Working-Class Life: On the Job

Between the end of the Civil War and the turn of the century, the American workforce underwent a transformation. In 1865, nearly 60% of Americans still lived and worked on farms; by the early 1900s, that number had reversed itself, and only 40% still lived in rural areas, with the remainder living and working in urban and early suburban areas. A significant number of these urban and suburban dwellers earned their wages in factories. Advances in farm machinery allowed for greater crop production with less manual labor, thus leading many Americans to seek job opportunities in the burgeoning factories in the cities. Not surprisingly, this period also saw a decrease in the number of self-employed Americans and an increase in those dependent on a wage system for their living.

Yet factory wages were, for the most part, very low. In 1900, the average factory wage was approximately 20¢ per hour (about $6.75 in 2022), for an annual salary of barely $600 (about $20,200 in 2022). According to some historical estimates, that wage left approximately 20% of the population in industrialized cities at, or below, the poverty level. An average factory work week was ten hours per day, six days per week, although in steel mills the workers put in twelve hours per day, seven days a week. Factory owners had little concern for workers’ safety. According to one of the few available accurate measures, in 1913, nearly 25,000 Americans lost their lives on the job, while another 700,000 workers suffered from injuries that resulted in at least one missed month of work. There were no laws that ensured the physical safety or financial security of workers and due to the booming population, factory owners could swiftly replace any worker who was put out of commission.

Figure 1. This image shows children working in a New York glass factory at midnight. There, as in countless other factories around the country, children worked around the clock in difficult and dangerous conditions.

Another element of hardship for workers was the increasingly dehumanizing nature of their work. They executed repetitive tasks throughout the long hours of their shifts, seldom interacting with coworkers or supervisors. This solitary and repetitive work style was a difficult adjustment for those used to more collaborative and skill-based work, whether on farms or in crafts shops. Managers embraced Fredrick Taylor’s principles of scientific management, also called stop-watch management, where he used stop-watch studies to divide manufacturing tasks into short, repetitive segments. A mechanical engineer by training, Taylor encouraged factory owners to seek efficiency and profitability over any benefits of personal interaction. Owners adopted this model, effectively turning workers into cogs in a well-oiled machine.

Women and Children in Industrial Labor

One result of the new breakdown of work processes was that factory owners were able to hire women and children to perform many of the tasks. From 1870 through 1900, the number of women working outside the home tripled. By the end of this period, five million American women were wage earners, with one-quarter of them working factory jobs. Most were young, under twenty-five, and either immigrants or the daughters of immigrants. Their foray into the working world was not seen as a step toward empowerment or equality, but rather a hardship born of financial necessity. Women’s factory work tended to be in clothing or textile factories, where their appearance was less offensive to men who felt that heavy industry was their arena. Other women in the workforce worked in clerical positions as bookkeepers and secretaries and as sales clerks. Women were consistently paid less than men due to the belief that they should be under the care of their husband or father and therefore did not require a living wage.

Factory owners used the same rationale for the exceedingly low wages they paid to children. Children were small enough to fit easily among the machines, could be hired for simple work for a fraction of an adult man’s pay, and were far less likely than adults to organize or strike. The image below shows children working the night shift in a glass factory. From 1870 through 1900, child labor in factories tripled. Growing concerns among progressive reformers over the safety of women and children in the workplace would eventually result in the development of political lobbying groups like the National Child Labor Committee, which formed in 1904. Several states passed legislative efforts to ensure a safe workplace for children and the lobbying groups pressured Congress to pass protective legislation that might outlaw the hiring of very young children. However, such legislation would not be forthcoming until well into the twentieth century. In the meantime, many working-class immigrants still needed the additional wages that child and women labor produced, regardless of the harsh working conditions.

Working-Class Life at Home

Marriage, Birth, & Mortality Rates

While life at work was incredibly challenging for working-class Americans, life at home could also be difficult. Aside from the crowded tenement buildings and lack of basic sanitation, there were issues with family life, nutrition, medicine, education, childcare, and the general cost of living.

In 1890, the average age of marriage was 22 for women and 26 for men, which might seem fairly normal to modern observers.^[3] However, it is important to remember that the average lifespan of a working-class urban American at this time was quite low and the infant & child mortality rate in those communities was quite high. According to one study based on records of the Death Registration Area (a section of the Census Bureau created in 1900) “white males born in rural areas had a life expectancy at birth in 1901 that was ten years higher than that for white males born in cities. For white females, life expectancy at birth was seven years higher in rural areas than in cities.”^[4]. So while industrial factory workers might have been getting married slightly later in life than previous generations, they also had shorter life spans, poorer health, and more children than wealthier or more rural Americans.

These statistics on life expectancy were also dragged down by the staggeringly high infant mortality rate, which was about 150 out of every 1000 live births in 1890 (for reference, the infant mortality rate in 1990 was 7/1000) and did not include the infant mortality rate for Black Americans, which has historically been much higher than White Americans. While the infant mortality rate was extremely high in urban areas, the birth rate was also very high, given that there was no reliable birth control available. The average number of children per American woman (of child-bearing age) was around 4 for White women and closer to 7 for Black women, which is far lower than the birth rates in the early nineteenth century, most likely due to later marriages. ^[5]

Cost of Living

In 1890, the average daily wage for a worker in an American city was about $2.50.^[6]. If a worker was scheduled six days a week, they would bring home about $15 per week (about $780 per year). The equivalent in 2022 would be an income of about $23,400 per year. These wages were what drove much of the immigration boom during the late nineteenth century because wages in European countries like Great Britain, France, and Belgium averaged around $1.10 per day during this same time period. However, the cost of living was still not sustainable for many American workers, since the prices of housing, food, and other necessities were also high and the quality was low. For example, in 1891 the average American family in Massachusetts spent $148 per year on rent, $385 per year on food, $32 per year on fuel to heat their home or cook, and $100 per year on clothing.^[7] These costs could also be higher or lower depending on where they lived and how many children they had, or whether both of the adults in the family worked (although women’s wages were much lower than men’s).