The Labor Day holiday started off as probably the biggest bait and switch in American history. It started as a holiday created by politicians who wanted to quell the voices of the worker masses and their attempts to form unions.
Instead of being given the badly needed reforms during the height of the Industrial Revolution, workers got a day off; they got an unpaid day off.
After the Civil War, the nation went about rebuilding the South and returning to the business of industrial production.
Factories up North suddenly received a boon in available labor as many of the freed slaves decided migrated to the northern factories to find work.
In Augusta, the old Confederate Powder Works was dismantled, and textile mills producing cotton and silk products sprung up all along the Augusta Canal, according to documentation by late historian Ed Cashin.
However, the explosion of available labor meant that the corporations could dictate virtually every aspect of the worker’s lives. Corporate bosses controlled the pay and the work hours required.
In many instances, workers lived in company-owned homes and were paid in company currency only redeemable at the “company store.”
According to the Library of Congress, workers worked a minimum of 12-hour shifts, most only receiving the Sabbath as a day off, but they were not guaranteed as the steel mills and other factories geared up to operate 24 hours a day and 7 days a week.
Adult workers were paid so little that, in many cases, it was necessary for their children to join them in the factories. It wasn’t an odd sight at all to witness boys of 11 or 12 years of age emerging from the coal mines where they toiled alongside their fathers.
In fact, children were prized workers as girls with small hands could easily reach into the textile looms to correct a problem. However, many were injured by being caught up in the machinery.
Children and adult workers were also exposed to dangerous chemicals. Children working in matchstick factories and other similar industries developed “Phossy jaw,” or phosphorus necrosis of the jaw where the bones in the jaw literally wither away from phosphorus exposure, according to the British Dental Journal.
Those children were called “stinkies” by their peers due to the odor of rot their young bodies emanated.
According to the National Archives, the 1833 Factory Act did absolutely nothing to ease child labor as most factory foremen ignored it or paid off the inspectors.
The so-called Robber Barons, the industry titans of the time, displayed their fabulous wealth with 20-room mansions they called “cottages” and were quick to remind the newspaper men of their philanthropy. In turn, some newspapermen of the time heralded the corporate titans as heroes.
Sure, the Barons created libraries, museums, sports arenas and opera houses, but their workers hardly ever had the time or the money to visit these places.
For most people in America, factory life was a Groundhog Day of endless labor that barely provided the means for cabbage soup every night.
By the early 1890s, the labor movement really ramped up, and activists were able to get the first Monday in September recognized as Labor Day in several states. After the Pullman Strike occurred in 1894, the holiday became a federal holiday.
However, the activists who pushed for the holiday hoped that reforms would soon follow, and they didn’t for many years. The eight-hour workday slowly became a standard, but the Fair Labor Standards Act eliminating child labor was not finally passed until 1938.
It was capitalists such as Henry Ford who made voluntary reforms for workers. According to Forbes Magazine, Ford doubled the pay for workers on the assembly line, but his decision was not out of altruism. It was a money saving gambit to keep workers on the job instead of having to train new hires daily.
Interestingly enough, historians who study the Medieval period have added up the amount of time our ancestors spent with festivals, holidays, days in service to the Church and just general frolic time and concluded the modern worker works more hours per year than the lowly Medieval peasant.
…And that is something you may not have known.
