Technology's Effect On Industrial Workers In The Nineteenth Century

Those who lived through the Civil War and Reconstruction period recognized that the nation had passed through perhaps the single most significant transformative period in its history. Technology and Labor unions had a profound effect on Industrial workers in the nineteenth century. As technology advanced, it forced workers into monotonous positions that led them to form labor unions to fight for changes in their work. These factors opposed each other under a strained economy where employers didn't recognize worker's rights. The growth of technology and technological innovation made the rapid territorial expansion of American cities at first technologically feasible, and then socially and economically necessary. The nation's cities grew because
But the growth of cities ran head-on into a long-standing American prejudice against urbanization as somehow European, corrupting, and dangerous to democracy. Just as labor's response to industrialization seemed threatening to prized American values of individualism, free enterprise, and social mobility, so, too, did urbanization seem to endanger the individual's ability to own his own home, the cherished doctrine of self-reliance, and the prospect of democratic government. But this anti-urban sentiment was only partly the latest outbreak of a venerable American intellectual tradition. It also was a direct response to the specific facts of American urban life, spread throughout the nation by the growing network of American newspapers and magazines. Americans throughout the nation read of the overcrowding of slums, the ghastly sanitary conditions that beset most urban areas, and the growing corruption of urban political life. Americans' anti-urban sentiment was fed by prejudice against one of the principal reasons for urbanization.

Although the idea of having a regular paying job was pleasing the conditions of industrial labor were often appalling, and at times life-threatening. Moreover, as the new industrial workers came to discover, they were unable to bargain over salary and working conditions weren't on equal
To some extent, their hopes were realized, as state and local governments experimented with legislation to protect the rights of workers (for example, state minimum-wage, maximum-hour, and working-conditions statutes) and the interests of consumers (for example, laws regulating railroad rates or the quality of manufactured