Chapter 14 Computer Lab Assignment - Mr. E's Forum: 2006-2007

Date: Nov 17, 2006

RE: Chapter 14 Computer Lab Assignment

Date: Nov 17, 2006

Alex Z, wow. Interesting response to all, even Krystal. Thanks for investigating the topic in some depth.

Date: Nov 17, 2006

Kelsey Smith wrote:

There are sweatshops around the world, even in the United States. Most large corporations are sweatshops and many people don’t even notice it when shopping there daily. When most people think of sweatshops they think of third world countries and envision cramped, filthy areas just like the first workers experienced, but there not only in third world countries. There was an investigation by the Department of Labor in Los Angeles that found out that two-thirds of the garment factories wailed to meet the minimum wage and overtime laws. Sweatshop workers underwent the unfair treatment from other workers and also work 15 hour-long shifts.

Unfair treatment of women in the work place has happened since they have stepped in the door. Despite the fact that sweatshops don’t run only off women they are usually work in them due to the fact that women are still looked down upon in some countries. There are people who try to prevent the unfair treatment of workers but its difficult considering most don’t know what actually comes from a sweatshop.

Kelsey, you did a great job showing how similar the sweat shops of today are to the mills of the 19th century. What do you think could be done to make consumers more aware of the practices used to produce the items that they buy everyday? How could sweat shops be eliminated without taking away nearly all career opportunites for citizens of third world and developing nations?

Date: Nov 17, 2006

Kp:

thank you very much that made me feel a lot better about my post.

Date: Nov 17, 2006

kathryn m. wrote:

8. Focus on the lives of early factory workers, perhaps using the female textile workers of Lowell, Massachusetts, as a case study. Compare female factory workers in early America with those working in sweatshops around the world today. Industrial Revolution really boomed in the 19th century, though it originally began to take off in 1790s. After the Embargo, mills and factories were popping up all over America. After Eli Whitney’s invention, the cotton gin, was exposed to southern plantations, cotton production increased immensely. As a result, cotton was sent to American textile mills, where the cotton could be woven into cloth. The mills evidently changed the lives of thousands. Many people were employed to work in the mills, particularly young, unmarried women. This industry also changed local economies, in which cloth became cheaper and part of a commercial exchange system. Unfortunately, the environment was hurt when waterpower to mills flooded farm fields and fish were no longer allowed to migrate (salmon). Industry was not considered traditional New England life, in which you lived on a farm and exchanged sugar for butter with your neighbor. Instead, people began buying products from mills or stores rather than growing the items themselves. Factory life changed the way women were looked upon in society. Because the mill workers consisted primarily of unmarried women, the tradition of domesticity was beginning to fade. Women were no longer in their homes cooking dinner or having children, but were out in the workforce and helping the economy. As one of the most industrialized cities, Lowell employed many young women to work in their mills. They worked with dangerous machinery and unhealthy working conditions. These poor working conditions lead to women rebelling against their managers. Some women didn’t even show up to their machines in the morning. The managers felt that women were supposed to "attend assiduously" to duties and to "aspire to the utmost efficiency" in work. However when their wages were continuously cut to smaller and smaller amounts and their hours were being raised, the Lowell Mill Girls protested their rights as factory workers. Thus, the organization of Unions began, which helped protect individual’s rights when in the workforce. We can draw extremely close parallels with the life of Mill Girls to sweat shops that exist today. In china, enormous organizations employ millions of the Chinese to work for extremely low wages for an immense amount of time. The living conditions in these sweatshops are dangerous. Unfortunately, sweatshops do not occur in the US therefore they do not contain the same individual rights as Americans do today. Neither did women at the time of the Industrial Revolution (compared to men). They were thought as easy labor in mills, therefore, managers took advantage of them. History surely repeats itself. Things never change. http://invention.smithsonian.org/centerpieces/whole_cloth/u2ei/u2materials/eiTessay.html

i liked this ms.ktymotta
didn't realized the danger of sweatshops...in china
since there aren't any here. i didn't know that either
asians, they work too hard

Date: Nov 17, 2006

Assignments due today

Date: Dec 3, 2006

Brittney Howell

8. Focus on the lives of early factory workers, perhaps using the female textile workers of Lowell, Massachusetts, as a case study. Compare female factory workers in early America with those working in sweatshops around the world today.

Mill Girls: Early mill girls almost all were young, unmarried women laborers. Some of the workers were not even over 10 years old. Few were middle aged women and the majority of the workers were between the ages of 16 and 25. The very young workers were called doffers, their duty was to take off full bobbins from the spinning frames and replace them with empty ones. They only worked about 15 minutes every hour and the rest of the times was their own. If they had a nice overseer they were allowed to read, knit, or to go outside in the mill yard to play.

