1. Essential Question:
What role did the business leaders play in stabilizing the chaotic business cycles of the Gilded Age?

2. The Industrial Workers

3. Industrial Workers Industrial work was hard:
Laborers worked long hours & received low wages but had expensive living costs
Industrial work was unskilled, dangerous, & monotonous
Gender, religious, & racial biases led to different pay scales
These conditions led to a small, but significant union movement
Low wages ($ /year but living cost $600); railroad injury rate 1 in 26, death rate 1 in 399; Composition of work force in 1900: 20% women (in 296 of 303 jobs) 10% of girls & 20% of boys had jobs (“child labor” meant ↓14 yrs)
all children poorly paid, but girls less than boys; Earning comparisons: Adults > Children; Men > Women; Skilled > Unskilled; Protestants > Catholics or Jews; Whites > Blacks & Asians; Blacks worked menial jobs; Chinese worked on Pacific Coast; often discriminated against (Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882)

4. INDUSTRIAL WORKERS
Low wages ($ /year but living cost $600); railroad injury rate 1 in 26, death rate 1 in 399; Composition of work force in 1900: 20% women (in 296 of 303 jobs) 10% of girls & 20% of boys had jobs (“child labor” meant ↓14 yrs)
all children poorly paid, but girls less than boys; Earning comparisons: Adults > Children; Men > Women; Skilled > Unskilled; Protestants > Catholics or Jews; Whites > Blacks & Asians; Blacks worked menial jobs; Chinese worked on Pacific Coast; often discriminated against (Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882)

5. Early American Labor Unions
In 1868, Knights of Labor formed to help all type of workers escape the “wage system”
The most successful union, the American Federation of Labor (1886) led by Samuel Gompers:
Made up only of skilled labor & sought practical objectives (better pay, hours, conditions)
Included 1/3 of all U.S. laborers
Membership regardless of skill, race, or sex
The KoL lacked organization to survive
Excluded women, blacks, unskilled laborers 17

6. The U.S. experienced an “era of strikes” from 1870-1890
The Great RR Strike of shut down railroads from WV to CA & resulted in hundreds of deaths
During the Chicago Haymarket Strike (1886), unionists demanded an 8-hr day; led to mob violence & the death of the Knights of Labor
The Homestead Strike (1892) resulted from a 20% pay cut at one of Carnegie’s steel plants

7. Essential Question:
How did the industrialization of the Gilded Age transform cities & immigration in America?