The Jungle

The central focus of Sinclair's book is the great suffering of the immigrant workers and their families. He uses that focus to bring attention to their plight as well as to show that radical changes to the entire economic system will be necessary to correct the situation. Sinclair portrays the struggle between the workers and the owners as one between the overpowering evil forces of the capitalist owners and the overpowered and helpless workers representing goodness:

So Jurgis said that he understood it; and yet it was really pitiful, for the struggle was so unfair---some had so much of the advantage! Here he was, for instance, vowing upon his knees that he would save Ona from harm, and only a week later sh

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labor unions and Progressive reform had little or no impact on improving the working conditions or the lives of immigrants. Again, Sinclair was arguing that capitalism---with or without unions or reform---would always be a hell for workers, and particularly for immigrant workers who were even lower on the socioeconomic ladder than native-born workers. In fact, in his critical portrait of capitalism and its exploitation of the immigrants and other workers, Sinclair tries to show how unions are in fact tools of the capitalist bosses, used as another means to control and mislead the workers, giving them false hope for justice and a better life: The packers [that is, the owners of the packing houses], of course, had spies in all the unions, and in addition had made a practice of buying up a certain number of the union officials, as many as they thought they needed. So every week they received reports as to what was going on, and often they knew things before the members of the union knew them (103). In Sinclair's portrait of the broken dreams of Jurgis Rudkis and his fellow Lithuanian immigrants, unions are meant to be institutions which mislead the workers, despite the best of intentions of some in the unions. The immigrants li
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Some common words found in the essay are:
Upton Sinclair, Lithuania Sinclair, Jurgis Rudkis, Organize Organize, immigrant workers, American Dream, sinclair's book, workers sinclair, York Bantam, entire economic system, suffering immigrant workers, unions ineffective, corruption unions, , capitalist bosses, conditions author, capitalism socialism, capitalist system,
Approximate Word count = 1330
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page)

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