ipl-logo

Analysis Of The Plight Of Immigrants In Upton Sinclair's The Jungle

1540 Words7 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: The Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 Essay

Upton Sinclair developed his thoughts on the plight of immigrants in Chicago extremely well throughout his novel, The Jungle. Through the portrayal of the Lithuanian family's struggles and hardships, Sinclairs tells the truths of the corruption and immigrant experience in Chicago in the early 1900s. The gruesome details of the meat packaging industry show how truly unjust and disturbing the working conditions were during these times. Upton goes on to depict the unfair living conditions of the Lithuanian immigrants as well as the immigrants before and after their time in Packington. After Sinclair released the serial form of his novel in a Socialist newspaper in 1905, the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 was soon to follow. This act prevented the manufacture, sale, or transportation of adulterated or misbranded or poisonous or deleterious …show more content…

If the case is where the raw materials are from that native area and would benefit the natives from the creation of jobs, then yes this may be ethical. However, corruption is still a factor that must be taken into consideration. The employees working to create these products must be treated fairly with the appropriate wages they deserve. Sweatshops are a good example of how outsourcing can go wrong. The workers are placed into cruel work conditions and expected to work for next to nothing. This is just as unethical as the meat production industry was is in the early 1900s. The only solution I see fit to correct this bad business is to enforce labor laws. If these foreign countries were to enforce labor laws, there may be improvement in the workplace. The workers could finally earn the wages they deserve and the environment best that may be provided. A worker who devotes their life to that one job and still cannot provide for themselves for daily needs is a tragedy. This tragedy is in much need of reform and

Show More
Related
1346 Words | 6 Pages

Seth Ruiz Tracy Brady HIST151 October 19, 2015 Paper 1 Upton Sinclair’s Living and Dying in Packingtown, Chicago is a reading of a portion of his novel, The Jungle. In The Jungle, Upton Sinclair writes about a man named Jurgis Rudkus who is an immigrant from Lithuania looking for a job in Packingtown. After the death of one of his wife’s sons, Kristoforas, Jurgis applied to work for a fertilizer plant which was considered the lowest of the low places to work. He got the job and soon came to realize how terrible it was to work at the fertilizer plant. Upton Sinclair wrote about what the plant was like in Jurgis’s and the townspeople’s mind, “All this while he was seeking for work, there was a dark shadow hanging over Jurgis; as if a savage

Read More
709 Words | 3 Pages

Upton Sinclair reflects the reality of the people during the late 1800’s in his novel The Jungle. In his novel, Sinclair wants to promote Socialism by showing how people lived in the meatpacking plant and under a corrupt government. The inhuman working conditions, combined with the lack of hygiene and a corrupt government, made trying to make a living a total hardships for the low class and the immigrants. The Jungle takes place in Packingtown, Chicago, where the employees work under horrible conditions.

Read More
637 Words | 3 Pages

The Jungle, written by Upton Sinclair, is about a Lithuanian family that travels to Chicago in pursuit of the American Dream. When writing this novel, Sinclair sought to build support for the Socialist Party and the working class. In preparation for writing The Jungle, Sinclair spent weeks in Chicago’s meat packing plants to study the lives of its stockyard workers. When the novel was first published, readers were more concerned with the health standards and conditions in which the meat was processed rather than the socialist message that Sinclair intended. The Jungle is also often associated with the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act both in 1906, the year the novel was published (Source A).

Read More
873 Words | 4 Pages

Labor Practice Paper Angelia Henry PHL/320 May 2, 2016 Bridget Peaco Labor Practice Paper Merriam-Webster online defines a sweatshop as a shop or factory where employees work long at a low wage that is under poor and unhealthy conditions (Merriam-Webster On-line Dictionary, 2016). Sweatshops are factories that violate two or more labor laws to include wages, benefits, child labor or even working hours (Ember, 2014-2015). Companies will attempt to use sweatshop labor to lessen the cost to meet the demands of customers. When we think of sweatshop, we always want to look at third world countries and never in our own backyard. In 2012, the company Forever 21 was sued by the US Department of Labor for ignoring a subpoena requesting the information on how much it pays its workers just to make clothes (Lo,

Read More
427 Words | 2 Pages

The Unfair Treatment of Immigrants in The Jungle by Upton Sinclair Imagine going somewhere new, far away and ending up in a bad situation with no way out. That’s how Jurgis and his family felt when they left their home country of Lithuania to come to America to pursue their dreams of wealth. Their world was quickly turned upside down when they realized that the deck was stacked against them in Chicago’s unfair system, which was designed to leave them trapped. The Jungle by Upton Sinclair will bring you into the world of manipulation and poverty in Chicago during the 1900s.

Read More
921 Words | 4 Pages

As industrial strength grew and technology advanced, labor in America changed. Machines replaced many of workers’ old duties and some skilled laborers who had been previously valued became easily replaced. Immigrants who were willing to work under poorer conditions flooded into the United States, big businesses grew, and political machines whose interests were not that of the people occupied the government. Laborers worked ten hour shifts, six-day workweeks, and started work as children. In The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair, he describes the painful and vigorous work in the meat-packing industry, saying, “The hands of these men would be criss-crossed with cuts, until you could no longer pretend to count them...

