In class, we have been talking about the Global south and the impact it has had on the United States South.  It has been made clear that when it comes to labor, the United States south has modeled its practices after those large industries in the Global South.  With that being said, I began to question whether or not the affect the Global South has had on the United States South labor force has been a positive or negative one.

Before answering this question, I think it is first important to distinguish the Global South from the United States South. The Global South extends beyond the confines of the United States, and extends to include places like Asia and Latin American countries; whereas, the United States south only includes southern states in The United States of America.  The Global South, in a sense,  set the stage for how to treat their industrial workers. For factory jobs, we have learned that the Global South offered poor working conditions and they rarely cared about the well-being of their workers.  To prevent the formation of things like unions, the Global South created racial tension amongst their employees. This ensured that people would not join together and protest against the company in order to bring about some change.  This exact method is how the United States South constructed and ran their factories and warehouses.

This method, later adopted by the United States South, is how industries ran and maintained order. This method is still around to this day. Of course, this method was created to maintain a type of social control in the workplace; however, it fosters an unequal opportunity of the employees. Because of this competition between races that was created at the boom of the industrial revolution, again, people who are members of minority groups are still disadvantaged.  So, not only were African Americans targeted and mistreated, but also women were viewed as the weaker gender. Factory owners then and now believe that women are less likely to speak up against poor working conditions because if they were to lose their job, then taking care of a family would indeed be out of the question.

After meditating on all of this information, I came to one conclusion. By following the Global South in their effort to create an ideal workforce for industrial businesses, the United States South set themselves up for failure. If the United States South came up with its own idea of how to run their industries, I believe that they would have come up with more reasonable working conditions.  I may be being a tad bit too optimistic considering the history of the United States of America, but I strongly believe creating their own mechanisms of social control in the worker place, these early factory owners could have created working conditions that were ideal for the American south worker instead of the Global south worker. If these things would have happened at the beginning of this industrial boom I believe the United States south labor jobs would be so much better.