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01/24/02 (The Missing Peace)
The one thing in the chapter “Workers in the United States” that I found to be somewhat disturbing is that the government sided with the side of the businesses in a lot of the conflicts between workers and employers. In the book it mentions a number of strikes that were handled in violence and some of the time it was the government that administer the violence. For example, the Ludlow mine strike of 1914, the government killed 13 women and children.
I found this strike in particular very interesting, and I looked it up at http://www.radio4all.org/anarchy/ludlow.html only to find out that there was a lot more to it. I was appalled by the actions of the government after the miners on strike sought to the National Guard soldiers that were placed around there camp in what the strikers thought was to help them. And the fact that there is no mention to this in the history books, makes me upset because you learn about Rockefeller’s fame and triumphs, rather is acts of violence against his own employees. This violence was only attacked by more violence by the miners.
I know in my previous I preached about the need for war, this incident was not war, and I am very disturbed my this violence, and the way that the government handled the situation.
The
three groups of people that chapters 7 & 8 focus on, had to
As
for chapter 7, I was disturbed while reading about child labor in
Another
attitude, which seems worth praising is, that of some
In
the summarizing section of chpt.7, the authors say that "
As
for chapter 8, I was particularly interested with current data
I
enclose two short web sites, relating to women during World War II:
http://www.nara.gov./exhall/powers/women.html
http://www.lib.noaa.gov/edocs/women/women2.jpg
They
show some posters encouraging women to work in factories.
I
found chapter seven of The Missing Peace to be of particular interest to
One
of the more interesting subjects of the chapter was the subject of the
In
discussing the First World War and socialism, I am lead to the person of
In
the 1800’s and early 1900’s things were pretty bad in the US for many
people. Working conditions during
the Industrial Revolution were horrible. The
days were long. The pay was low.
The management systems were tyrannical and harsh.
The government ignored the workers pleas for a welfare system.
Yet they set up pension plans for veterans.
Women and blacks still had few rights.
The situations have changed but the issues have not.
Capitalism produces inequality. The
US has the freest economy of all industrialized nations, yet we have the most
economic inequality. How is that
right? Shouldn’t our nation be
able to come up with a way that keeps people from being at one end of the
spectrum or the other? There is no
middle ground.
Chapter
8 dealt with an issue that is very important to me.
Gender inequality is such a large issue in society.
Yet no one wants to recognize it as a problem.
The fact that gender is defined as “socially constructed differences
between males and females”, yet no one in society feels that gender is a big
issue. Gender affects every aspect
of life. It affects who gets jobs,
who gets promotions. It affects who
gets airtime on television. It
affects all levels of life. In high
school, gender affected how well my sports teams played.
The boys teams got most of the money for new uniforms every year, while
the girls teams had the same uniforms for several years.
The boys baseball team had a perfectly groomed ball field, that nobody
was allowed to set foot on if you weren’t on the team.
Meanwhile the fastpitch team had to play on the middle school kick ball
field. I am bringing this up
because guys always think that there is not a problem.
Of course they would think that. The
problem doesn’t affect them. I am
sick of being treated like I am not equal.
The
website I chose is one that incorporates both gender inequality and the
Revolution in one. The website is
called Unheard Voices. It is about
the types of work that women did during the Revolution.
It talks about how some women left their homes and moved to live in
factory boarding houses to work. If
women were so useless, then why were they such an important force during the
Revolution? Without the women, some
of the factories would not have been able to function.
There are links to things like outwork-what women did that wasn’t
considered factory work.
http://www.library.hbs.edu/hc/unheard_voices/collections/work/ Site with large collection of “unheard voices”—primary documents from women, working people, others whose lives are often left out of history.
The first part of the reading we had was on the rights of workers in the United States of America. By the reading I feel that we have come a long way in the rights that workers have today compared to what people had back in the time frame between the Civil War and the First World War. I agree with the start of the chapter about how the industrial revolution started an economic growth that gave workers a problem with their rights that they have in their environment. I feel that the hours and the conditions that the workers worked in where harsh, and long. They worked twelve hours a day for six or seven days a week. That is extreme because today the average person works a forty-hour week. The conditions that the workers went through were harsh and I’m glad that I do not have to go through what they went through at their place of work.
In the second part of the reading in chapter eight it is about what gender has more opportunities in life. I feel that this topic on the opportunities for men in women are not equal because men have more rights than women do in our society. There is a lot of this that men can only do but there are also a lot of things that women can do that men can’t. In a way it is kind of close to the equalization of each of them but males do have a better opportunity to advance in life.
The web site that I found was on the first comprehensive cultural history of North America's largest and most inclusive labor organization of the nineteenth century. It was the only nineteenth-century labor organization to make an effort to organize African Americans, women, and unskilled workers on an equal basis with white craftsmen.
http://www.takver.com/history/secsoc02.htm
It is really hard to imagine that working conditions were ever as bad as they were. Today so much emphasis is placed on safety and equality that it shows just how much difference a hundred years makes. The fact that children were used as cheap labor is not new information. It's just that today we could never imagine anyone, especially children, in those working conditions. I think that many people don't realize how poorly we used to treat child labor when they are criticizing the working conditions of other countries. Also the fact that children were not paid more sticks out to me. They were called an "asset" and any asset to a company today is going to make more than the other employees. Since they were children they were just used and then replaced as needed.
This quote in the book stuck to me. "Anyone stuck permanently in a wage earning position, lacking property and security for old age, was not a free person." I think that quote can still be applied in some cases today. Replace the word property with education and many people today still are not entirely free. They all have the same rights, but the level of education impacts one's job, that impacts how much one earns, and that influences the way one's life is lived. Those who lack adequate education get the joy of working the jobs no one ever dreams of working. Also, they will likely work until they are older than those who are well educated, which makes them more of a slave to their wage earning position.
My website, http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/jones/MotherJones.html, is one of many websites about Mary Harris Jones. It gives a little more information than a few of the other sites I came across. This site asks and tries to answer the question Who Was "Mother Jones?" It gives some background information about her, like when she may have came to the states and when she was arrested, and describes her as a union organizer and other things. It tells briefly about some of her accomplishment and provides links to other sites that do the same.
Here
is my website dealing with the reading for Jan 24, 2002:
After
reading chapter 7 on capitalism and workers in the industrial
Chapter
7 contains a lot of shocking information in it, however, I was not
I
find it interesting how all of these factors, combined with others,
mold
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