1. Big Businesses and Big Labor Chapter 6.3

2. Big Business Andrew Carnegie gained control of almost the entire steel industry using these techniques: – Vertical Integration: buying all levels of the process of making a product coal & iron mines, railroads, machine companies – Horizontal Integration: buying other companies that do the same function Buying other steel factories

3. Big Business

4. (Same list continued) – Making his business super-efficient – Underselling his opponents until they couldn’t compete on price and went out of business

5. Big Business Charles Darwin’s theory of “natural selection” said only the strong species survive – Social Darwinism applied this idea to humans, that some are better and deserve to be rich and others are weak and deserve to be poor – Social Darwinism suggested less government regulation, let the rich get rich & the poor be poor

6. Big Businesses Company buys out all competitors  “monopoly” Companies teams up and their power over to a group of people (trustees)  “trust” – The difference: trusts were technically still separate companies

7. Big Business Both trusts and monopolies could charge whatever they wanted for their product – Because they had no competition Sherman Anti-Trust Act tried to make trusts illegal – but when under pressure, a trust would just split back into separate companies

8. Starter, Tuesday Sept 17. 1. What is the setting of this image? 2. What do the large men in the back represent? 3. What is the author’s message?

9. Labor Unions Working conditions were horrible – 12 hour days, 7 days a week, low pay, unsafe. Child labor meant children didn’t get a “childhood” The AFL attempted to improve workers situations through collective bargaining – Where unions negotiate for all their workers at once

10. Labor Unions Some unions believed in Socialism, where the govt. owns and runs businesses to make people more equal. – Eugene V. Debs was a union leader who actually ran as the Socialist party candidate for president 5 times!

11. Labor Unions 1877 RR workers struck because their wages were cut, Pres. Hayes ended the strike with troops At the Haymarket Square in Chicago in 1886, A bomb was thrown at police who had dispersed striking workers – This made the public turn against the labor movement.

12. Labor Unions 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire showed how bad working conditions could be But companies were successful in pushing the govt. to weaken unions by arguing that strikes hurt interstate commerce – The govt. used Sherman Anti-Trust Act to bust big unions (rather than big businesses)