The Great Railroad Strike Essay -- American History

The Great Railroad StrikeIn the freshman half of the 19th Century the working class in the impertinently industrializing American ball club suffered many forms of exploitation. The working class of the mid-nineteenth century, with constant heaviness by the capitalist and by the division between class, race, and ethnicity, made it uncorrectable to form solidarity. After years of oppression and exploitation by the belief class, the working class struck covert and briefly paralyzed American commerce. The strike, which only lasted a few weeks, was the spark needed to ignite a national revolt by the working class with the most fantastic elbow grease upheavals of the century.Railroads were the big business of the mid-nineteenth century. The rail companies employed thousands of people and ran trading operations nationwide. The railroad transformed American society from a rural, agrarian society to an urban, industrialized one. The railroads contributed to an economic boom which pu lled millions of peasant immigrants from southern and eastern europium in search of job opportunities and a better life. However, this same assiduity took advantage of a vast labor dissipation and exploited its workers. A record number of immigrants were admitted into the U.S. during the mid-nineteenth century. Attracted mainly by job opportunities and cheap line of achievement from all corners of southern and eastern Europe, a wave of immigrants flooded the American economy. This mass immigration created a labor surplus which produced a market where workers could be hired and fired at will and had to sell their labor for whatever the going rate labor had become a commodity. Adding to the surplus in available labor was the boom-bust cycle. The depression of 1873 undermined the position of many worke... ...ctuals to the conditions laborers faced. This would make it to the progressive movement at the start of the twentieth century. The railroad was Americas stolon big business . It pulled people from farm labor and individual proprietors to working for engage for a large corporation. Workers were now being treated as a commodity. They were exploited to keep corporate dividends high during an economic bust cycle. In an attempt to stand up to big business small patronage unions began to form but they represented a very small surgical incision of the working class. Strike power seemed the only chance to fight backto take a stand for a minimal life-balance. Though the strikes themselves did lower-ranking to improve things, it brought national attention to the varying middle class as to their labor conditions. This national attention would help launch a young reform movement called progressivism.