At this time New England considered employment of women to be immoral. They made sure that the environment was a proper one. The mill girls had strict curfews, they mandated church attendance, they were provided with a healthy diet, and the mills had a high degree of cleanliness. Unlike many factories during this time Lowell Mills were kept clean and the workers lived in well kept dormitories and boardinghouses. Mill girls who had homes usually worked 8 to 10 months in a year and the rest of the time was spent with friends or family.

The wages were good compared to the standards of the day. They received about two dollars a week and their work day started at 5 in the morning and was not over until 7 at night. All of the mill girls had a 1 half an hour break for both, breakfast and one for dinner. Even the younger children were forced to be on duty nearly 14 hours a day.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lowell_system

http://womenshistory.about.com/gi/dynamic/offsite.htm?zi=1/XJ/Ya&sdn=w omenshistory&cdn=education&tm=9&gps=91_7_1020_563&f=00&tt=14&bt=1&bts= 0&zu=http%3A//www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/robinson-lowell.html

Sweatshop Workers: Sweatshops still exist in today’s society big companies such as Walmart and Jcpenny use sweatshops to produce large amounts of textiles. Children as young as 13 to 15 years old work at least 13 hours per day and 7 days a week. Most of their work days start at 7:30 in the morning until 9 at night. Children are also not allowed to attend night school because of the over extended hours they are forced to work. Overtime in sweatshops is mandatory and it does not pay time and a half The worker’s are paid as little as 15 cents per hour.

Along with all the long hours the workers are not treated well. Workers deal with verbal, physical, and sexual abuse by supervisors. In one case it was said that a women got fired for refusing intercourse from her supervisor. These hot and dusty factories are also fenced in behind barbed wire fences and under armed guards. The building doors are also always locked without fire escape exits. Which make these buildings over unsafe. Also these buildings were built very fast because of the demands of textiles, most of these buildings are very unsteady and could potentially collapse on workers. Machinery is also known to be faulty and these workers are working which dangerous chemicals or electrical products. Which makes sweatshops extremely unsafe.

The place where sweatshop workers are housed are found to be tin and stick shacks with cardboard walls and dirt floors. They house an entire family in a space the size of cubicles, and one bed has as many as five people. They have no running water and most of the time they have to keep warm by and open fire.

http://www.globaled.org.nz/schools/documents/Sweatshops.pdf

http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/47/266.html

Early mill workers were not treated fairly by the means of wages and long work days but they were housed properly unlike sweatshops. So in a sense a sweatshop and a mill environment is similar, except the sweatshop workers lived under harsher conditions such as the way they were treated and mill workers were for the most part treated fairly well for women at this time. The treatment of these women at the time was extremely harsh and unreasonable and the fact that sweatshops still exist today is a horrible thought and also how big companies use them to make a good profit by selling items made in sweatshops for an extremely high price is horrible. All sweatshops should be ended no one deserves to work under those type circumstances.

Date: Dec 9, 2006

David Souza AP U.S. History 2-304 A Ch. 14, Q6

6. Discuss one or more of the early inventions and their relation to economic growth, e.g., the cotton gin, the sewing machine, the mechanical reaper, the telegraph. Consider how much technological progress depends on the proper social and economic conditions.

Eli Whitney the inventor of the cotton gin, gave a new life to the cotton industry. With his invention cotton could be produced cleanly, improving the time it takes to produce cotton. Before cotton had to be painstakingly plucked, sorted and have the sometimes very sticky seeds removed. With the cotton gin, all you had to do was pluck the cotton and place it in the gin to be cleaned and sorted. Because this machine made cotton so much more easier to handle, it made it a cash crop for the South. Cotton then became the nation’s biggest export, making up three fifths of all exports. Now that cotton was so much easier to handle, people wanted land to grow as much cotton as they could. Secondly, people wanted more slaves in order to have more workers cultivate the land. Slavery was going to die out in the near future due to the fact of there was no demand or reason. But now that cotton was easy to produce and foreign counties wanted cotton for their factories, people wanted to cultivate the land and needed as many hands as possible to get the product. For new technology to happen, you need a reason for that invention or just luck. This machine was created because the cotton was difficult to cultivate and there was a huge demand for it. Countries, like England had developed textile factories and they needed cotton. So the economic demand for cotton for use in textile factories around the world led to the production of the cotton gin.

Sources:

1. http://inventors.about.com/od/cstartinventions/a/cotton_gin_2.htm

2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cotton_gin

--MY OWN PERSONAL ARMY--

Date: Dec 9, 2006

David Souza AP U.S. History 2-304 A Ch. 14, Q6

6. Discuss one or more of the early inventions and their relation to economic growth, e.g., the cotton gin, the sewing machine, the mechanical reaper, the telegraph. Consider how much technological progress depends on the proper social and economic conditions.

