6.6 - Labor in the Gilded Age

Challenges for Wage Earners

• By 1900, two-thirds of Americans worked for wages, often under harsh conditions with long hours (ten hours a day, six days a week).

• Wages were low due to a large supply of immigrant labor, leading many families to rely on income from women and children.

• Real wages rose over time, but most families still struggled to make ends meet, with about 20 percent of children working by 1900.

• Real wages rose because mass production and cheap railroad shipping lowered the prices of many goods, so a day's pay bought more. Many families could now afford ready-made clothing, canned food, kerosene lamps, and goods from mail-order catalogs like Montgomery Ward and Sears, Roebuck, so standards of living improved for many Americans.

• At the same time, the gap between rich and poor grew. Industrialists like Carnegie and Rockefeller built fortunes worth hundreds of millions of dollars, while many steelworkers worked 12-hour days for a few hundred dollars a year, and the depressions that began in 1873 and 1893 brought layoffs and wage cuts that wiped out workers' gains.

• Child labor increased as factories used machines that needed less skill and employers could pay children less. By 1900, about 1.75 million children ages 10 to 15 worked, in textile mills, coal mines (as "breaker boys" picking slate out of coal), canneries, and city streets, usually because their families needed the income.

• Industrial workers faced monotonous, dangerous work with limited sense of accomplishment, often in unhealthy environments.

• Workers frequently rebelled by missing work, quitting, or changing jobs, with about 20 percent eventually leaving the industrial workforce altogether.

• Lockout: Closing a factory to break a labor movement before it could organize.

• Blacklist: Circulating the names of pro-union workers to prevent them from finding employment.

• Yellow-dog Contract: A contract where workers agreed not to join a union as a condition of employment.

• Private Guards and State Militia: Used by employers to suppress strikes.

• Court Injunction: Legal action to prevent or end a strike.

• Management supported public fear of unions as anarchistic and un-American, often winning labor disputes with support from the federal and state governments.

• Workers used collective bargaining, where they negotiated as a group with employers for better wages and working conditions, and picketing, where they demonstrated outside workplaces to protest and discourage others from working.

• Some labor advocates pushed for political reforms to support worker rights, while others favored direct confrontation through strikes, boycotts, and slowdowns.

Great Railroad Strike of 1877

• A nationwide strike erupted during an economic depression when railroad companies cut wages.

• The strike spread from West Virginia and Maryland to cities like Pittsburgh, Chicago, and St. Louis. More than 100,000 workers took part, and at its height more than half of the freight on the nation's railroads stopped moving.

• President Rutherford B. Hayes used federal troops to end the strike, resulting in over 100 deaths.

• The strike led to some employers improving wages and conditions, while others took a harder line against unions.

• Founded in 1866, it was the first attempt to organize all workers in all states, including skilled and unskilled, agricultural and industrial workers.

• Advocated for higher wages, an eight-hour workday, equal rights for women and African Americans, monetary reform, and worker cooperatives.

• Won the eight-hour day for federal government workers but lost support after the 1873 depression and unsuccessful strikes in 1877.

• The NLU mostly kept Black workers out, so in 1869 African American workers led by Isaac Myers, a Baltimore ship caulker, formed the Colored National Labor Union.

• Began in 1869 as a secret society and went public in 1881 under Terence V. Powderly.

• Opened membership to all workers, including African Americans and women.

• Advocated for worker cooperatives, abolition of child labor, trusts and monopolies, and arbitration over strikes.

• Peaked at about 730,000 members in 1886 but declined rapidly after the Haymarket bombing in Chicago that year.

Haymarket Bombing

• A public meeting in Chicago's Haymarket Square on May 4, 1886, turned violent when someone threw a bomb at police. The blast and the gunfire that followed left seven police officers and several civilians dead.

• Eight anarchist leaders were tried, with seven sentenced to death, causing public opinion to turn against the labor movement.

• The Knights of Labor lost popularity and membership following the incident.

• Unlike the reform-minded Knights of Labor, the American Federation of Labor (AFL) focused on narrower economic goals, primarily higher wages and improved working conditions.

• Founded in 1886 as an association of 25 craft unions of skilled workers, it was led by Samuel Gompers until 1924.

• Gompers directed local unions to walk out until employers agreed to negotiate new contracts through collective bargaining.

• By 1901, the AFL was the nation’s largest labor organization with 1 million members, though significant successes would come later in the 20th century.

• Because it organized only skilled craft workers, the AFL left out most unskilled factory workers, and many of its member unions kept out women, Black workers, and new immigrants. Gompers accepted capitalism and focused on "bread and butter" gains like pay and hours instead of trying to change the whole economic system.

Strikes and Strikebreaking in the 1890s

• Two massive strikes in the last decade of the 19th century demonstrated both the growing discontent of labor and the continued power of management.

• Henry Clay Frick, the manager of Andrew Carnegie’s Homestead Steel plant near Pittsburgh, cut wages by nearly 20%, leading to a strike.

• Frick used lockouts, private guards, and strikebreakers to defeat the steelworkers' walkout after five months, resulting in at least 10 deaths, mostly steelworkers.

• The failure of the Homestead strike set back the union movement in the steel industry until the New Deal in the 1930s.

• Workers at George Pullman’s company town near Chicago struck after wages were cut and leaders of their delegation were fired.

• The American Railway Union (ARU), led by Eugene V. Debs, supported the strike by boycotting trains with Pullman cars, tying up rail transportation nationwide.

• Railroad owners linked Pullman cars to mail trains and persuaded President Grover Cleveland to use the army to keep the mail trains running.

• A federal court issued an injunction against the strike, leading to the arrest and jailing of Debs and other union leaders, effectively ending the strike.

• The Supreme Court’s decision in In re Debs (1895) upheld the use of court injunctions against strikes, giving employers a powerful legal tool to break unions.

• After his jail sentence, Debs turned to socialism, helped found the Socialist Party of America in 1901, and ran for president five times.

Conditions in 1900

• By 1900, only 3 percent of American workers belonged to unions, with management holding the upper hand in labor disputes and government generally siding with employers.

• The need for a better balance between the demands of employers and employees was becoming recognized to avoid the numerous strikes and violence of the late 19th century.

• Industrial growth was concentrated in the Northeast and Midwest, attracting more immigrants and migrants, leading to the development of more cities.