all right this is open stocks u.s history chapter 18 section 3 building industrial america on the back of labor so this time period 1870 to 1900 is referred to as the gilded age and for something to be gilded means that it's kind of like gold plated on the surface it looks very valuable and rich and of course you know 18.2 we talked about how some of the richest people of all time made their fortunes in the gilded age in the united states carnegie rockefeller morgan et cetera et etc this time we're going to look more underneath the surface and the reason why this period was called the gilded age was because from the outside and on the surface everything looked golden but when you scratched it and looked at you know kind of american society a little bit closer you realize that things weren't all golden golden and that was because a lot of this industrial production was built off the backs of specifically a working class who worked mostly in factories you know we're talking about miners railroad workers textile workers uh you know the people who made these things happen whereas your carnegies your rockefellers they actually didn't do any of the work themselves so in terms of what's going on in this particular period we mentioned urbanization this is the populations moving to the cities and one of the reasons for that was because of the jobs that were there factories were the primary production facilities so they were all in certain areas so much so that you know during the course of the gilded age different industries were pretty much dominant in different cities chicago was the the meat industry or animal products new york was associated with things like uh textiles cloth pittsburgh steel etc etc so if you wanted to get a job you had to go to the factories you had to go to the cities where the factories were located uh in the factories workers were paid wages typically very low about as low as you could imagine 10 hour work day six days a week so long work days the factories were very very very dangerous you could risk either injury or even death in many cases there was really no protection for worker safety right no protections for safety and very very repetitive tasks which had a certain psychological effect on people right your job in a factory might be to just pull a lever or push a button for 10 hours a day six days a week so it was very mind-numbing in terms of these repetitive tasks you know it more or less had made people themselves just know nothing more than than the actual machine and a lot of this was done in the name of profit right that you don't uh you require long days you pay low wages you don't care for worker safety because at the end of the day it's all about money and you know safety equipment might cost money you don't want to pay your workers more because that might cost money and uh you know profits were pretty much prioritized over human well-being uh businesses went so far as to establish specific sciences scientific management was essentially the practice of getting the most efficiency and profitability out of the factory and so your work you know the work schedule was really dictated by this what was the most efficient what was the most profitable and as a consequence of you know these or this desire for profit it also meant that you know every aspect of u.s society was employed including women and children especially child labor increased dramatically in this period uh one of the reasons was because women and children could be paid less paid less right that was one of the reasons so uh it was very difficult right for workers and really no matter what industry you were in here's a photo of not to mention the respiratory problems dark dingy uh you know electric lighting and electricity made it so that factories could run 24 hours a day seven days a week so there really was no end to the uh to the work day and so workers began to organize and protest against these very harsh conditions unions were formed unions are organizations of workers uh and usually they would try and improve working conditions whether that was safer conditions or more pay or you know whatever it ended up being uh businesses or one of the tactics that workers could could do is to go on strike and to go on strike is a refusal to work and so as long as workers aren't working the business is losing money and you know it becomes somewhat of a standoff the the businesses might hire strike breakers strike breakers are workers hired really to counter a strike right so a bunch of workers decide they're going to go on strike because they want more money well you could just hire somebody else and that somebody else would be strike breakers so that was a common tactic that was used by business and so business and labor could go back and forth on these particular issues however workers struggled with unity and there was a lot of different reasons as to why that is race was one the inability for white and black workers to work together ethnicity language and culture this is a period where there is a lot of immigration specifically what we call new immigrants and new immigrants tend to be from parts of europe that you didn't historically have in the united states so many catholics uh many people from russia and italy uh you know this is a time period where 80 of the population of new york is foreign born so to get a lot of different people from different cultural backgrounds different ethnic backgrounds who speak different languages and have different religious groups um it was just that proved the problem for the working class to come together because essentially there's a strength in numbers so um you know the the the workers movement in the united states never as strong as it could potentially be for this particular reason but another problem that uh you know workers unions weren't as influential or powerful was because there's still a widespread belief in individual work ethic and that was the idea that you could go from rags to riches with hard work but you didn't need organizations you didn't need strikes you didn't need protests etc etc some of these organizations in particular now there were many unions and many organizations some of them became infamous the mollie maguires were one of these workers