Ethnicity and Labor 1865-1945
During this period, the United States was the destination of millions of immigrants, mainly from southern and eastern Europe following the 1840s immigration from Ireland and Germany. As many were Catholic and Jewish, they changed the demographics of major cities and industrial areas. Pennsylvania and New York received many of the new immigrants, who entered through New York and Philadelphia and worked in the developing industries. Many of these poor immigrants took jobs in factories, steel mills, and coal mines throughout the state, where they were not restricted because of their lack of English.
The growth of industry eventually provided middle-class incomes to working-class households, after the development of labor unions helped them gain living wages. The availability of jobs and public education systems helped integrate the millions of immigrants and their families, who also retained ethnic cultures.
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Famous quotes containing the word labor:
“The most remarkable aspect of the transition we are living through is not so much the passage from want to affluence as the passage from labor to leisure.... Leisure contains the future, it is the new horizon.... The prospect then is one of unremitting labor to bequeath to future generations a chance of founding a society of leisure that will overcome the demands and compulsions of productive labor so that time may be devoted to creative activities or simply to pleasure and happiness.”
—Henri Lefebvre (b. 1901)