Read More
1442 Words | 6 Pages

Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle” tells the story of Jurgis Rudkus and his immigrant family. In his homeland of Lithuania, Jurgis meets his love, Ona. However, he is denied marriage to her Sometime later, Jurgis tries again to seek her hand, but fins out Ona’s father has died and her family is in debt. Along with his father, Antanas, and Ona’s family: Teta Elzbieta, Marija, Jonas, and six children, Jurgis moves to America to start a new life. They arrive in New York, and soon travel to Chicago.

Read More
1060 Words | 5 Pages

However, readers at the time were not very concerned about the petty immigrants living on the lower rung of society. Rather, they cared about what affected them most: the condition of the meat they were eating-- and had been eating-- for years, that were produced by some of the very factories mentioned in Sinclair’s novel. For the majority of The Jungle’s readers, the fact that poor immigrants were being exploited was not bothersome. Instead, the fact that the food that readers had been eating for years contained the power to kill them seemed shocking, pushing the nation into a worried frenzy. Readers were disgusted by the facts they were reading, catalyzing the creation of administrations like the FDA.

Read More
1899 Words | 8 Pages

Upton Sinclair portrays the economic tension in the United States during the late 19th and early 20th centuries through his novel “The Jungle”. He used the story of a Lithuanian immigrant, Jurgis Rudkus, to show the harsh situation that immigrants had to face in the United States, the unsanitary and unsafe working conditions in the meatpacking plants, as well as the tension between the capitalism and socialism in the United States during the early 1900s. In the late 19th century and early 20th centuries, there were massive immigrants move into the United States, and most of them were from Europe. The protagonist, Jurgis Rudkus, like many other immigrants, have the “America Dream” which they believe America is heaven to them, where they can

Read More
2149 Words | 9 Pages

A Time for Struggle and Change Upton Sinclair’s book, The Jungle, depicts the struggles of Lithuanian immigrants as they worked and lived in Chicago’s Packingtown at the beginning of the Twentieth Century. The United States experienced an enormous social and political transformation; furthermore, the economy, factories, and transportation industry grew faster than anyone had ever seen. Immigrants and migrants were attracted to city life for its promise of employment and their chance at the American Dream. The poor working class had little to no rights, and they grappled with unfair business practices, unsafe working conditions, racism, Social Darwinism, class segregation, xenophobia, political corruption, strikes, starvation, poor housing,

Read More
1445 Words | 6 Pages

Families that are poor or have a low income are more likely to commit crimes for the purpose of their own needs to survive. “It is a fact that neighborhoods where the poor are concentrated are more prone to high crime rates, and poor residents are the most common victims of crimes” (1). The best explanation for this is that poorer people have the same needs as a regular middle-class citizen. The poor citizens need certain things to help him or her live a healthy life, such as healthcare, food stamps, and more employment options. One may argue that healthcare is too expensive and that food stamps have been taken away from many people.

Read More
1411 Words | 6 Pages

In addition, Upton Sinclair published, The Jungle (1906), in attempt to unveil the appalling exploitation of (immigrants) workers in the meat packing industry, which contributed greatly to the socialist movement, also led to the Meat Inspection Act and Pure Food and Drug Act passed in 1906 (The American Yawp, Ch.20-2). Jacob Riis and Upton Sinclair exposed of the ghastly surroundings and situations strengthened the support for the progressivism evolution. Another reason for the advancement of progressive era is faith/religion, the emerged of the social gospel. The social gospel “…emphasized the need for Christians to be concerned

Read More
803 Words | 4 Pages

What is Foxconn’s unethical issue? In mid 2010, Foxconn Technology Group (Foxconn) was facing a crisis of having its workers held protests and riots against the company in Shenzhen, China. Being the world’s largest contract electronics manufacturer (Pun, 2010), the company exploited its migrant workers by providing them with exceptionally low pay and allowing unacceptable number of overtime working hours in the manufacturing site. Such method of raising workers’ efficiency is unethical in the eyes of many.

Read More
1202 Words | 5 Pages

During the time period of the 1900’s, the meat packaging industry in Chicago, as Sinclair mentions in his novel, The Jungle, was a very unsanitary and extremely dangerous workplace that lacked much more than just a few safety precautions. Simple things, such as enforcing hand washing or workers’ rights were unheard of in the working environment. It is clear that Upton Sinclair was trying to expose the worker’s horrendous labor conditions in order to improve their situation, along with the introduction of socialism. Upton Sinclair, in his novel, talks about how a Lithuanian immigrant by the name of Jurgis Rudkus, and his family, travel to Chicago trying to make ends meet. However, they soon realize Chicago was not the place for that.

Read More
1269 Words | 6 Pages

And, unfortunately, it’s more prevalent in America than many may believe. When defining what exactly a sweatshop is and what it consists of, there are many forms that it has taken over the many decades of America’s existence. The basic definition of a sweatshop is a factory in which its employees, many being children, are exploited; working long hours in extreme cases of hazardous and unhealthful conditions for little pay. Despite the fact this is a

Read More

More about Analysis Of The Plight Of Immigrants In Upton Sinclair's The Jungle

Related Topics

Open Document