The meatpacking industry is considered the most dangerous, crude, and foul industry in the world. During the period in which The Jungle was written, the meatpacking business was at its peak of business corruption. Even though the meatpacking industry had horrible working conditions, no official laws protecting meatpacking, and owners that only cared about money, the employees of the industry still continued to work and were not rewarded for the risks that were involved.
The meatpacking industry is the most hazardous industry in the United States, and The Jungle is a perfect example of it. The working conditions in the factories were horrendous, causing multiple employees to become sick and injured. Most of the time the workers did not last longer than six months because they are required to work ten hours a day, six days a week. Immigrants would continuously come to the United States to achieve the “American Dream”. When employees got sick or hurt, there was always another person to replace them, this allowed the companies to continuously meet the supply and demand for work. Jurgis and Ona are perfect examples of what the dangers of the meatpacking industry cause. Jurgis worked as hard as he possibly could until his body eventually gave out. He would come home every night with aches, pains, headaches, and cuts on his rough hands. No matter how hard Jurgis and Ona fought, they still came up short of the American Dream consistently. In the first month of the meatpacking industry, 319 workers were injured in the first month and over 60% would suffer from some type of injury in the next two months. One of the most dangerous jobs in the industry was transporting the animals, still half alive, from one point to another while the animal...
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...e, such as Connor, there is someway that the upper class citizens plead not guilty and escape trouble easily. Ultimately, the businessmen of the meatpacking industry were influenced by greed and power which caused them to do business in a corrupt manner.
The meatpacking industry was an industry that was built on the desires of being corrupt. Since there was such a high demand for the products that the companies were producing and such a high demand for work, the meatpacking industry continued to produce large profits with low amounts of investments. The upper class citizens continued to run the town and country because they had all of the money, while the average person was left living a life of poverty. The corruption of business in the meatpacking industry was plentiful, and the harm if caused on the employees was unbearable which was wrong, and truly evil.
The Jungle is a vivid novel and I’m going to expose one of the major themes that I found to be unimaginable. It tells the tale of immigrants who were subjected to barbarian working conditions with absolutely no labor laws, I’m also going to use the text book entitled America a Concise History to describe how awful these working conditions were and the changes in labor laws it had in American society. This book describes major problems and changes of what was happening in America at this specific time in American history.
It is not just the animals who are being treated wrongly. The workers are vulnerable and suffer from injuries on a daily basis. This workforce requires so much protection, such as chainmail outfits to protect themselves from tools. From cuts, sprains, to amputations, “ The injury rate in a slaughterhouse is about three times higher than the rate in a typical American factory.” (238). Many immigrants come to the states, some illegally. Companies give their supervisors bonuses when they have little reported injuries as a reward for a spectacular job. Regardless, these supervisors do not make attempts to make the work environment safer. They threaten the employees with their jobs. They will put injured employees on easier shifts to heal so it will not look suspicious as to why they are in pain. Next to failing to report injuries, women in the slaughterhouses suffer from sexual assault. Male coworkers pressure women into dating and sex. Reported cases include men using animal parts on them in an explicit manner, making work another kind of nightmare. All this corruption and lack of respect for workers is all for a cheap meal people buy when they have the
While The Jungle was by far Sinclair’s most famous work, what many are not aware of is the fact that The Jungle was initially written as an expose for a well-known socialist newspaper in the country, Appeal to Reason. Although Sinclair once said he were to write the “Uncle Tom’s Cabin of the labor movement”, he did so not by merely speculating what the meat packing industry was like, but by actually experiencing the lifestyle firsthand. Upton Sinclair went to the packing plants himself in order to truly gain the experience of what it was like to work in the stockyards as well as communicating directly with employees, laborers, social workers, and locals to truly grasp what life was like in a place like Packingtown. It was not until Sinclair was able to take all of his experiences in that he was able to sit down and write an accurate and to some, frightful expose of what the meat packing industry
Imagine going to work and being sprayed by a scorching splash of molten metal. Wouldn't that be just terrible? Unfortunately for the working-class Americans of the early 20th century (who worked in a steel-factory of sorts), this hellish scene was a reality for them (Sinclair 215). Upton Sinclair's book The Jungle, a ficticious yet all-the-more realistic novel about the Chicago meat packing industry (and just working/life conditions in general for city-dwelling Americans at the time), follows Jurgis Rudkus --- A Lithuanian immigrant trying to live the “American dream”. Unfortunately, that dream is crushed under the deepest and darkest aspects of Capitalism through terrible working conditions, appalling living situations, homelessness/unemployment, and unfair legal and political procedures. These obstacles make excellent examples as for why some rules and regulations are needed in our otherwise Capitalistic society.
In the world of economic competition that we live in today, many thrive and many are left to dig through trash cans. It has been a constant struggle throughout the modern history of society. One widely prescribed example of this struggle is Upton Sinclair's groundbreaking novel, The Jungle. The Jungle takes the reader along on a journey with a group of recent Lithuanian immigrants to America. As well as a physical journey, this is a journey into a new world for them. They have come to America, where in the early twentieth century it was said that any man willing to work an honest day, would make a living and could support his family. It is an ideal that all Americans are familiar with one of the foundations that got American society where it is today. However, while telling this story, Upton Sinclair engages the reader in a symbolic and metaphorical war against capitalism. Sinclair's contempt for capitalist society is present throughout the novel, from cover to cover, personified in the eagerness of Jurgis to work, the constant struggle for survival of the workers of Packingtown, the corruption of "the man" at all levels of society, and in many other ways.
