New American Vision - Essay Example

For many modern day individuals, those of whom will have grown accustomed to the present state of the market and the working world, it can become quite easy to forget the earlier days of how things such as cars and utilitarian items, would have been produced. A classic example of the evolution of production, would have been the assembly line perfected by automaker Henry Ford. Due to his creative thinking, American consumers were able to possess the opportunity to have an automobile at the fraction of the time it would have taken prior.

In this case, "The Industrial Revolution was a transformation of human life circumstances that occurred in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (roughly 1760 to 1840) in Britain, the United States, and Western Europe due in large measure to advances in the technologies of industry," ("Industrial Revolution", p.1). It would be this revolution, that would lead to changes in production measures that would result in a shift in the modern workforce. Where previously the workforce had been predominately individuals themselves, it would now become a scenario in which machines would be able to alleviate a level of the strain, so that it would be a mixture of man and machine.

American families would be impacted by such changes in the workforce. Mainly in such areas as, the ability for the heads of the household to be at home more, rather than spending the vast majority of their time at work. This would give way to the stronger sense of the modern American family. The family that would be able to eat meals together and also interact with each other on levels previously not had, had it not been for the adjustments made to the workplace in conjunction with the boom of the technological advancement age.

From a business standpoint, it would enable business owners to lower wage costs by having fewer employees on the floor at the same time. Such cost savings would in turn, be able to be transferred to the customers of their products, in the form of decreases in the cost of products purchased. Further assessing the automotive aspect of the revolution, "For American automobile workers, one relatively constant feature of their daily factory lives was this simplified, monotonous, and degraded work.

Although work tasks, work situations, and work routines varied considerably from automobile firm to automobile firm and from one shop or department to another, the work tasks of assembly line workers were the simplest, most boring, and most degrading," (Meyer, p.1). For those individuals that sought to achieve the basic needs of life as they saw them, the advancements in the production line, courtesy of the increases in industrialization, would seem as a saving graces of sorts. The opportunity to have work environments that were simple.

Many who were a part of the workforce, worked in factories that resided in their respective towns. " As in Britain, the United States originally used water power to run its factories, with the consequence that industrialization was essentially limited to New England and the rest of the Northeastern United States, where fast-moving rivers were located," ("Industrial Revolution", p.19). With such limited presence in the modern world, the ability of transferring created goods to a broader grouping of people, would prove to be quite difficult.

The vision of a modern America, would be hindered in that, at this point, only a