organizations that used more extreme tactics such as kidnaps and murder so more extreme slash violent tactics to improve their conditions on the on the quote-unquote day of the rope a number of molly mcguires were executed for their role in the kidnappings and murders they committed in the name of trying to get improved worker working conditions the great railroad strike of 1877 was perhaps one of the largest and most widespread strikes during the gilded age it was one of the very rare um strikes in the gilded age or really in american history that had a wide geographic reach and that was because you saw railroad workers in pennsylvania railroad workers in indiana railroad workers in maryland were all kind of on the same page and they all went on strike at the same time in pittsburgh in particular it turned violent you had over 40 people that were killed in pittsburgh but it eventually came to an end when the federal government intervened in that strike and it was eventually put down and you know order was restored and those workers you know went back but not after a lot of violence and damage that was created so these you know these efforts by workers to come together and organize could result in violence and in some cases did take the intervention of the federal government which is again washington dc in order to uh you know to to restore order essentially now workers continue to struggle while violence you know kidnappings and murders were used they weren't the most often or most common forms of resistance instead you had organizations that made various demands so one of the very earliest ones the national labor union put forward the idea of the eight hour work day this was in the 1850s it was much earlier before the civil war uh the panic of 1873 in the series of bank failures led to an economic depression and usually when faced with depression many businesses look to cut wages and lay off workers you know those who are affected by these panics the most or in some cases the workers themselves who you know usually see this or usually experience this as you know losing their job essentially and so in response to that you had some of the most influential and important workers unions formed during the gilded age the first one was the knights of labor which is described as one big union pretty much they said anyone can join and the knights of labor had maybe more radical solutions more radical solutions and the idea of being one big union meant that immigrants could join white black women men skilled workers unskilled workers you know kind of one big union for everybody they were popular but they weren't the most popular union during the during the gilded age uh instead the afl became the most popular and one of the ways that workers unions were discredited were with these violent affairs the haymarket affair in particular which took place in chicago and involved a bomb being thrown at the police which killed a number of people and because you had this very chaotic episode in which people who were going on strike these were radical you know unions kind of like the knights of labor because that violent hat violence had broken out it really worked to discredit a lot of these labor unions and in the aftermath of the haymarket affair a lot of these unions were targeted of what they believed to be you know sort of these uh violent tactics but the afl was much more popular than the knights of labor in the long run its leader samuel gompers so gumpers is the leader of the afl as opposed to more radical solutions the afl wanted solutions that had a direct impact you know they didn't have you know their goals were very much small sort of small steps at a time rather than allowing anybody to join the fail was exclusionary they only included whites they only included men and they only included skilled workers so by targeting a smaller portion of the population and targeting specific goals like those that had a direct impact pay safety etc etc membership of the afl reached at a time 4 million people so it was the largest and probably the most powerful labor union or organization of workers in the united states although there were many labor unions in the u.s at the time the knights of labor didn't it it was about maybe almost 1 million members but by the 1880s and 1890s the knights of labor was almost extinct and the afl instead was the more popular form uh in the very late part of the 1890s the workers and workers movement suffered two defeats at two strikes the homestead steel strike in 1892 took place in pennsylvania uh this was carnegie's steel plant and when workers went on strike there carnegie hired henry frick and the pinkerton detectives which were like private security to take the factory over from uh striking workers uh gunshots violence broke out this was another episode of violence that occurred but by the end of what was i believe a five-month strike the workers ended up getting a defeat uh the pullman trike was over train cars so once again this was railroads and because you know the great railroad strike here of 1877 because that really had threatened to create a wide geographic reach the pullman strike in 1894 was especially worrying because what you had were railroad workers all over the country that if they saw a car with the pullman name on it and pullman was the company they were refusing to unload it because they were in solidarity with their workers who were on strike i believe in indiana eugene v devs was the leader of the striking workers but once again like what had happened earlier in 1877 with the intervention of the federal government the same thing happens 20 years later in 1894 grover cleveland the president at the time claimed the strike interfered with the u.s let's scroll down here uh post office right and because some of the train cars had mail on them and there were strikers that were refusing to uh you know unload these cars because of the strike grover cleveland who was the president at the time claimed the strike had interfered with the us post office which is a federal offense and justified then sending in troops to put down strike which is exactly what he did so both uh homestead and pullman both of these were strikes that ultimately led to defeats for the workers movement