Labor Unions During The Gilded Age

The United States’s industrialization lead to a great boom in both economic and population growth, allowing businesses to flourish. With more money and workers at their disposal, employers often would often mistreat workers, suddenly cutting their wages or firing them. With only profit in mind, industries eventually became monopolized and the conditions of workers only worsened. Defenseless and barely able to survive, laborers soon found power in uniting with each other, leading to the establishment of American labor unions during the Gilded Age. They provided workers with necessary protection from their employers’ capricious decisions, and while their presence elicited fear in business owners, unions eventually bettered the standard of living for the American proletarian through compromise.

Corporations looking for cheap labor, such as railroad, mining, or oil companies, often hired Italian immigrants to do their work. S. Merlino, a New York journalist alive during the Gilded Age, explained this tendency in his account Labor Contractors and Italian Immigrants, writing that “[the contractor] finds in the market a large number of men entirely at his mercy, with not even the weak support of a promise to defend themselves against his greed” (Johnson 71). Employers took advantage of immigrant desperation by hiring them with low wages, no benefits, and no contract. Laborers seeking work would have to then choose between not having any money to support themselves or their family, or being paid an unfairly low amount of money and hoping that they will be able to