One important step was elaborating the division of labor. Anxious to cut costs, businesses sought ways to trim the cost of labor. Turned to steam power for larger factories after theĪs they did, they initiated changes in the nature of factory work and the relationship between those who owned the factories and those who worked there.Ĭhicago's competitive environment fostered a search for production methods that were faster and less expensive. Manufacturers in Chicago, with rail access to abundant southern Illinois Typical of most early-nineteenth-century American industry, Chicago's earliest manufacturing took place in artisan workshops and manufactories where skilled craftsmen, aided by laborers or apprentices, dominated production. Chicago's grain merchants turned discrete bags of grain from specific fields into a standard type passing through the city's new grain elevators, financed in part by contracts for future delivery that formed the basis for a new financial services Chicago's success lay partly in the ability of its businesses to make nature abstract in ways that transformed products of farms and forest more readily into commodities for the market. This emphasis on speed and scale also encouraged businessmen to find faster, simpler ways to get things done, resulting in the standardization of products from grades of grain to sizes of lumber. The town grew with amazing speed, generating jobs inĪnd the manufacture of construction materials, but there was a high priority on doing things quickly and grandly in every other endeavor as well. Beginning in World War I, they were joined by large numbers ofįrom the South and, after 1965, by Latinos and Asians.įrom its early days, Chicago was a place where everything happened fast. From 1870 to 1930, Chicago grew rapidly from bustling trading center to quintessential industrial complex, Carl Sandburg's “Hog Butcher for the World,” “City of the Big Shoulders.”Īs the nation's transportation hub, Chicago also became the Midwest's primary labor market for rural and small-town job seekers and immigrant workers-at first from Germany, Ireland, and Scandinavia, then from Southern and Eastern Europe. Or milling flour-and then started making grain harvesters,įor farmers and frontier towns. Remained key, in the mid-nineteenth century small factories first began processing the products of the prairie-packing pork, sawing Which consolidated Chicago's central position until the ascendance of air power and interstate highways after Chicago's commercial and, eventually, industrial power depended on its linkages to the hinterland and other cities, first by lakes, rivers, and canals, then roads and The changes wrought by large-scale corporate manufacturing and trade provoked battles over the character and control of work that spilled over into broader political fights over democracy, citizenship, and the rights of workers.Īt first the work of Chicago was trade and-nearly equally important-speculation inĪnd in the city's future as the great metropolis of the frontier. People flocked to Chicago to find work and fought there over what work should be. Especially in the late nineteenth century, Chicago was both shaped by and helped to foment a nationwide revolution in work that first undermined and then remade the democratic promise of America. As the city grew, work in Chicago underwent dramatic transformations, both in the type of industries that dominated and in the organization of work itself. Work has defined Chicago in popular and literary imagery, shaped the city's character, and served as the fulcrum of its history. In the late nineteenth century, booming Chicago struck visitors as the “purest kind of commercial city,” a place devoted to work and moneymaking.
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