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Big Businesses and Big Labor

Big Businesses and Big Labor. Chapter 6.3. Big Business. Andrew Carnegie gained control of almost the entire steel industry using these techniques: Vertical Integration : buying all levels of the process of making a product coal & iron mines, railroads, machine companies

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Big Businesses and Big Labor

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  1. Big Businesses and Big Labor Chapter 6.3

  2. Big Business • Andrew Carnegie gained control of almost the entire steel industry using these techniques: • Vertical Integration: buying all levels of the process of making a product • coal & iron mines, railroads, machine companies • Horizontal Integration: buying other companies that do the same function • Buying other steel factories

  3. Big Business

  4. Big Business • (Same list continued) • Making his business super-efficient • Underselling his opponents until they couldn’t compete on price and went out of business

  5. Big Business • Charles Darwin’s theory of “natural selection” said only the strong species survive • Social Darwinism applied this idea to humans, that some are better and deserve to be rich and others are weak and deserve to be poor • Social Darwinism suggested less government regulation, let the rich get rich & the poor be poor

  6. Big Businesses • Company buys out all competitors “monopoly” • Companies teams up and their power over to a group of people (trustees)  “trust” • The difference: trusts were technically still separate companies

  7. Big Business • Both trusts and monopolies could charge whatever they wanted for their product • Because they had no competition • Sherman Anti-Trust Act tried to make trusts illegal • but when under pressure, a trust would just split back into separate companies

  8. Starter, Tuesday Sept 17. • 1. What is the setting of this image? • 2. What do the large men in the back represent? • 3. What is the author’s message?

  9. Labor Unions • Working conditions were horrible • 12 hour days, 7 days a week, low pay, unsafe. • Child labor meant children didn’t get a “childhood” • The AFL attempted to improve workers situations through collective bargaining • Where unions negotiate for all their workers at once

  10. Labor Unions • Some unions believed in Socialism, where the govt. owns and runs businesses to make people more equal. • Eugene V. Debs was a union leader who actually ran as the Socialist party candidate for president 5 times!

  11. Labor Unions • 1877 RR workers struck because their wages were cut, Pres. Hayes ended the strike with troops • At the Haymarket Square in Chicago in 1886, A bomb was thrown at police who had dispersed striking workers • This made the public turn against the labor movement.

  12. Labor Unions • 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire showed how bad working conditions could be • But companies were successful in pushing the govt. to weaken unions by arguing that strikes hurt interstate commerce • The govt. used Sherman Anti-Trust Act to bust big unions (rather than big businesses)

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