Background Analytical

Consistently throughout history, labor has dominated the lives of the average American. It is come knowledge that is thought to us when we are children that everyone has to grow up and work. The whole reason behind being educated is to have a successful job at an older age. Most of an American’s adult life is spent in the work place, regardless of their profession. Because of this, there has been a constant struggle for rights and benefits in the work place since the foundation of our country. Although labor unions were present throughout the 1800’s, they were not very organized until 1886 when Samuel Gompers formed the American Federation of Labor. This Federation was able to organize how unions worked. This allowed all unions to have the same set of standards for the work place, and even though individual unions did not have to numbers to get these standards, the AFL made that a possibility. The AFL helped make laws that are not even realized today, laws that are taken for granted. Without the AFL we would have no child labor laws, or no minimum wage. Those are concepts that are just fact of our current labor system, but they were not always there. There are even specific cases that the AFL were involved in to give workers rights. One such example of this was in 1894 in Pullman, Illinois. The Pullman Palace Car Company had monopolized the entire town. This meant that everyone living in the town was an employee of the Pullman Palace Car Company and everything people in Pullman bought was from the Pullman Palace Car Company. This problem with this was that the people were not getting paid enough to afford the prices of the same company. When the town’s people went on strike and the AFL got involved, the company was taken to court. The president of the Pullman Palace Car Company was eventually sent to jail for this due to a law against monopolizing. The AFL is mainly only helping people who have jobs, so being unemployed is still a large problem in America. Unemployment is almost an issue in the nation, but there were times that it was more specifically an issue than not. This was during the Great Depression. During this time in the early 1900’s, unemployment was at 25%, while with our most recent recession, it never reached 11%. Our country got into a circle where the businesses needed to let many workers go because they could not afford to keep them, because of this, people couldn’t spend as much as they could when they were employed, so business would suffer even more. It was Franklin D. Roosevelt who was able to get us out of this depression. FDR created a new deal plan where there were enough jobs created so that everyone was able to have a source of income. Because labor is directly tied to our economy, once the unemployment problem was fixed, the nation made a full recovery soon after. Labor will continue to be a major part of our economy for the rest of the country’s future. It is a system that works to benefit everyone and continues to get better over the years.