Eli Whitney the inventor of the cotton gin, gave a new life to the cotton industry. With his invention cotton could be produced cleanly, improving the time it takes to produce cotton. Before cotton had to be painstakingly plucked, sorted and have the sometimes very sticky seeds removed. With the cotton gin, all you had to do was pluck the cotton and place it in the gin to be cleaned and sorted. Because this machine made cotton so much more easier to handle, it made it a cash crop for the South. Cotton then became the nation’s biggest export, making up three fifths of all exports. Now that cotton was so much easier to handle, people wanted land to grow as much cotton as they could. Secondly, people wanted more slaves in order to have more workers cultivate the land. Slavery was going to die out in the near future due to the fact of there was no demand or reason. But now that cotton was easy to produce and foreign counties wanted cotton for their factories, people wanted to cultivate the land and needed as many hands as possible to get the product. For new technology to happen, you need a reason for that invention or just luck. This machine was created because the cotton was difficult to cultivate and there was a huge demand for it. Countries, like England had developed textile factories and they needed cotton. So the economic demand for cotton for use in textile factories around the world led to the production of the cotton gin.

Sources:

1. http://inventors.about.com/od/cstartinventions/a/cotton_gin_2.htm

2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cotton_gin

Date: Dec 10, 2006

You said Jill that sweatshops were in underprivleged countries. What countries exactly have sweatshops? Also, what companies today use sweatshops?

Date: Dec 12, 2006

Julia Greene wrote:

6.        Discuss one or more of the early inventions and their relation to economic growth, e.g., the cotton gin, the sewing machine, the mechanical reaper, the telegraph. Consider how much technological progress depends on the proper social and economic conditions.

The sewing machine can be seen as one of the most helpful inventions of all time. The first trace of the sewing machine can go back to the 1750s. Not only did this machine help to make work easier, but it also was a start of mass production.   The textile industry boomed in America during the Industrial Revolution after being introduced to such a wonderful machine. Because of the economic conditions, the sewing machine was pretty much always in use. Women in sweat shops and factories were constantly using them for hours a day. As time went on, more people would buy clothes instead of making them. We now have machines that don’t have to be worked manually and make our lives a lot easier.

Pros:

Larger amount of production in smaller amounts of time

Women could have jobs

Cons:

Low wages

Poor conditions

The sewing machine came with many benefits, yet if a man had operated them there would be fewer downfalls. Women were allowed to be treated this way without much consideration.

SOURCE: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sewing_machine

Straight to the point…nice. I just have a couple of questions:

1.) Who was the person who invented the first sewing machine?

2.) How did the sewing machine socially change people?

Date: Dec 14, 2006

J.Furtado wrote:

6. Discuss one or more of the early inventions and their relation to economic growth, ex. The cotton gin, the sewing machine, the mechanical reaper, the telegraph. Consider how much technological progress depends on the proper social and economic conditions.

The sewing machine, one of the early inventions provided help to the economic growth through technological progress depending on the proper social and economic conditions. A sewing machince is a mechanical device that joins fabric usings thread. Sewing machines create a sewing-machine stitch using two threads but the can also use one, three and four stitches. Before the sewing machine was invented everything was sewn by hand. The first known attempt at creating a sewing machine was by the German born man Charles Fredrick Wiesenthal. The needle he designed was made to be passed through the cloth by a pair of mechanical fingers and grasped on the other side by a second pair. Barthelemy Thimonnier built the first functional sewing machince in Germany which only used one thread and a hooked needle that made the same stitch as embroidery. This inventer was almost killed do to a bunch of enraged french tailors who torched his garment factory in fear of unemployment because of this new invention. In America Walter Hunt built our first working sewing machine but because he feared that his invention would cause unemployment, he never patented. The first american patent was issued to Elias Howe. His machine had a needle with an eye at the point. Mass production didn’t include sewing machines until the 1850s when Isaac Singer built the first commercially used machine. By 1856 competition among Sewing Machine Manufacturer graduatly increased. Manufacturers were threatening war on each other. Isaac Singer introduced that istallment plan of sale to bring the machine within the reach of the poor thus causing the machines price to steadily fall. The power-driven sewing machine helped the production of clothes on a larger scale. Since the invention of the sewing machine the clothing industry has become one of the most important in the country. Sewing machines are still getting improved making it a fact that present day clothes are rarely made by hand.

If the machine was first introduced to the poor how did it make economic progress? what social conditions caused the invention of the sewing machine?

Do you think that's the main reason why tecnological advances are made? because of these economical and social needs? if so then why are mp3s and entertainment devices and consider also the need for different sickness that have yet to conjure an antidote.

-focus more on the topic: you started to talk about more of how a sewing machine works rather than it's effects

-good se of outside info(i like the whole german input)