<P> Increasing industrialization outpaced the supply of laborers able or willing to work in dangerous, low - paying, and dead - end jobs . However, the demand for low or unskilled jobs drove wages up and attracted waves of Irish, Italian, Polish, Russian, and Jewish immigrants who could earn more in America than in their homelands . </P> <P> The earliest unions emerged before the Civil War as trade guilds composed of journeyman carpenters, masons, and other artisans who would engage in strikes to demand better hours and pay from their masters . All branches of government generally sought to stop labor from organizing into unions or from organizing strikes . </P> <P> To finance the larger - scale enterprises required during this era, the Stockholder Corporation emerged as the dominant form of business organization . Corporations expanded by combining into trusts, and by creating single firms out of competing firms, known as monopolies . Banking, investment, insurance, consulting, corporations, speculation, business cycle </P> <P> The Progressive movement and the Progressive Era that emerged from it was in part a reaction to excesses of the new industrial age . "Muckraking" journalists reported on a wide array of social issues, and the reaction of the public lent urgency to reforms that led to increased government regulation, such as the Meat Inspection Act and Pure Food and Drug Act (1906). </P>

Summarize some of the new technology that helped change life in the west