Germinal, written by Emile Zola is about a man, Etienne, who receives a mining job at Le Voreux, a coal mine. While working, Etienne discovers the harsh working conditions, and the malnourishment men and women have. As the status of these workers continues to deplete, Etienne is motivated to start a revolt in hope of gaining better working conditions and wages so he and the other workers can live proper lives.
I think Zola wrote this novel to promote the act of revolting, in necessary conditions. Throughout the novel, there are various scenes which depict the hard lives of people living under the harsh conditions. “Choked by a violent cough, he spat, and his spittle left a black stain on the ground.” The reason this man, Bonnemort, was coughing and spitting up black phlegm was because he had been working down in the coal mine for such a long time, since he was eight years old. “They ceased to notice the water streaming down and causing their limbs to swell, or the cramps brought on by being stuck in awkward positions. As the day wore on, the atmosphere became even more poisonous and the air grew hotter and hotter.” These are the things workers had to put up with every time they work. The miners are working in rough conditions and being paid just enough money to keep them alive, but still suffering. Some even thought the workers would be better off dead because at least they would not have to suffer from starvation and body pains. These harsh conditions lead one man, Etienne, to start a revolution because he believed these people were not being treated right. The examples provided are reasonable causes to start a revolution. Although the revolt he started may not have played out the way he intended to, it makes me wonder what coul...
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...ion was the chance for change. The workers went along, but in the end, they let their anger for the Company get the best of them. Instead of using the power of word, they were greedy and violent. The workers had blown their chance for reformed working conditions. And with that, I sympathize with the miners. They then had to go back to the old way of the iron law, and harsh living conditions, all because they couldn’t control their emotions. “Today the same slave labour was beginning all over again, as dangerous and as badly paid as every. Just over there, seven hundred metres under the ground, he could almost hear the steady, ceaseless clunk of picks as his black comrades, the very comrades he had seen going down that morning, dug away at the coal in silent fury.”
Works Cited
Emile Zola, Germinal
Emile Zola, Germinal. Trans., Roger Pearson (New York: Knopf, 2004)
The Coal Company exploited the workers by underpaying them and restricting their freedom as consumers. The miners were forced to buy their own tools, clothes, food, etc. from the Ôcompany storeÕ many times at higher prices than necessary. This created circulation of money from the company to the laborer back to the company. The miners worked for obvious reasons: to supply themselves and their families with shelter, food and clothing. They relied on company power to supply a means of employment. However, the company in turn relied on the laborers, because without them the company would have no means by which to excavate the coal and continue the production process.
Although each character delivers their powerful and moving account, I would like to focus on one individual and his struggle to organize the miners. Rondal Lloyd struggled most of his life, he knew the coal mines first hand when he had to leave school to help his dad work in the mines to pay off debt to the company store. Unfortunately, this was common back in the times that this story is based upon. In West Virginia as far back as 1901 there are archives that have tried to set some sort of standards for child labor, but we must remember that these children grew up hard and fast. (West Virginia Mine War...
The poem demonstrates the discord that exists when people do not treat others humanely. When we discriminate based on culture or wealth, the ending is a tragic one. The author is able to combine diction, which makes violence occur in the readers mind after every stanza, with a view into both worlds in the society to demonstrate the flaws within the form of government. The author not only brings the tragedy to life, she makes it personal. The poem causes the reader to empathize with the workers and realize that they were slain for no reason other than a cultural difference and an inability to leave.
The book begins by describing participants in a garment industry strike and how any form of challenge to the authority, the factory owners, would be handled. He describes the money driven political corruption that allowed the owners to thwart any upheaval by sending out the muscles of the not so underworld to beat the strikers, women included. One of these occasions, in September of 1909, included Miss Clara Lemlich. She was a fiery member of the socialist party and a garment worker. She personified the change in women of the day. Women who worked and supported a family, She represented the image of “The Gibson Girl”. After leaving a strike, she was targeted as a trouble maker and one of the criminals of the day was paid to beat her. This did however backfire as a bruised woman brought more people to the cause. On many occasions the protestors were arrested on trumped up charges to punish them for making waves. The police were also believed to be on the payroll. The main political team at the time was out of Tammany Hall.
In the late nineteenth century, many European immigrants traveled to the United States in search of a better life and good fortune. The unskilled industries of the Eastern United States eagerly employed these men who were willing to work long hours for low wages just to earn their food and board. Among the most heavily recruiting industries were the railroads and the steel mills of Western Pennsylvania. Particularly in the steel mills, the working conditions for these immigrants were very dangerous. Many men lost their lives to these giant steel-making machines. The immigrants suffered the most and also worked the most hours for the least amount of money. Living conditions were also poor, and often these immigrants would barely have enough money and time to do anything but work, eat, and sleep. There was also a continuous struggle between the workers and the owners of the mills, the capitalists. The capitalists were a very small, elite group of rich men who held most of the wealth in their industries. Strikes broke out often, some ending in violence and death. Many workers had no political freedom or even a voice in the company that employed them. However, through all of these hardships, the immigrants continued their struggle for a better life.
