Seventeen cents in 1906 is equivalent to $4.02 in 2009. Aside from the intrinsic desire I have to present you with superfluous information, why I am telling you this? Answer: seventeen cents is the amount Jurgis Rudkus—the focal character of The Jungle, which Upton Sinclair published in 1906—is paid per hour to work in a Chicago slaughterhouse.
The federally set minimum wage as of July of this year is $7.25 an hour, but it wasn’t until 2007 that legislation was adopted that would raise the minimum wage to it’s current level. So, in 2006, one hundred years after the publication of The Jungle, it was perfectly legal to pay workers at the lowest rung of the employment ladder the then minimum of $5.15, or the equivalent of slightly less than five cents above what Jurgis received. And of course, none of this takes into account the fact that Jurgis was a recent immigrant and non-citizen.
I couldn’t find any information about the wages undocumented workers receive in the U.S. without spending more than five minutes searching on the Internet, but I think it’s safe to assume that the amount is probably closer to four than seven dollars an hour. (I did find many informative articles, however, about the horrible toll illegal immigrants are taking on all of us in this country. I had no idea.)
Well, that’s a lot of great information, but what does all of this have to do with my review of The Jungle? Answer: based on the novel’s reputation I’d taken some time to prepare myself emotionally for the harrowing depictions of blood and gore in the slaughterhouse, but what I found most disturbing is how similar, though admittedly on a different scale, the working conditions of Jurgis and his family are to those you would find among many in the middle class today.
The slaughterhouse scenes are gruesome, but perhaps they’ve lost some of their punch in a world where a new Saw movie has been released five years running. Besides, I’m simply more interested in the plight of working people, because as a man of status, wealth, and learning, I feel it is my obligation to empathize with the seething masses of those less fortunate than I.
An artist friend of mine holds a day job processing the payroll for a temporary employment agency in New York, and I asked him what he thought of my idea that little has changed from the time of The Jungle. He responded as follows: “[The temps] are in an office, so it’s a little different, but I can see your point. There are people who’ve worked for us at the same position for years and who still don’t get paid for holidays when their office is closed and who don’t have health insurance. And temps can be let go for absolutely no reason, with no notice. And if they get sick or have to be out for a while, especially, on short term assignments, we have to replace them with one of the dozens of people we have waiting for us to call them for work…” My friend went on to praise the work I’ve posted on this space and to project great things for me in the future, but I will leave those comments out.
The Jungle is written in the visceral and gritty style popular around the beginning of the 20th century with American writers like Horatio Alger, Stephen Crane, and Frank Norris. But unlike those writers, Sinclair’s prose undergoes an interesting shift some fifty page short of the novel’s end, when he decides to stop writing about Jurgis and begin writing a Socialist propaganda pamphlet. This change is so sudden and complete that as you finish each page you find yourself thinking, ‘this can’t go on much longer. What about Jurgis?’ And yet it does go on—on and on—until the inevitable concluding chant of “Chicago will be ours! Chicago will be ours! CHICAGO WILL BE OURS!” (I’m not joking, that’s how the novel ends.) Needless to say, a hundred years have passed and Chicago is not there’s.
