Evaluating Worker-Management Relations in the U.S. (1870-1898)

This is not a revolution of fanatics willing to fight for an idea. It is a revolt of workingmen against low prices of labor, which have not been accompanied with correspondingly low prices of food, clothing, and house rent. I have the highest respect for the bone and sinew of the country, but we have now learned that here, as in Europe, when the working man gets into difficulties he allows the turbulent and depraved classes to join him under pretext of helping him out. They damage his cause, they hurt his reputation and they plunge him into still greater difficulties.

Much could be said of Pullman [Illinois, a company town created by the Pullman Palace Car Company to provide housing and a community for its workers] as a manufacturing centre, but the purpose of this article is to treat it as an attempt to furnish laborers with the best homes under the most healthful conditions and with the most favorable surroundings in every respect, for Pullman aims to be a forerunner of better things for the laboring classes. . . .

It was soon after the Civil War that the machine age begun and the shoe business grew. The first that come was the Howe machine. No power to it at first. It was run by the foot. The first McKay machine for stitching soles was also run by a foot pedal. ... But when the lasting machine come it, that caused considerable resentment because them fellas couldn’t do nothing else, and they was out. Might as well cut the throats a them men as put a lasting machine in their shop.

I maintain that this is a true proposition—that men under the short-hour system not only have opportunity to improve themselves, but to make a greater degree of prosperity for their employers. . . . Wherever men are cheap, there you find the least degree of progress. ... We notice that in any country where the hours of labor are longest, not only are the employers the poorest, but the wage-workers are the poorest.

Who are our women wage-workers? . . . Perhaps the simplest classification on practical lines would be in general terms: Women engaged in professional work. Women engaged in domestic service. . . . And now we come to the third class, “women engaged in store or factory work.” ... We must disentangle the individual from the mass. We must find a way or several ways of leading these girls, one by one, away from the shadows which envelop them, if not into the sunshine of happiness and prosperity, at least, into the softening light of content, born of pleasant surroundings, congenial occupations, and the inward satisfaction of a life well spent.