Labor Day has always felt like Dropout Day among high school students. A day off? Just because we work? Makes you think we should have these three-day weekends all year round. But like so many American traditions, scratch the surface of this innocuous federal holiday and you’ll see capitalism run rampant and bloodshed.
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In America’s forgotten working history, transportation has always played a huge role. Decades before the UAW drew the world’s most powerful companies to the bargaining table, there were railroads and all the unions involved in their operations. The Pullman Railroad Strike of 1894 would put 250,000 people out of work; Union troops broke up the strike, with 30 dead. The reasons why those workers went on strike will be familiar to many of us today. Typically this political cartoon from a labor newspaper in Chicago, could also have been out in 2022:
To know about the Pullman strike and how it completely changed America, you first need to know a little bit about the sleepy Chicago car magnate George M. Pullman. Follow Chicago Magazine. Likely getting away with serving in the Civil War, he instead spent his time creating and streamlining the production of luxury train sleepers. Pullman considered himself a Lincoln-style Republican, and prided himself on hiring so many former slaves from the south that Pullman became the largest employer of black Americans in 1900. He was also the early adopters of the corporate town, building concept. neat little brick houses, a library and the first indoor shopping center in the Midwest, all near Chicago’s transportation hub. The town of Pullman still exists, in part, as a neighborhood in that city.
But not everything went so smoothly in Pullman’s factories and railroad cars. Black train porters are well paid, mainly based on tips from brutally racist passenger used to consider Negroes as slaves of chattels. George Pullman is truly considered one of the people who created a cultural phenomenon in America The recruitment of these Southern black men is based on recent racist ideas of docile and privileged nature. freed slaves, according to the book Fight Like Hell: The Untold History of the American Labor Movement. These workers have a seasoned handbook of rules and regulations for living, and are forbidden to eat at the sight of passengers or even sleep on long cross-country routes. The recruitment of black Americans to low-service positions reinforced the racial segregation that was present in every aspect of American life. White passengers often refer to porters as “George”, reflecting the view that these employees are essentially own by George Pullman. Black maids are even worse off facing sexual assault and sexism from both passengers and porters, all of which are underpaid.
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For factory workers at Pullman Palace Car Company, life in Pullman, Illinois, was tough. Life is also tightly controlled, with a messy lawn or a fight with your spouse ending with a call home from your boss. Rents for homes adjacent to the factory were unbelievably high, even before the worst economic disaster in American history (at the time) occurred in 1893. Pullman cut wages and laid off workers, but did not cut rents. That left his workers in dire straits, sometimes with only a few dollars left to live for two weeks after their rent was deducted from their paychecks. A Pullman employee testified that, after his hours were cut and his rent deducted, his payslip showed he owed Pullman two cents. (He framed the check.)
On May 14, 1894, Pullman workers left their jobs in disgust.
Normally, such a strike might not draw much attention, but Pullman workers were members of the Union of American Railroads. From coal miners to seafarers, industry and railroads west of Detroit begins to close in the name of solidarity. The Pullman strike would show the country and its powerful oligarchs the power of labor. Are from Smithsonian Magazine:
… Pullman employees were members of the American Railway Union, a large labor organization founded just a year earlier by labor leader Eugene V. Debs. At their June convention, delegates from the ARU, a union open to all white railroad employees, voted to boycott Pullman wagons until the strike was resolved.
At the convention, Debs advised members to include in their ranks the porters necessary for Pullman’s operations. But it was a racially harsh time, and white workers refused to be “brothers” to the African-Americans who drove the trains. That is a serious mistake.
The boycott closed many of the nation’s railways, especially in the West. The workers’ remarkable display of solidarity caused a national crisis. Passengers are trapped; Riots broke out in the railway yards. Across the country, prices for food, ice and coal skyrocketed. Mines and timber mills were closed due to lack of transportation. Factories and power plants have run out of fuel and resources.
George Pullman refused to respond to his employees’ request to appoint a neutral arbitrator to decide the merits of their claims. The company, he claims, “has nothing to arbitrate.” It was a phrase he would repeat over and over again, and one that would haunt him to his grave.
And this is how a wealthy, familial tycoon, who saw himself as a patriot and hero to the oppressed, came to be known as one of the great villains. greatest of the early American labor movement. Pullman contacted US Attorney General Richard Olney, a practicing railroad lawyer who persuaded the court to issue an order against the union, making the strike illegal.
However, the strike continued and shook the country so much that Congress made Labor Day a national holiday in the hope of appeasing the strikers. Prior to the strike, Labor Day was a holiday celebrated only in a handful of states, with Oregon being the first to pass legislation recognizing Labor Day on February 21, 1887. The following year, New York fasted. quickly followed suit, along with Colorado, Massachusetts, and New Austria.
But one more a year off is not enough. These are workers who have jobs, but are still poor under the yoke of their bosses both at work and at home. When legal wrangling and congressional approval proved fruitless, Olney persuaded President Grover Cleveland to send armed troops to break up the strike, all without state approval. In the end, 30 Americans, mostly in Pullman’s hometown of Chicago, would die in the riot, shot dead by their countrymen. Thousands of others were injured or lose their jobs.
While the strike was quelled without any negotiation between labor and management, Pullman’s reputation dwindled, never to recover. When Eugene Debs, the labor organizer arrested for defying a court strike order, was released from prison, a crowd of 100,000 people showed up to cheer him on. He will become a major force in organizing and strengthening unions. The strike also led to the creation of the first all-black union in the American Federation of Labor, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. (Much of Debs’ disappointment, ARU .’s brotherhood voted to still admit only white workers into its ranks, even although some black workers were involved big strike.)
Compare Debs’ fate to what happened to Pullman, according to Smithsonian:
The federal commission investigating the strike judged that his company’s paternity was “behind its time”. A court soon ordered the company to sell off the model neighborhood. When Pullman died three years after the strike, he left instructions that his body be encased in reinforced concrete for fear it would be disregarded.
A rabbi exclaimed at Pullman’s funeral, “What did he have planned!” But most only remember how badly his plan went wrong. Eugene Debs offered the simplest eulogy for his pompous villain: “Now he’s equal to the toilet-goers.”
Things have not changed much since 1894. If railway workers and managers do not come to an agreement by September 15 on a new contractthose workers could go to the hotline, causing further ripples through the fragile recovering economy.
As we watch Jeff Bezos, CEO of the largest online retailer in the world and a notorious abuser of his own workforce, engaged in rental housing during the historic housing crisis and rental prices skyrocketed, we must ask ourselves whether we are falling into the same traps that defined America’s Gilded Age. In a time of unbridled profits for companies and unbridled inflation for the rest of us, it’s good for Americans to remember what can happen when those who are working not shared fairly in the good times.
