A Textile Worker Explains The Labor Market Summary

The document I chose was Document 19-1 titled ‘A Textile Worker Explains the Labor Market’. This document is the testimony of Thomas O’Donnell given before the U.S. Senate Committee on Relations between Labor and Capital in the year 1885. O’Donnell speaks about what it’s like to be a labor worker in the 1880s to a committee so they could better understand the relationship between labor and capital. The Gilded Age saw the rise of industrialism and great economic growth in the United States. But true to its title, the Gilded Age was only plated with gold but inward filled with corruption and poverty. What meant great success for some, meant lack of job security and financial hardship for the working class Americans. This document really depicts what it’s like being on the working end of these companies seeking to industrialize.

Hard working men, including Mr.

O’Donnell who was with his company for eleven years, would lose their jobs to a machine who could do the job quicker or to a worker who would work for a lower wage, like young boys or immigrants. O’Donnell described how men would gather to be picked for work in the mill and the men with young boys to serve as “back-boys” always got picked first because they could do the work faster and the young boys worked for $.30 or $.40 a day as opposed to the $1.50 O’Donnell usual took home for a day’s work. He also described how it didn’t take a skilled worker like himself to operate the new ring-spinners that expedited the cotton spinning process. But skilled workers and laborers weren’t the only ones who were “under the plating” of the Gilded Age. In Document 19-2, women described the struggles of working as domestic servants. Many women went to work during the late 19th century to help out their families in this time of financial anguish. Many took up jobs as domestic

servants. Most women did not mind the work itself, like cooking or cleaning, but rather despised the way they were treated by the wealthy women who employed them. Many described cramped and dark living quarters, mistreatment from the women of the house and excessively long hours. The majority agreed that while they don’t mind working for the families, the women of the house was often entitled, mean, and would work the women relentlessly; even the women who once were domestic servants themselves. But this era was really a tale of two cities. While the poor were treated poorly and underappreciated, the rich got richer and corruption was a norm. Document 19-5 contains a statement from George Washington Plunkitt were he plainly describes insider trading as “honest graft”. He would find out when a piece of land was going to be used for something, bought it and made money off selling at an inflated rate. Instead of seeing this as corruption, he describes it as seeing an opportunity and taking it. He said it was honest because he was making money for the good of the city and not for personal gain.