Labor in the Gilded Age
Women and Children
Industry’s Main Goal
• Industry’s main goal is to maximize
production.
• Machines were more profitable than
workers during the Gilded Age.
• Workers must engage in class politics to
combat the actions of business leaders
and management.
Gilded Age Labor Quick Facts
• Unskilled Labor
• Use of the contract system
• Unskilled workers often moved city to city,
factory to factory looking for work
• Worked up to 12 hour shifts
• Inexperience, factory conditions, and fastpaced production led to frequent accidents
• In 1880 most working women were
between 18 and 26 and unmarried.
Women in the Industrial Age
• Upper-class women believed in, and lived in,
“separate spheres.”
• Women remained at home, raised the children, and
performed housework. Men were the breadwinners and held
the public sphere of the family.
• Married working-class women often worked in
sweatshops or from home finishing tasks (particularly
in the clothing industry)
• Single working women often viewed factory work as a
way to avoid domestic work.
• Factory jobs paid better than domestic jobs.
• Creation of office jobs
Child Labor: the Lucky Ones
• Child labor was a
national disgrace
during the Gilded
Age. The lucky ones
swept the trash and
filth from city streets
or stood for hours
on street corners
hawking
newspapers.
Child Labor: the Less Fortunate
• The less fortunate
coughed constantly
through 10-hour
shifts in dark, damp
coal mines or
sweated to the point
of dehydration while
tending fiery glassfactory furnaces.
Children in the Textile Industry
Child Labor Quick Facts
• In coal mines and cotton mills, children
entered the work force as early as 8 or
9.
• Used in tight spaces
• Coal industry placed them below the chute
which broke coal to remove any impurities
• Prone to being injured by pulleys
A Matter of Survival
• By and large, these child
laborers were the sons and
daughters of poor parents
or recent immigrants who
depended on their
children's meager wages to
survive.
1870: 750,000 Child Laborers
• In 1870, the first U.S.
census to report child
labor numbers counted
750,000 workers under
the age of 15, not
including children who
worked for their families
in businesses or on
farms.
1911: 2 Million Child Laborers
• By 1911, more than
two million American
children under the
age of 16 were
working - many of
them 12 hours or
more, six days a
week. Often they
toiled in unhealthful
and hazardous
conditions; always
for minuscule wages.
Photographer Lewis W. Hine
• But until the
documentary
photographs of Lewis
Wikes Hine appeared
in popular and
progressive
publications in the
early 1900s the public
turned a blind eye to
the pervasive and
cruel exploitation of
children in the work
place.
Gilded Age Labor Politics
Key Terms
• Closed shop: employees of the
company are only union members
• Union shop: employees are hired
without being a member, but must
become a member within a specified
time
• Open shop: does not restrict
employees to union members
Key Points on American Labor
History
1.
2.
3.
4.
Limited Radicalism (exception: IWW)
Workers live at the economic margins
Practicality
Dependent on a worker culture
Paul Douglas’ Model of Labor
Workers have four different levels of attainment:
1. Poverty: inadequate diet, unhealthy conditions, no
resources for unexpected events
2. Minimum Subsistence: meet basic needs, but have
no additional funds
3. Minimum Health & Decency: adequate funds for
needs; small amount left over for leisure
4. Minimum Comfort: funds for comforts (leisure and
savings)
Douglas argues that American workers never make it to
minimum comfort. Why don’t they do anything?
Labor Unions
• Why does management dislike unions?
• Union workers typically receive higher pay
• Union workers typically receive higher
benefits
• Union workers have more leverage over
management (strength in numbers)
Labor Unions, Management, and
Government
• Management usually has the government on their
side.
• Strikes are often broken when the government steps in
• Government and management and more aligned
because:
• They both want economic growth.
• They both want order (less conflict).
• 1902 is the first time in American History that the
federal government favors workers (TR does not
break the United Mine Workers Strike).
Where are labor unions
successful?
• Labor unions are more successful in big
cities and immigrant towns.
• Labor unions work like an interest group or
a political machine.
• Transactional politics
• Unions back parties and candidates that
are sympathetic to their issues.