hour days for less than I make in an hour. It took along time to fix the ills suffered by the working man, but once the ball gotrolling, there was no stopping it. Another reason why this workweek was adoptedwas because the less time you work, the less tired you are. This increasedproductivity. And the extra money added to their salary increased moral. As youcan see, as we go farther into the 20th Century, these things have to change, orelse it would have been chaos. Workers revolted all the time, and many times thepolice and military had to intervene. The fact of the matter is though thatthere was way more common workers than anything else, and henceforth could havestarted their own army. An army for the common man. It was all the empl oyerscould do was meet their demands. They knew the risk.