FREE ESSAY ON AMERICAN BUSNIESS IN THE GILDED AGE

AMERICAN BUSNIESS IN THE GILDED AGE

American businessmen will ultimately accept such demands as the eight hour day and forty
hour week, not because they were forced to do so, but because it was good for business.
I agree with this statement 100%. During the first years of the 20th century, the
companies had total control over their workers. Take the coal mining industry for
example. It started the workers off young, often around the age of 8! This made sure that
for the rest of their life, they'd never know anything other than mining, therefore
keeping them down. The people who grew up in the mining community were downtrodden, and
kept that way. Sure, they were afforded "luxury's", such as housing and free heat (a
monthly supply of coal). This may seem great on the surface, until you realized that the
housing was often poorly built, and often just a shanty town set up to pacify the cry's
of the employees. The coal was often the stuff left over after the good coal was sold to
industry. Sometimes it was nothing more than rock. But this is what they worked for. This
is what these people were forced to, most of the time for their whole life. But then
something happened. The factories that the coal companies sold their product too started
to close. Why, you may ask? BECAUSE EVERYONE WAS TO POOR TO BUY ANYTHING FROM THEM! This
got the bosses thinking. If they don't work the people so hard, they wont be so tired
that they may go shopping. And if they pay the people more, so that way they get
compensated for fact that their working less hours, they'll have that money to spend on
the products, this keeping the economy rolling. After many years of changing schedules,
the standard 8 hour day and 40 hour work week were adopted. Now, I've worked an 8 hour
day and a 40 hour week during the summer, and I did not like it! It was very long and
dragging, and now I think about what these people had to go through with, and I realize
that I can't complain. They were doing 70 hour weeks, 12 hour days for less than I make
in an hour. It took a long time to fix the ills suffered by the working man, but once the
ball got rolling, there was no stopping it. 
Another reason why this workweek was adopted was because the less time you work, the less
tired you are. This increased productivity. And the extra money added to their salary
increased moral. As you can see, as we go farther into the 20th Century, these things
have to change, or else it would have been chaos. Workers revolted all the time, and many
times the police and military had to intervene. The fact of the matter is though that
there was way more common workers than anything else, and henceforth could have started
their own army. An army for the common man. It was all the employers could do was meet
their demands. They knew the risk. 
Bibliography
American in the 20th century