the jungle
Imagine having to work over twelve hours a day and not be able to support your family. This was a reality for Jurgis Rudkus, the main character of The Jungle. There was always the fear that he might lose his job to someone younger and stronger. Early in the twentieth century there was no such thing as job security. When there was hundreds if not thousands of unemployed men and women eager to take your job, not much complaining was going on. Jurgis had traveled to the United States of America from Lithuania with his wife and their families in hopes of achieving ''The American Dream.'' However, ever since Jurgis's feet touched American soil the reality of reaching that dream faded fast. The story of this immigrant was told in such a way that I could not help but read an extra chapter to find out what happened next. Upton Sinclair's The Jungle uses description to tell the powerful story of the wage slave. Some of The Jungle's power lies within the description of Jurgis, the packing factory and town. Sinclair's use of the shock factor to tell the story of the wage slave with true examples of situations that were going on in the meat industry was especially important in his expose. In the story, Jurgis Rudkus does not spe
His physical appearance was so amazing he was able to get a job without even knowing the language. The bosses were able to pick out Jurgis in less than thirty minutes from a massive crowd of unemployed workers. Some of these unemployed workers had been waiting months for a chance at a job. sausage; there would come all the way back from Europe old sausage that had been rejected, and that was moldy and white-it would be dosed with borax and glycerin, and dumped into the hoppers, and made over again for home consumption. There would be meat that had tumbled out on the floor, in the dirt and sawdust, where the workers had tramped and spit uncounted billions of consumption germs. There would be meat stored in great piles in rooms; and the water from leaky roofs would drip over it, and thousands of rats would race about on it. It was too dark in these storage places to see well, but a man could run his hand over these piles of meat and sweep off handfuls of the dried dung of rats. These rats were nuisances, and the packers would put poisoned bread out for them; they would die, and then rats, bread, and meat would go into the hopper together. (Sinclair 135) In the tank rooms full of steam, and in some of which there were open vats near the level of the floor, their peculiar trouble was that they fell into the vats; and when they were fished out there was never enough of them left to be worth exhibiting, - sometimes they would be overlooked for days, till all but the bones of them had gone out to the world as Durham's Pure Leaf Lard! (Sinclair 99) It was not unusual for the factories to do such things because the benefits far out-weighed the risks. The wages that were given to the employees were very low. ''A new novel which would be intended to set forth the breaking of human hearts by a system which exploits the labor of men and women for profits'' (Bloodworth 47). The profit motivated machine had no interest in the plight of the working man. It did not matter that the workers could not keep their families alive with the salaries they earned. The salaries the workers earned could barely keep that one person sustained. The owners of the factories knew that the jobs out there were very much limited, and even if they slashed the wages in half the workers would return. Times were hard in the early parts of this century and having a job, even with a small salary, gave that person that much more chance of surviving. With no job, starvation and sickness eventually crept up and took the weakest of the unemployed. Employees had to keep to their schedule. '' The Department of Agriculture had publicized the ill effects of additives in meat products'' (Bloodworth 49). This was very disturbing to find out that the meat factories were putting potentially deadly chemicals into the foods of the consumer. she shipped it off to packing town,
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Approximate Word count = 2779
Approximate Pages = 11 (250 words per page double spaced)
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