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Greed In Upton Sinclair's The Jungle

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During the turn of the 20th Century America, was not a happy place to reside in. Though many immigrants were hopeful with leaving everything behind for their new homes in America, they had no clue what awaited them when they arrived. Jurgis Rudkus, a character in The Jungle by Upton Sinclair, was one of those hopeful immigrants that left everything behind. Jurgis and his family left their homeland of Lithuania seeking the opportunities that the American Dream could possibly provide for them. When they arrived they learned that America is not like the stories, they found filth, death, and deception around every corner they turned. However, greed was their largest problem, some were able to make it, but when it came to Jurgis and his families …show more content…
At a point of the time Jurgis spent in America he acquired a 100 dollar bill. He asked if a bar tender could break it because 100 was too big of a bill, the tender told him yes but that he would have to buy something, when Jurgis said he would take a beer. The tender gave him a beer and only gave him two dimes a quarter and 50 cents, then Jurgis said "' My ninety-nine dollars,' 'What ninety-nine dollars?' demanded the bartender. 'My change!' he cried--'the rest of my hundred!' 'Go on,' said the bartender, 'you're nutty!"' (Sinclair 254). Jurgis then got into a fight with the bartender and was arrested. Jurgis met a man in jail who he later got involved in crime with, they would rob rich people off of the streets. Jurgis was forced to rob for money because the bartender was greedy and did not want to give Jurgis his money and made Jurgis go to jail because of him, causing Jurgis to lose his job and find another means to get money which lead to conducting criminal activity. Another prime example of greed affecting how workers got money they needed would be when Ona instantly "went back to Brown's and saved her place and a week's wages" after giving birth. She grew poor in health because she had no recovery time, but if she chose to recovery she would have lost her job and the family would have been in even more financial …show more content…
Bosses and workers often fought for work hours. For example, "a man who was one minute late was docked an hour... if he came ahead of time he got no pay for that... A man might work full fifty minutes, but if there was no work to fill out the hour, there was no pay for him." (Sinclair 93). This would cause workers to try to extend their work time to the full hours worth of pay and the bosses trying to end the work time during the later part of the hour so they would not have to pay the workers, and so they could make more money. The last example would be the work environment that the workers were put in. When Jurgis was taking a tour a a meat factory his party "descended to the next floor, where the various waste materials were treated. Here came the entrails, to be scraped and washed clean for sausage casings; men and women worked here in the midst of a sickening stench, which caused the visitors to hasten by, gasping." (Sinclair 42). If the stench was bad enough to make visitors gasp at first smell imagine what it would have been like for the workers. They had to be down in the blood, guts, and stench of the entrails all day. Nothing was clean and nothing was ever clean in any parts of meat factories because it would cost extra money for the bosses to keep sanitary, and that is money they would rather

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