Labor in the Gilded Age
By the late nineteenth century the wage-labor relationship between employers and workers expanded and the United States can be said to have become a fully industrialized nation. From the 1870s until the beginning of the Second World War, a shift occurred in the organization of work and the structure of labor markets with more jobs reduced to common, semi-skilled labor and control of the labor process concentrated among foreman and their employers. The Gilded Age, representing the beginning of this period, also saw the growth of middle-class professions like engineers and managers. At the same time, capital and production became increasingly concentrated.
The process of transition to the discipline of the industrial order occurred in numerous craft production settings throughout the nineteenth and into the twentieth century. Through the principles of scientific management nineteenth-century elites used spatial organization to reinforce their positions of power and authority in the emergence of industrial capitalism.
This rapid industrialization was marked by shifts in industry and industrial practices. Around the turn of the century, science and efficiency, such as extolled by Frederick Taylor, led the drive for order and control in the workplace. Taylor was a champion of the scientific management of work, whereby scientific observations and methods were applied to the work process and labor relations. Mechanization and centralization continued into the twentieth century with technological innovation further aiding the expansion of the unskilled labor force. From the 1920s onward, qualitative differences in the organization of work and labor markets were produced by political-economic forces.
The transition to more industrialized systems of production, commerce, resource extraction, commodity distribution, and agricultural production over time increased the magnitude by which the environment is used and altered, and in turn, impacts people. Industry can be understood to include a total system that includes raw materials, tools, operational sequences and skills, social and cultural knowledge, work coordination, and the historical context within which these parts and their interactions occur. Industrial processes produce entire landscapes or networks of landscapes that evolve out of the interactions of laborers and their families, labor processes, machines, and natural environments.
Industrialization was accompanied by many technological changes. The invention and implementation of new labor technologies, such as the institution of piecework, changed the way in which laborers worked and perceived their work. Workers at most manufacturing operations toiled at an increased speed and produced a greater quantity of items with the aid of new machinery and labor practices such as the assembly line. These workers were less attached to their products and the production process than earlier workers were during the artisan production period.
New technology also impacted workers' health conditions. Changing production and processing methods often forced workers to labor in unhealthy conditions and environments for a significant period of time. For example, the increase in harmful fumes released during production and changes in air quality and temperature caused an increase of bronchial infections and diseases among miners, furnace and forge operators, and brewery workers. The faster speed of machinery, such as weaving and spinning devises, also threatened physical harm to workers in mills and factories.
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