Towards the beginning of the 20th century an amazing thing happened which boosted our economy yet caused much chaos throughout America, The Industrial Revolution. This revolution was started by many people and new inventions which helped the business world and economy greatly, but for every good aspect of the revolution, there were two bad aspects. I am going to talk about what some of these aspects were and the people who tried to help change these conditions and problems many faced during the industrial era.
Workers of the early 1900's faced many problems in their everyday lives outside of work. Luckily they didn't have long to worry about these problems because work hours consisted of 14 hour or more shifts for wages that barely covered their house payments. This was just for the men. Women who were working at the same time received very little pay compared to men for the same jobs and efforts. Children were forced out of school to work and help support their families as well; for a fraction of an adult's pay, the children were exposed to the same conditions. The money wasn't the only bad aspect of the long toiling hours in machine rooms, coal mines, or glass factories. Many business entrepreneurs and industrial powers (monopolists like Andrew Carnegie and Rockefeller) tried to cut costs by not providing proper safety equipment for their workers. Children working in glass factories or coal mines were often killed by the age of 12 by disease or work-caused injuries.
Although working conditions were terrible, there were people trying to fix them. Some of these people began forming guilds for skilled workers to demand more pay and unions where all workers from a specific job type could band together and demand higher wages or shorter hours and such. The largest of these beginning labor unions was the NLU or National Labor Union. The NLU was founded by an ironworker names William H.