During the Industrial Revolution, America transformed from an agricultural country to an industrialized one. With the emergence of large industrialists such as John D. Rockefeller with his Standard Oil company and Andrew Carnegie controlling the entire Steel industry, politicians and industrialists often neglected workers’ working conditions. Their tactic of promoting the overall economic growth has simultaneously caused serious problems such as a bigger gap of wealth and the inhumane treatment to the workers. Therefore, in response to all these intolerable regulations, workers stood up for themselves and together formed workers cooperative and labor unions.
On an ordinary day of 1894 in a factory in Chicago, a worker’s strike broke out in George Pullman’s railroad cars manufacturing factory. The potential causes behind the strike serve as a reminder to the public of the worsening working conditions for the lower class workers. Different from what he has always been advertising about, Pullman treated his workers badly with very minimum wage and bad working conditions (“Pullman Strike”). To make things worse, Pullman decided to cut the wage again to further exploit his employees. In reaction to this impersonal treatment, the workers in the American Railway Union (ARU) fought back. The leader of this strike was Eugene V. Debs, who was the president of ARU. He condemned Pullman’s action, and compares him to the slave owners (“The Strike of”). Debs believed that all workers should cooperate together to fight against big industrialists and for their own working conditions. Deb served six months in jail after the strike; however, this movement has brought this critical social issue to the publics’ attention. All of this led to the establishment of the Railway Labor Act of 1926 and the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, which guaranteed the workers right to join a labor union. While other people ignored workers, Debs has always been fighting against the inhumane treatment in the industries, serving as an important reformer in the workers history.
While Debs was imprisoned, Mary Harris Jones stood out for him and supported Pullman’s strike. Mother Jones was an Irish immigrant; after her husband and children died, she joined and supported the workers strike. She has helped African American workers to obtain their rights, held opposition to child labor, and also proposed a shorter working time. Most prominently, she has devoted to fight for the abolition of child labor. In the year of 1903, she joined a march with mill workers and child laborers from New York City to President Theodore Roosevelt’s Long Island home to advocate for their economic justice (“Mother Jones”). She once said that “today the white child is sold for two dollars a week to the manufacturer” in order to satirize the purposes of the industries for using those extremely cheap child labor. Her fierce reforms led to new child labor laws, which prevented children under 14 from working. These laws are still in place to this day to protect children from physical damage at a young age as well as their educational opportunities.
Sources:
“Pullman Strike.” EHISTORY, The Ohio State University, https://ehistory.osu.edu/exhibitions/1912/content/pullman.
“The Strike of 1894.” National Parks Service, U.S. Department of the Interior, https://www.nps.gov/pull/learn/historyculture/the-strike-of-1894.htm.
“Mother Jones: AFL-CIO.” AFL, aflcio.org/about/history/labor-history-people/mother-jones. </small>
Written by Yusong Liang
Edited by: Brian Yu
America’s Immigrant Farm Workers