Low Wages The Ultimate Problem In The Gilded Age

Low Wages the Ultimate Problem in the Gilded Age
The Jungle was a sad, depressing and disgusting representation of the Gilded Age industrial labor. Sinclair aimed at the public’s heart and by accident hit its stomach. Laborers worked hard hours and never saw their families, and had a fear that followed them, all just for little compensation. Industrial workers lives would have been easier if they had higher wages. The problem with industrial laborers in the Gilded Age, represented in Utpon Sinclair’s The Jungle, was lower wages. Higher wages would help laborers afford better housing, better healthcare, laborers wouldn’t have to depend on their jobs and this idea of “uncertainty” would be lifted from their conscious.
Housing conditions in the twentieth century Packingtown were
Jurgis and family started their life in Chicago in a town called Packingtown. They started off living in a boardinghouse out by the stockyards spending nine dollars a month for an overcrowded and unhealthy flat. Poni Aniele was the owner of the boarding house, “that had four floor flats in one of the wilderness of two story frame elements that lie in the “back of the yards.” (Sinclair,)There were about half a dozen to each room. Occupants were responsible for gathering their own mattress and bedding. Mrs. Jukniene opened up her flat for the women and children of the family, but her house was unthinkably filthy. “You could not enter by the front door at all, owning to the mattresses, when you tried to go up the backstairs you found that she walled up her porch for her chickens.” (Sinclair, )Once Jurgis got a job at Durham’s and was making two dollars an hour, him and Ona starting thinking of better living conditions. Jurgis came across an advertisement for a house that they could pay and call their own. “It was a four bedroom house with a basement, was