Industrialization, like most things, has positive and negative effects. Industrialization has always benefited the wealthy company owners and has disintegrated the workers’ morale. Overall, it has done more worse than good in the pursuit of advancement. Companies have ignored the ethics of human rights, and the repercussions it would have on the earth’s environment. Due to industrialization, not only does the environment suffer as a consequence, but there are people suffering from the rapid urbanization and sweatshops in developing third world countries.
Dating back to Britain in the late 1700’s, prior to the movement towards manufacturing in factories, people usually made their products at home using their hands or basic tools. Industrialization came in when demand for various products went up. People would work in factories operating powered machinery used for mass production. Industrialization is the cause of urbanization; when factories were built people moved into the cities for the hopes of employment. It took a big turn when industrialization became mainstream as many companies expanded production and employment. Many companies in the U.S. came out such as the Standard Oil Company founded by John D Rockefeller, and the U.S. Steel founded by Andrew Carnegie. Sweatshops came into play as competition became fierce and manufacturers wanted to get a bigger share of the market in the 1880’s. As the U.S. economy developed the sweatshops moved to third world countries due to land, labor and capital being cheaper there for producing goods.
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The biggest downside of industrialization is the toll it has taken on the environment globally. Global warming and the high density of air pollution is the result of industrialization. All the destroyed environments, deforestation, and waste material produced by humans is deteriorating the quality of earth and the inhabitants such as the plants and wildlife. Millions of gallons of toxic chemical waste in gaseous, liquid, and solid forms are being poured out into rivers, seas, and bayous daily. For example, the Ganges River, which is considered sacred to Hindus, is contaminated with many harmful toxic chemicals coming from chemical plants, textile mills, and coal power-based plants; yet many followers of Hinduism still bathe in it every day, knowing that the water has been linked to promote dysentery, cholera, and hepatitis. As many developing countries have been moving towards urbanizing into cities, it causes development of freeways and infrastructures to be built. This industrialization leads to destruction of biodiversity now more than ever.
As companies grow larger and more competitive, they tend to look for cheaper and more efficient ways to produce their line of products. They achieve this through the technique of setting up sweatshops in developing third world countries, due to the low cost of manufacturing and demand of people looking for work. The sweatshops going on in third world countries contribute to child labor, unfair wages accompanied with long hours in perilous working conditions, Bangladesh has more sweatshops than any other country. About 23% of the population or 3.5 million people work in 4,825 factories. These factories are heavily packed with young women and children working for twelve to thirteen hours for no more than two to three dollars a day. Sweatshops have been infamous for its unsafe working environments. For example, on March 25th, 1911, a fire broke out on the ninth floor of the Asch building in New York city; the floor overcrowded with sewing machines and 146 young workers looking to escape the fire. The only exit down the stairway was blocked. Those 146 young workers were burned to death. Some of those workers tried escaping through the window falling nine floors through the air, crushing the bystanders that tried catching them. A more recent case similar to this took place in Bangladesh, except it has happened many more times there. According to the Clean Clothes Campaign, since 2006 more than 500 Bangladeshi workers have died due to the unsafe working conditions in the sweatshops. These unsafe conditions have been consistent since the beginning of industrialization.
Urbanization is the process of people migrating from agricultural areas to manufacturing regions such as cities. Though, when the urbanization is fast and rapid, there tend to be a couple complications. In today’s developing countries, they are not ready for this instant growth, this leads to exhausting the available resources these countries have. Along with that, the overflow tends to be more people looking for places to stay than there are places to live. This leads to environmental pollution, overcrowding in public institutions and facilities as it did in New York during the industrial revolution in the 1890’s.
On the other hand, no one can doubt industrialization has done good, it has set up new opportunities of jobs in developing countries, allowed companies to produce more at a very low-cost, and has helped economies come out of debt. However, be that as it may, at the end of the day sweatshops are still immoral, the trafficking of the inner cities caused from rapid urbanization has people staying in unhygienic living conditions, and the earth is being polluted with toxic chemicals.
In summary, industrialization has its positive and negative views on society’s advancements, but overall the bad will always outweigh the good in this instance, for you can never put a price tag on human rights and the earth’s preservation for the betterment of industrialized companies’ gross income.
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