Grade 8 Lesson at a Glance: Chapter 15, Lesson 3

Houghton Mifflin Social Studies
A More Perfect Union

Lesson at a Glance
Chapter 15, Lesson 3: The Workers' Changing World (pp. 455-461)

The Big Idea
Framework Concept: Conflict Workers and employers increasingly clashed over issues of pay and working conditions.

Describe the division of labor and mass production on an assembly line, and work with students to list the effects of the assembly line on production, profits, and workers. Review the ways in which workers at this time were exploited and became increasingly unhappy with their working conditions.

Explore the role of early labor unions in organizing workers and the later efforts of the AFL to improve workers' conditions. Talk about the general reaction to strikes (including government actions), using the Homestead and Pullman strikes as examples.

Lesson Outline
Use the Lesson Outline to preview the content of the lesson. You may wish to print it for your students as a guide during reading.

Check for Understanding

Organize students into groups and have each group prepare a short letter to the editor supporting or opposing workers' rights. Letters should include descriptions of working conditions, company towns, and attitudes about strikes and boycotts from the point of view of workers or company owners.
Have students work in pairs to act out how a job (such as making shoes or some other small object) might have been done by hand by one worker and then by several workers on an assembly line. Then have students discuss which activity they would prefer to do, and why.

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