Thomas White Industrialization

Industrialization was a transformative component that influenced the boom of the economy in the United States’ west. Furthermore, western industrialization provided those with opportunity through various forms of labor such as mining and/or railroad work. Although these western occupations instilled notions of becoming an autonomous and opulent worker that were believed to be different from the east’s work businesses, this usually was not the case. In a majority of these industries, individuals were contracted under a wealthy owner where they endured dangerous working conditions, received poor treatment, and obtained extreme minimal wages. Additionally, there were other downsides workers underwent too such as animosity between and amid other

Thomas White’s essay discusses the complexity of railroad laboring in the Great Northwest during the early 1900s. Expanding, White’s essay additionally highlights the laborers’ racial competition between and amongst one another as well as railroad corporations generating disputes as a manipulation tactic for stopping unionization. As for the argument, White’s thesis discusses segments of unskilled and skilled workers’ realities and their economic impact pre-World War I of laboring on the railroad through viewpoints of race, ethnicity, and assembly for a workers union. As for Gunther Peck’s essay, Peck’s focus is towards the collaboration, yet resentment among diversities of immigrant mine workers at Utah Copper Company in Bingham, Utah in late 1890s to the early 1900s. Peck also explains how radicalism projected the fight for unionization in mining and the desire to rid of padrone hiring. In his thesis, Peck discusses the complexities of the immigrants versus the established American locals’ relationship and establishes the context of radicalism through relations towards the 1912

Before the 1912 strike, Greek immigrants had ideas of unionization when in 1908, about more than 300 Greeks left their mining job at UCC due to the implemented pay cuts to their wage which the company, a week later, restored the wage (Peck). The root of the 1912 strike originated previously in 1911 when Crete Greek immigrants wished to remove their shady padrone, Leonidas Skliris, and abolish the padrone hiring system. To begin, fifty Greek laborers wrote a letter to William Spry, the governor of Utah, detailing this matter writing that Skliris was an oppressive padrone who violated their rights. Spry did not reply, which in return more than 500 laborers wrote a subsequent letter addressed to Spry about this matter demanding that Skiliris be restraint and have the freedom to obtain their goods anywhere but Skiliris’ market