Societal Effects of the Americ essays

Societal Effects of the Americ essays The American Industrial Revolution had many profound and indelible effects on American society. The enormous expansion of American business and industry promoted a drastic change in the basic division of labor. The basic need of industry is labor, so a great demand for a workforce was created. Growing industrialization caused a huge influx of laborers into cities. As more factories sprang up, labor was expanded to utilize women and children. With expanding business and more workers, workers began to adamantly demand higher wages or more favorable hours; unionization came into full force. The American Industrial Revolution caused major growth of urban populations, precipitated a change the division of labor, and began movements for workers rights The migration of laborers from rural farm life to urban factory life was a major result of Americas industrialization. A fact of economic life is that workers in an industrial setting are able to command higher wages than farm workers. Labor in an industrial setting is simply more efficient than the productivity of farm workers. Because economic systems compensate laborers in accordance with their output rather than how hard or how long they work, industrial labor becomes the obvious choice for a worker. As Chamberlain states in The Enterprising Americans, The productivity for a worker in a factory could be as much as ten times that of their farming counterparts (97). Simply stated, the simple gain in productivity meant a wage increase ten times that of farm work, only by switching to industrial labor. For the great majority of workers, this was too much to resist, causing an exodus of laborers from rural to urban areas and skyrocketing the As factories spread, there was a high demand for workers. However, during the early stages of industrialization, labor was difficult to obtain. In urban areas...