From Ayn Rand's The Jungle: Is It Hard To Work?

It also mentions the problem of child laborers working so that their families wouldn’t starve. The job market was so unstable that parents were forced to send their kids to work for some semblance of job security. John Spargo’s “The Bitter Cry of the

The Jungle is a book about a young couple and several relatives that immigrated to Chicago from Lithuania in search for a better life. The young couple, Jurgis Rudkus and Ona Lukoszaite, hold their wedding in a bar in an area of Chicago known as Packingtown. Packingtown is the center of Lithuanian immigration and of Chicago’s meatpacking industry. It is a hard, dangerous, and filthy place where it is very difficult to find a job. Jurgis and Ona discover, at their reception, that they are more than one hundred dollars in debt with the saloonkeeper.

BEING PROGRAMMED TO BELIEVE THAT BUSINESS IS BAD: Have you been programmed to believe that business is bad, that money is evil? It's been my observation that there are two camps of people who espouse these views: 1. People who haven't been successful in their careers. These people are like the fox who couldn't reach the grapes.

Businessmen and factory owners could hire children because they could pay them less than women, which women got paid even less than men. On average, the children would be paid about a dime for a ten to fifteen hour long day. These children were working with heavy, steel machines, making their jobs so dangerous that they would lose fingers, toes, limbs, or even their lives. Also, little education is seen “In the urban tenement picture from Encarta Online Encyclopedia, where the children are not at school. This could mean it is a weekend, but the ration is slim.

Child labor was another problem presented at this time. At the rate they were going back in 1900, 26% of boys between ten and fifteen were already working, and for girls it was 10% (Background Essay). Child labor was increasing as fast as the children working were dying. An example of this tragic scenario was Dennis McKee, a 15-year-old boy who was smothered to death by coal (Document B). This boy had a family, and that family had to deal with the loss of their son, all to the fault of an industry that thought to use young, able-bodied boys for their work was a fantastic idea.

In the midst of all of this he finds a balance by focusing on what really matters. At the same time this keeps him focused on his main goal which is education. Education will be his family's way out of poverty. Through seeing his younger brother that is unemployed and will be having a child soon he looks beyond this and is genuinely proud of where he comes from. He realizes how strong his family is when he seems them fighting through poverty and making things.

About one hundred thousand workers from six hundred different mills were on strike there. The strikers wanted their work cut from sixty to fifty-five hours. About a sixth of the strikers were children under sixteen.” ( 5, Josephson). As a result, she gathered a large group of mill children and their parents, shaming the mill owners of their actions.

“those who are dependent on daily labor for support.” (Johnson, 4) Children who worked on the mill would work 12 hours or more a day with only approximately 20

Throughout the book, Jurgis had to constantly switch jobs because of accidents that laid him off work. No jobs was available to Jurgis except the fertilizer mill. The job at the fertilizer is the worse of it can be, Jurgis describes “...the phosphates soaked in through every pore of jurgis’s skin and in five minutes he had a headache, and in fifteen was almost dazed. the blood was pounding in his brain like an engine’s throbbing ……”(108). The fertilizer mill Jurgis is working at is extremely unsafe.

The Jungle written by Upton Sinclair was an expose on the life of those who lived in Packingtown, Chicago. Packingtown was where most of the people who was looking for work lived, it was a very crowded city. Job openings were scarce and most of the jobs were very unsafe. Most of the people in this part of town were poor, so they did not really have much doubts of food,. The Jungle exposed the horrific work conditions, the poor food quality, and the deceitfulness of the business owners.

Without opportunities, no one can survive. The cotton system crippled Lalee’s family and the community at large. It left them impaired, oppressed, and helpless. They were oppressed to the point that even after they were freed; they were still slaves mentally and economically. A large group of the people in the community did not move pass “picking cotton”.

The Jungle is a story that revolves around the protagonist Jurgis Rudkus and his family, the Lithuanian immigrant who came to America to lead a better life and worked at meatpacking plants of early 20th century Chicago. The story showcases the hardship that they underwent due to the harsh and bad working condition, poverty, starvation and being cheated by unjust people agents, eventually losing all their money. The Jungle provides us ways to look at the unfettered capitalism that prevailed in the early 20th century. This book also exposes the corruption, inequality, unjustness, sickness and slavery that existed in the society.

He found and did everything possible to provide for himself and his family in hard times. Jurgis took on the lowliest jobs in Packingtown that required the most work with little pay. While doing backbreaking work twenty-four

Throughout the book, money was the largest issue that affected the family and their living. The external conflict caused the family to always be in debt. Debt caused the family to move around a lot in order to be in search of other opportunities. Without debt, the family would be relived and well nourished with food and a healthy environment all the time. The family would not only become healthier physically but also mentally.

“To make ends meet, women and children who had formerly stayed close to home, cooking and mending and tending the family’s chickens and garden, now had to join the field gangs who worked under the watchful eye of an overseer” (197). In result, the culture of the people of the rural area changed. They weren't living the same lives as before, they were forced into working harder for less pay. They weren't used to working for someone else but themselves. Therefore, working under