A look into laborer lives

  According to Mark Twain, the "Gilded Age" of the late 1800s was a time where America was being portrayed as a country that was rising economically due to the many new innovations that came about from the Industrial Age, yet in reality, the country had several flaws, especially in social class aspects, underneath what most people came to see America as- a land of prosperity.
     The problem of debt in farmers was particularly caused by their needs of land and tools that would be used for running their agricultural business. Farmers often had to loan money from banks in order to have land for growing their crops and buy machines that would make the process of harvesting their agricultural products more efficient, as well as avoid hiring additional workers, because this would make the farmers have to take away some money to pay their employees. Another factor that resulted in farmers was that they did not have the power to be able to control the price of their products. Railroad companies took advantage of this, so they started increasing their fees for transporting farmers' products while decreasing their sale prices, therefore decreasing farmers' overall profit.
   Another group of laborers, the factory workers, faced harsh working conditions. For example, Andrew Carnegie, a powerful businessman of steel, forced his workers to work for long hours under unpleasant working conditions. The fact that people were operating dangerous machinery to manufacture goods while being in an environment full of high concentrations of smoke and dust led to severe injuries and even deaths among the workers. Despite all their great efforts to provide for the industry, the average factory worker's salary ranged from 400 to 600 dollars per year - just barely enough to get past the basic necessities of life.
       Both groups of laborers got angrier about the unfair lives they had, since it made them feel a greater difficulty of being able to rise to a more elite social status. This made them feel isolated, so they decided to start new ways of getting politicians to become aware of the problems that were giving the laborers a harsh life. As a solution to their problems, farmers and factory workers started going on labor strikes and created worker unions. For farmers, they worked together to pass the "Granger Laws," which would help set more affordable railroad shipping rates. Eventually, their ideas spread to other farmers across the South; this resulted in the Farmers Alliance, an organization that aimed to better the lives of laborers by using co-ops, and later on when the plan failed, the Farmers Alliance's founders started a large political movement called the Populist Movement with a goal of raising the power of all workers.
For factory workers, Samuel Gompers established the American Federation of Labor, which focused on giving workers (only skilled) safer work environments as well as increasing their salary while decreasing their work shifts.