Underground and Abandoned — The Jungle

Winter drives Jurgis back to Chicago with fifteen dollars and hard-won street sense. He lands work digging telephone tunnels, not knowing the job is a secret freight subway built to break the teamsters' union. Decent wages buy warmth only in saloons; nowhere else welcomes a dirty, vermin-scented man from underground. He digs a freight subway built to break teamsters without knowing it.

A cave-in crushes his arm. The hospital stay feels almost humane until discharge comes while he is still disabled, winter outside, under three dollars in his pocket. The company owes nothing; the landlady will not keep him. Injury converts a worker into litter with no legal recourse and no next shift to claim. A cave-in crushes his arm; discharge brings three dollars and winter.

Begging fails because poverty is a profession with specialists. Con artists fake wounds; amateurs like Jurgis earn contempt instead of coins. He watches evangelists preach to men who need meals, rage sharpening as well-fed voices promise salvation without rent money or coal for the room. Con artists and evangelists split the trade of begging and preaching.

Jurgis learns the disposable labor trap from inside it, another cycle of useful, ruined, and cast out before spring can offer even false hope to a man with one good arm. Bribed officials price broken bodies at zero and cast them out.