January 2020 BOTM: THE JUNGLE BY UPTON SINCLAIR

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > The Book Barn > January 2020 BOTM: THE JUNGLE BY UPTON SINCLAIR

pig slut lisa: Mar 5, 2012; irl is good

What a great book! I've read it twice: once about 7-8 years ago in grad school, and then again in 2018. I think it's one of those books that's worth coming back to every so often as your own experience in the world as both a worker and an observer changes.

I recently read On The Clock by Emily Guendelsberger and I'd highly recommend it to anyone who reads and likes The Jungle. Here's how the publisher describes On The Clock:

quote:

After the local newspaper where she worked as a reporter closed, Emily Guendelsberger took a pre-Christmas job at an Amazon fulfillment center outside Louisville, Kentucky. There, the vending machines were stocked with painkillers, and the staff turnover was dizzying. In the new year, she travelled to North Carolina to work at a call center, a place where even bathroom breaks were timed to the second. And finally, Guendelsberger was hired at a San Francisco McDonald�s, narrowly escaping revenge-seeking customers who pelted her with condiments.

Across three jobs, and in three different parts of the country, Guendelsberger directly took part in the revolution changing the U.S. workplace. ON THE CLOCK takes us behind the scenes of the fastest-growing segment of the American workforce to understand the future of work in America � and its present. Until robots pack boxes, resolve billing issues, and make fast food, human beings supervised by AI will continue to get the job done. Guendelsberger shows us how workers went from being the most expensive element of production to the cheapest � and how low wage jobs have been remade to serve the ideals of efficiency, at the cost of humanity.

ON THE CLOCK explores the lengths that half of Americans will go to in order to make a living, offering not only a better understanding of the modern workplace, but also surprising solutions to make work more humane for millions of Americans.

As I read this book, I was struck by how many parallels I saw to The Jungle. The way that young strong people are originally able to breeze through demanding physical labor but are slowly and eventually broken down by it, whether they're handling carcasses in the slaughterhouse or picking items in a giant Amazon warehouse. The way that management treats labor as expendable, knowing that there's always a crowd of desperate people willing to put on a call center headset or take on backbreaking work at the factory. The way that young people aren't able to pursue a full education when they or their family needs money on the table now, locking in the cycle of poverty and precarity for another generation. It's definitely a good companion piece to compare what has and hasn't changed over the last century.

# ¿ Jan 8, 2020 16:13

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# ¿ Dec 11, 2024 07:13

pig slut lisa: Mar 5, 2012; irl is good

I will say the biggest weakness of The Jungle imo is that Sinclair does what a lot of lefty writers in the first part of the 20th century did, which is put a long dry speech near the end of the book just so you, the reader, are left absolutely certain that yes socialism is good and here's why. My complaint isn't political, just literary. After a few hundred pages of showing us what you mean, now you're gonna laze out and beat us over the head by telling us what you mean? Boo! Boring!

On the other hand, given that the takeaway among contemporary society was "we gotta clean up the food industry" and not "this country grinds poor workers up into dust", maybe adding a little explicit message at the end isn't the worst thing an author could do.

# ¿ Jan 8, 2020 16:21

pig slut lisa: Mar 5, 2012; irl is good

Toobly posted:

I was supposed to read it in high school but I didn't. Not sure how I passed that literature class... (or any other literature class in high school) I feel like if I had read it then I would have hated it and found it boring.

I skipped a bunch of reading in high school English classes (thanks Spark Notes). I've gone back to read a number of those books as an adult and it turns out almost all of them have been good.

# ¿ Jan 8, 2020 21:30

pig slut lisa: Mar 5, 2012; irl is good

Kangxi posted:

Why did the big Chicago meat-markets close? Did it have to do with the automation of work, transportation technology...? When I hear about slaughterhouses or meat processing facilities in the United States these days it's usually about the conditions for the animals and I hear very little about the people involved.

As Konstantin says, transportation had a lot to do with it. If you want a truly excellent read on the topic, I recommend Nature's Metropolis by William Cronon. It's an economic history of Chicago that focuses on three commodities: lumber, grain, and meat. Cronon tracks the rise and fall of Chicago as the king of all three of these commodities. In the case of meat, Chicago's rail system ended up being a victim of its own success. During the first round of railbuilding in the Midwest, nearly all railroads ran to Chicago due to the benefits of centralization. This served Chicago well for several decades. However, because these railroads were built by different companies, connections from eastern railroads to western railroads were incredibly congested and difficult. There was no thru-running railroad connecting east to west through Chicago; all the goods, cargo, and passengers needed to transfer via wagon and truck between railroads. Eventually, a second round of railroad construction directly linked cities like Kansas City, Tulsa, and Oklahoma City with big east coast markets, completely bypassing Chicago. Once this happened (and as refrigeration technology continued to improve), it made sense to move the slaughterhouses closer to the locations where the cattle was raised.

# ¿ Jan 11, 2020 02:07

pig slut lisa: Mar 5, 2012; irl is good

Keep in mind that to get on a boat back to Lithuania he'd first need to get on a train to New York. Dunno what that would do to costs but I doubt he'd get a discount on a package deal for the two.

I wonder if eastbound passenger ship fares were significantly cheaper than westbound fares during this period due to the sheer volume of people booking passage from Europe to America.

# ¿ Jan 15, 2020 13:59