The Jungle Essays (1390 words) - Meat Packing Industry, The Jungle

The Jungle The Jungle By Upton Sinclair The Jungle portrays the lower ranks of the industrial world as the scene of a naked struggle for survival. Where workers not only are forced to compete with each other but, if they falter, are hard pressed to keep starvation from their door and a roof over their heads. With unions weak and cheap labor plentiful, a social Darwinist state of the survival of the fittest exists. The real story revolves around the integration and eventual disintegration of Jurgis Rudkis and his family, Lithuanian immigrants who move to the Chicago stockyards in hopes of a better life. Unfortunately, their hopes quickly disintegrate; like thousands of other unskilled immigrants at the turn of the century, financial necessity forces them into virtual slave labor in order to survive. For Jurgis and his family, the slave master is the ruthless and greedy meat packing industry, whose leaders value their workers no more than the animals they slaughter. The Jungle shows the relationship between the animals that were being slaughtered and the workers who were slaughtering them, from very early in the novel. It compares the workers to the animals who are penned up and killed every day in the stockyards, which are moved along on conveyer belts by machinery that cares nothing for their individual desires. In the monotonous killing of each of the hogs, They had done nothing to deserve it; and it was adding insult to injury, as the thing was done here, swinging them up in this cold blooded, impersonal way, without a pretense of apology without the homage of a tear.(Pg. 35) The key comparison is the condition of the workingmen; as cold, efficient machinery assimilates them, a blind fate swallows them up. A few of the men are even swallowed up literally when they would fall into huge vats and emerges as Durham's Pure Leaf Lard. (Pg. 99) The Jungle also shows precisely how wounded, diseased, and pregnant animals are turned into food under ju st the same unhealthy conditions that soon leave healthy men wounded and diseased; There was no heat upon the killing beds; the men might as well have worked out of doors all winter?. On the killing beds you were apt to be covered with blood, and it would freeze solid; if you leaned against a pillar, you would freeze to that, and if you put your hand upon the blade of your knife, you would run a chance of leaving your skin on it. (Pg. 79 & 80) Grotesque injuries were inevitable, injuries for which the company would rarely take responsibility. While a man was laid up his family could starve or freeze to death, and after a series of such injuries, if he survived, he would be too crippled to go on doing the work. When Jurgis is healthy and overflowing with life, he gets a job immediately. When he becomes an empty husk of his former self he is reduced to beggary. Even among beggars he finds a jungle of savage competition, in which the truly needy are often at a disadvantage. And each of them had an individuality of his own, a will of his own, a hope and a heart's desire; each was full of self-confidence, of self-importance, and a sense of dignity. (Pg. 35) Here is another part of the story that shows the relationship between the animals and the people of packing town. Immigrants with peasant backgrounds, and even migrants from America's own rural regions, are especially ill equipped to survive the urban jungle because of their stubborn individualism. Jurgis relies on his own strong back to carry his family, to cope with inhuman work, but he simply becomes a screw in the industrial machine, to be discarded as soon as he shows the signs of being broken. Jurgis and his family are desperate to own something, to be on their own, to make them feel more apart of their new country. To try to make their American dreams come true. And trusting and strong in faith he had gone about his business, the while a black shadow hung over him and a horrid fate waited in his pathway. (Pg. 35) Jurgis and his family tried as much