ong until it was realized that she would have to work, along with the children and the old and the sick. Everyone would have to work in order to keep alive, in order to feed each other and keep warm in the winter. The difficulty of finding a job in Packingtown was hard enough. The characters also had to walk to work everyday, often in below zero temperatures. The book also describes the process of speeding up. Men would have to work at a pace unthinkable to modern society. People were literally worked to death. There were always accidents at work and dying was not unusual. The book also describes the horrible processes of the meat packing industry. Nothing is clean about the business. the beef had lain in vats full of chemicals, and men with great forks speared it out and dumped it into trucks, to be taken to the cooking room. When they had speared out all they could reach, they emptied the vat on the floor, and then with shovels scraped up the balance and dumped it in to the truck. This floor was filthy, yet they set Antanas with his mop slopping the pickle into a hold that connected with a sink, where it was caught and used over again forever; and if that were not enough, there was a trap in the pipe, where all the scraps of meet and odds and ends or refuse were caught, and every few days it was the old mans task to clean these out and shovel their contents into one of the trucks with the rest of the meet (Page 65).In one part of the book, a man dies and is mixed in with the other part of the meet that is to be shipped for lard. The conditions in which the people of the book work in are truly unbearable. People wade up their knees in blood, get sores and cuts, and yet they never stop working for fear of loosing their job. Some highlights of the first part of the book might be when Ju...
