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John Upton Sinclair's The Jungle

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The Jungle is one of the best-known pieces of the muckraker movement.The novel is responsible for bringing the working and sanitary conditions of Chicago's slaughterhouses to light.The jungle a brilliant story that bring to light a lot of the trues people didn't consider.It show that the working conditions for the immigrants and their living condition to ;as well as the condition of the food the people are eating. Americans were horrified to learn about the terrible conditions which their meat products were packed and were disgusted that rotten and diseased meat was sold without consideration for public health. They were more horrified to learn that the labels listing the ingredients in meat products were full of lies. The meat containing …show more content…

Sinclair explains how the immigrants had to work in unsafe, unsanitary conditions. " let a man so much as scrape his finger pushing a truck in the pickle rooms, and he might have a sore that would put him out of the world; all the joints in his fingers might be eaten by the acid, one by one. Of the butchers and floorsmen, the beef boners and trimmers, and all those who used knives, you could scarcely find a person who had the use of his thumb; time and time again the base of it had been slashed, till it was a mere lump of flesh". He goes on to describe the diseases that each of the different jobs. Meat packing plants employed children to do even the most dangerous. Kid at the age of 14 could work but the restriction was upheld ,so kid at the age of 8 worked too. On top of that Chemicals were used in just about every part of the process ,and the worker did not wear protective gear nor glove. The factories would get really hot, which meant the place reeked of bad meat and sweating workers because the factories had no ventilation. Workers were required to clock in for six days a week, ten hours per day. Most of workers only received a few cents per hour for their work. If you were to convert it to today’s amount it would be about 1.50 $. In those time getting hurt on the job didn't mean any extra money. It just meant that you could lose your job or worse. Real estate agents would raise rates so that they can kick out families whose husbands or wives has been injured on the job. Women worker that were disprite were used as play thing for the boss’s of the

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