Factory owners had little concern for workers’ safety. An average factory work week was sixty hours, ten hours per day, six days per week, although in steel mills, the workers put in twelve hours per day, seven days a week. According to some historical estimates, that wage left approximately 20 percent of the population in industrialized cities at, or below, the poverty level. In 1900, the average factory wage was approximately twenty cents per hour, for an annual salary of barely six hundred dollars. Yet factory wages were, for the most part, very low. Not surprisingly, there was a concurrent trend of a decrease in American workers being self-employed and an increase of those working for others and being dependent on a factory wage system for their living.
#Big business and labor manual#
Advances in farm machinery allowed for greater production with less manual labor, thus leading many Americans to seek job opportunities in the burgeoning factories in the cities. A significant number of these urban and suburban dwellers earned their wages in factories. In 1865, nearly 60 percent of Americans still lived and worked on farms by the early 1900s, that number had reversed itself, and only 40 percent still lived in rural areas, with the remainder living and working in urban and early suburban areas.
A Nation on the Move: Westward Expansion, 1800–1860.Industrial Transformation in the North, 1800–1850.Growing Pains: The New Republic, 1790–1820.Creating Republican Governments, 1776–1790.America's War for Independence, 1775-1783.
Imperial Reforms and Colonial Protests, 1763-1774.Rule Britannia! The English Empire, 1660–1763.Creating New Social Orders: Colonial Societies, 1500–1700.Early Globalization: The Atlantic World, 1492–1650.The Americas, Europe, and Africa Before 1492.Industrialization and the Rise of Big Business, 1870-1900.
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