The American Bourgeoisie

At the turn of the nineteenth century many problems faced the American bourgeoisie. The cause of many of these problems was the laissez faire economic policy of the Unites States during this time, this meant that Business owners operated without any restriction from the government. Since they had no restrictions business owners made decisions based completely on what would be cheapest and make them the most money. As a result of this unethical situations developed in the workplace. These situations included child labor, unsafe working conditions and unclean food production. After a period of time the American bourgeoisie refused to live with these conditions and began an effort to reform them. Reform took place in the shape of workers unions,

Both mothers and fathers had to work full time to earn a decent pay for their families since there was such low wages. Not only were these adults suffering through extreme work conditions but their children were subjugated to this treatment also. Since the government had a hands off policy, entrepreneurs were not concerned with the children having to work long hours in overcrowded factories. The tycoon of these business were just pleased with the low wages yet hard work from these children. In many situations, children suffered not only mentally from this extreme labor, but physically being that their growth was delayed. Even though people thought it was quixotic that child labor would be gone, citizens still lobbied for child labor to be abolished after learning about the deleterious work conditions. In the late 1890’s, people innovated the Child Labor Law, which in 1916 was established and called the Keating- Owen Act. This act prevented children under the age of fourteen from being able to

Thanks to progressives who were acumen and rebelled against these corrupt policies legislation was created that prohibited these environments from emerging again. Today we can look back on the mistakes made in history and know that while unrestricted economy may stimulate growth that morales and values for human life cannot simply be ignored because they are not “profitable”. Laissez faire economic policy created an unrestricted environment in which entrepreneurs took advantage of the bourgeoisie until the bourgeoisie could not take it anymore and rose up creating legislation in the form of factory safety standards, child labor laws and cleaner food