"The Jungle": Inspiring Change in the Workplace

A sickly breeze slithers around the corner of a long brick building and pulls bits of paper and trash into its wickedly spiraling game. Grey fog, twisting and warping into grotesque patterns, oozes up from the dank stream of sewage that floats lazily down the gutters of the stone-made road. A hunchbacked old man trundles through the mist, the collar of his tattered jacket clenched tightly around his face to ward off the slight autumn chill of the brisk morning air. He hardly slows at the sound of another being moving towards him through the smog. A small, dirty child, adorned in a ragged yellow dress waddles by, on her way to the factory where she will spend her day exposed to many hazardous conditions. Thus was the life of the people in the big cities. Men, women, and children had come from all over the world hoping for a better life. However, none awaited them in this glamorous deathtrap. Everyone that was affected by the conditions of industry wanted a change, and The Jungle, a novel by Upton Sinclair, helped fuel the beginning of that change through sanitation in the workplace.

The troubling conditions that needed to be changed did not come about until several years after thousands had immigrated to America. These newcomers had heard that life would be better for them. The rumors were that "a man might earn three rubles a day," and thus would be very well-off after only a short amount of time (Sinclair 23). Anyone could work, even the children, so families would be able to provide for themselves without the fear of starving that they’d had in their native country. The immigrants were told that they would not be subject to anyone except themselves and, therefore, could "count" themselves "as good as any other man" (Sinclair ...

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...key factors that played into workers' rights; thus we know that Sinclair did not have as much impact on the rights of laborers as he had hoped. However, through his book, The Jungle, Upton Sinclair was able to greatly influence the hygiene in food and other products, which is just as important as the rights of the people. The intertwining of events that occurred in the late 1800s and early 1900s and the publishing of the marvelous book The Jungle have had a huge impact on the pay and working conditions for laborers today and on the levels of cleanliness in foods and other goods.

Works Cited

Littell, McDougal. The Americas. Illinois: Rand McNally and Company, 2005. Print.

Sinclair, Upton. The Jungle. Massachusetts: Robert Bentley Inc., 1946. Print.

Werstein, Irving. The Great Struggle: Labor in America. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1965. Print.