Industrialization and the Workplace by Gil Smit

Coal Miners

gsmit1 — 2016-01-19 22:17:22 UTC

Miners

gsmit1 — 2016-01-19 22:17:40 UTC

Building the Transcontinental Railroad

gsmit1 — 2016-01-19 22:23:47 UTC

Total snowfall reached 40 ft and hundreds of men buried in avalanche, frozen still clutching shovels or picks .

Textile Factory

gsmit1 — 2016-01-19 22:24:41 UTC

What things do you notice about this factory?

Drawing Steel from Open Furnaces.

gsmit1 — 2016-01-19 22:24:55 UTC

Inside the Steel Industry

gsmit1 — 2016-01-19 22:26:00 UTC

Triangle Shirtwaist Factory

gsmit1 — 2016-01-19 22:29:45 UTC

The fire that began at 4:30 pm 100 years ago today started on the 8th floor and spread quickly upwards, igniting machine oil and flammable piles of cotton scraps and shirtwaists on the factory floor. The workers rushed to escape but found the main stairs chained shut (the bosses didn’t want them taking breaks or stealing shirts and routinely searched them before they could leave the building.) While some made it out via the single freight elevator, others were pushed to their deaths in the elevator shaft. The flimsy fire escape came unmoored from the building in the heat, killing many more.

Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle"

gsmit1 — 2016-01-19 22:44:08 UTC

“It was only when the whole ham was spoiled that it came into the department of Elzbieta[character in story]. Cut up by the two-thousand-revolutions-a-minute flyers, and mixed with half a ton of other meat, no odor that ever was in a ham could make any difference. There was never the least attention paid to what was cut up for 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 [chemical], 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.”

Shrimp and Oyster worker

gsmit1 — 2016-01-19 22:50:02 UTC

Workers in a meat packing plant

gsmit1 — 2016-01-19 22:50:54 UTC

Newberry Mills

gsmit1 — 2016-01-19 22:53:27 UTC

Noon hour. All are employees. The unguarded wheel and belt at the left are sinister neighbors for little girls' arms, skirts and braids. There was no factory inspection in South Carolina

Lewis Hines: "Child Labor" series

gsmit1 — 2016-01-19 23:00:34 UTC

gsmit1 — 2016-01-19 23:16:10 UTC

Workers in a meat packing plant

gsmit1 — 2016-01-19 23:18:10 UTC