Built off of the backs of immigrants, it is the very same people that are poorly mistreated but are the reason for the country's booming economy. Yet, a century ago these migrant workers who devoted their health and time to the factories receive a poor man’s salary. They worked long strenuous hours in horrible conditions and would often get injured during the process. The corporation had no compassion towards its laborers. This extract from Sinclair’s novel The Jungle explains the terrible conditions in which employees worked: “...your hand slips up on the blade, and there is a fearful gash. And that would not be so bad, only for the deadly contagion. The cut may heal, but you never can tell,” (Sinclair, 12). Mikalos, a character in the novel, is used in this instance to personify the way in which the employees had to conduct their job. They had to focus on working as fast as humanly possible even if they were injured. The character states that he accidently made a laceration while deboning an animal. Even though his injury is significant, he is not to breathe a word of it to his employer. The employer cares not of the accident nor of the worker wasting valuable time chatting about “frivolous” events such as their health. It did not matter if a laborer lost a finger, the only thing that mattered to the businessmen was making more money. This was how life was working in the factory and it shows that the industries
Modern industry has replaced the privately owned workshop with the corporate factory. Laborers file into factories like soldiers. Throughout the day they are under the strict supervision of a hierarchy of seemingly militant command. Not only are their actions controlled by the government, they are controlled by the machines they are operating or working with, the bourgeois supervisors, and the bourgeois manufacturer. The more open the bourgeois are in professing gain as their ultimate goal, the more it condemns the proletariat.
At the beginnings of the 1900s, some leading magazines in the U.S have already started to exhibit choking reports about unjust monopolistic practices, rampant political corruption, and many other offenses; which helped their sales to soar. In this context, in 1904, The Appeal to Reason, a leading socialist weekly, offered Sinclair $500 to prepare an exposé on the meatpacking industry (Cherny). To accomplish his mission, Sinclair headed to Chicago, the center of the meatpacking industry, and started an investigation as he declared“ I spent seven weeks in Packingtown studying conditions there, and I verified every smallest detail, so that as a picture of social conditions the book is as exact as a government report” (Sinclair, The Industrial Republic 115-16). To get a direct knowledge of the work, he sneaked into the packing plants as a pretended worker. He toured the streets of Packingtown, the area near the stockyards where the workers live. He approached people, from different walks of life, who could provide useful information about conditions in Packingtown. At the end of seven weeks, he returned home to New Jersey, shut himself up in a small cabin, wrote for nine months, and produced The Jungle (Cherny).
Upton Sinclair, the author of The Jungle, wrote this novel to unveil the atrocious working conditions and the contaminated meat in meat-packing workhouses. It was pathos that enabled his book to horrify hundreds of people and to encourage them to take a stand against these meat-packing companies. To obtain the awareness of people, he incorporated a descriptive style to his writing. Ample amounts of imagery, including active verbs, abstract and tangible nouns, and precise adjectives compelled readers to be appalled. Durham, the leading Chicago meat packer, was illustrated, “having piles of meat... handfuls of dried dung of rats...rivers of hot blood, and carloads of moist flesh, and soap caldrons, craters of hell.” ( Sinclair 139). His description
The Jungle by Upton Sinclair exemplifies a muckraking style in its often gory depictions of life in a meat packing factory, Sinclair writes of how the meat packing industry exploits its workers, many of whom are uneducated and poor in the same way a capitalist government exploits it's working class. Sinclair uses Symbolism in terms of physical objects, Objects that serve a metaphorical purpose, and oppressive tone, to persuade the reader that Capitalism leads to the declination and corruption of America and that the only way to remedy this is socialistic government.
In the early twentieth century, at the height of the progressive movement, “Muckrakers” had uncovered many scandals and wrong doings in America, but none as big the scandals of Americas meatpacking industry. Rights and responsibilities were blatantly ignored by the industry in an attempt to turn out as much profit as possible. The meat packers did not care if poor working conditions led to sickness and death. They also did not care if the spoiled meat they sold was killing people. The following paper will discuss the many ways that rights and responsibilities were not being fulfilled by the meat packing industry.
In a review the website writes that “Slaughterhouse is the first book in which workers in the meat industry speak publicly about what is actually taking place in America’s slaughterhouses.” This particular book shined light to the graphic and very disturbing facts that factory farms are providing all types of products at the expense of the lives of innocent animals. The book is able to bring forth evidence and enticing information that is hard to miss by the reader because at one point or another, this matter was meant to come to light. The review goes further in illustrating “Eisnitz 's investigation with a single complaint from a United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) worker alleging that cattle there are having their heads skinned while fully conscious. This single complaint becomes a full-scale, groundbreaking investigation.” Slowly but steadily, Eisnitz was able to figure the puzzle out and attract the attention of individuals and organizations who are particularly found of advocating for animal rights. The book itself had testimonies from workers who would deliberately beat, “strangle, boil, or dismember animals alive. Today’s slaughter line does not stop for anything: Not for injured workers, not for contaminated meat, and least of all, not for sick or disabled animals.” This is the driving force of individuals who have no other
The Meat industry treats their workers the same way they treat the animals. They treat these living beings as if they were worthless. Slaughterhouses kill thousands of hogs a day and pack thousands chickens tightly together like a jail-cell. These ani...
in reading of the atrocities of the Chicago meat packing plants. Take for example the
The devastating effects of hunting are made worse by logging companies that “provide the physical and social infrastructure for this anarchic exploitation. They supply the roads, workers, and ammunition to carry out this growing un-policed commercial enterprise. In the case of the Brazilian Amazon, the building of major roads for loggers to enter inaccessible regions has caused major forest loss, which directly threatens primate populations.