Culturally, the Stone Mountain Coal Company is able to maintain control over the residents of Matewan by promoting ignorance and fear of the unknown—“strike breakers,” races, and unions. Pitting Matewan’s resident workers against the incoming strikebreakers allows the Company freedom to raise competition levels for jobs that all the workers need to live, while lowering the amount of mone...
... were left unprotected and abandoned by the unions. How is it that the unions can demand labors lose months of wages, be subject to labor blacklisting and ultimately sacrifice their lives without any protections for the strikers and still claim success? They can’t. If anything, the Pinkertons who dispersed the crowd did more to help the worker, by reopening the Homestead, than the union had done. Thus, the unions were an utter failure in furthering the position of the laborer, as the laborer was better off before hand. Before unions the laborer had their life, as many died in failed strikes, and their dignity, as society at least held an intrinsic value in their lives. However, unions succeeded in decimating any chance of advancement by tarnishing the reputations of all laborers, leading to a direct decline in the socio-economic position of the blue-collar worker.
The documentary strived to show us how factories were corrupt that they couldn’t provide good working conditions for the workers until we lost people. This documentary is about the tragic fire that took place on March 25, 1911 in the Triangle factory. We can clearly see through this documentary that these people didn’t matter to the factory owners because their needs were not met. The documentary shows that the year before the fire took place the workers led a strike asking for better working conditions, but obviously their voices were not heard. After the fire took place this is when factories started improving working conditions. It is sad to learn that it took 146 lives of innocent people in order for factory owners to be convinced that they need to improve the poor working
Rebecca Harding Davis wrote “Life in the Iron Mills” in the mid-nineteenth century in part to raise awareness about working conditions in industrial mills. With the goal of presenting the reality of the mills’ environment and the lives of the mill workers, Davis employs vivid and concrete descriptions of the mills, the workers’ homes, and the workers themselves. Yet her story’s realism is not objective; Davis has a reformer’s agenda, and her word-pictures are colored accordingly. One theme that receives a particularly negative shading in the story is big business and the money associated with it. Davis uses this negative portrayal of money to emphasize the damage that the single-minded pursuit of wealth works upon the humanity of those who desire it.
The blue flies, Madame Defarge’s knitting, and the sea are just three of Dickens’ many symbols that develop the theme of man’s inhumanity to his fellow man in A Tale of Two Cities. Although Revolutions are not particularly humane in themselves, the individual characters and the majority of the peasantry in this book took inhumane to its extreme. Because the revolutionaries follow their ruthless leader, Madame Defarge, they do not question the humanity or morality of the massacre of the aristocracy. In a Revolution meant to free peasants, peasants should be last on the list of those being murdered, and this injustice should be realized. In the French Revolution as well as A Tale of Two Cities, the oppressed become the oppressors and the main cause behind the revolution is lost.
Toni saw this opportunity to write this particular article into a novel to show people how the days of slavery were and the sacrifices those that had run away would make if they stood a chance to be recaptured. The novel also introduces us to the spirits of the souls that were lost and how they never rested in peace until they finished what they had left behind. Toni really captures the audience’s attention in this particular novel.
This tragedy pointed out the negatives of sweatshop conditions of the industrialization era. It emphasized the worst part of its times the low wages, long hours, and unsanitary working conditions were what symbolized what sweatshops were all about. These conditions were appalling, and no person should ever be made to work in these conditions.
The project outlines the powerful impact of the Pullman Car Company worker’s rebellion on the modern labor force across the nation and worldwide. George M. Pullman’s employees were subject to a strict, controlled society centered around the Pullman train car industry. They not only worked in his facilities, but were also encouraged, more accurately they were forced, to live in a special town created by their employer. In this town, Pullman maintained control over their living conditions. He provided amenities and, most importantly, commanded the cost of rent. Pullman had successfully created a civilization in which he maintained total authority over his worker’s lives, economically and socially. Unfortunately, leaving the rights of the workers
To conclude, after reading all this, the impact of the industrialization for workers in the United States had a negative impact. It had a negative impact due to the fact that workers had low wages, long working hours, and working conditions. Which shows how since workers had a lot of work and they were not paid good. So hey tried going on strikes and they tried fighting for their rights.This topic is important to talk about still today , is because if we still talk about what they went through back then, is so we don’t have to go through it again. A connection I can give from today is how undocumented people still work hard, or they work harder than people who have papers. Iit is not as hard as it was before but we can still see that problem
The main focus of Dickens’ novel is the French Revolution. This was a tragic time that took place between the years of seventeen eighty-nine and seventeen ninety-nine. It was the lower class revolting against the corrupt authoritarian government. The ideals that the French stood for were liberty, equality, and brotherhood. Dickens uses this for the background of his novel. Marie Shephard once said that Dickens was helped by his friend Carlyle for a background on the French Revolution, and tried to focus more on the plot than a character (51). Another historian said that “the French Revolution exists in the novel only insofar as Dickens’s characters vivify it, live through it, react to it, and make its reality manifest to the reader”(Allingham). Dickens understood this and used it to help him write the novel, and to help us in understanding it.