American industrial workers were subject to many injustices during the late eighteen hundreds. Since industrialization was fairly new to America, things weren’t running as they should in an industrialized economy. The government had chosen a laissez-faire form of dealing with business so things like immigration and labor unions are what mainly affected American Industrial Workers. Immigration brought unskilled, cheap labor to the U.S. which big businesses took advantage of immediately. Immigrant groups like the Chinese and Mexicans were know to work harder for less so when a company had the choice to either hire a Chinese immigrant or an American citizen they would most likely pick the immigrant. Immigrants were also seen to have lesser cares and responsibilities than white Americans which made them feel better when they put immigrant workers deeper in the mines or gave them the job of detonator when building a tunnel. Immigrants weren’t such a bad thing for the American Industrial Worker either. If immigrants were able to do all of the dangerous jobs and menial jobs for lesser pay, that gives the American worker the opportunity as working as management and gaining a higher wage. An …show more content…
Labor Unions were organizations of industrial workers that fought for better working conditions and better pay. The first national labor union was the Knights of Labor led by Uriah S. Stephens and they accepted all kinds of workers who “toiled” for their living. At first the union sounded like a good way to finally be heard by employers and get good feedback, but they were unable to keep organized, much like the Plains Indians in the west, and when they finally went on strike against Gould railroads which dissolved the strike almost immediately. The Knights of Labor got a bad reputation after that and after losing over two-thirds of their original support they disappeared after a few more