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Summary Of Scraping By By Seth Rockman

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The text, Scraping By, by Seth Rockman is unique in the fact that the prosperous city of Baltimore in the 1800’s and the wealthy elites that reside in it are more or less exposed. Rockman examines the city from the rock bottom. Historians and textbooks often exclude the main ideas and arguments of this book. Baltimore falsely claimed all who worked hard had the chance to be successful. The actual reality was that the impoverished working-class had a minute opportunity to change hard labor from a career into only a stage in their life; impossible might be a better word to describe their opportunities to thrive and prosper. Baltimore was truly built on the blood and sweat of the unskilled laborers. After Seth Rockman outlines his arguments …show more content…

The rich were able to become richer, whereas the poor could basically only get poorer. This is how Rockman described the unfair market of Baltimore in the 1800’s. As an upper-class employer, the labor market was easy to take advantage of. There was an excess of poor people that were looking for work and would do whatever was necessary to get a job. Both free and unfree laborers worked the same jobs alongside each other. This increased the number of individuals looking for a job and allowed for the wages to be lowered. As a result, profit was maximized for the employer. The use of both free and unfree labor “ensured that labor and those performing it would be understood interchangeably as commodities, while leaving all working people increasingly exposed to the vagaries of the market” (Rockman 233). This supports Rockman’s argument about how the upper-class utilized the labor pool as a commodity to get richer. Employers were able to hire and fire workers as they pleased because they could easily replace them with someone else who was willing to do the same work for possibly lower wages. To add to labor being a commodity, when cotton became more popular in the South, slave-owners began to do whatever they could to keep their slaves so they could sell them for much more than they bought them for. During this time, Rockman described how free slaves were in much danger to be captured and sold away. The ruthlessness Rockman describes of the elite is the reason they were able to prosper and why the working-class could

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