GAIL DRAKE: Labor Day: The legacy of listening

“The laborer is worth of his hire.”

— Luke 10:7

One man listened.

When auto manufacturer Henry Ford opened his factories in 1914 in Dearborn, Mich., he shocked the country when he announced $5-per-day wages, twice the customary rate. Workers lined up to work for him and remained in their jobs long-term. Ford’s productivity doubled within two years. He initiated an 8-hour workday, then gradually changed to five days per week.

“It is high time to rid ourselves of the notion that leisure for workmen is either ‘lost time’ or a class privilege,” Ford said.

The Ford Motor Company thrived for decades, and other corporations followed this example. American workers began to enjoy new prosperity, and we celebrate today with the national Labor Day holiday.

Unfortunately, other men did not listen. In the 1800s, most workers worked 10- to 12-hour days, six days per week, with very few breaks. Men, women and children often labored in deplorable, dangerous factories and mines and received paltry wages. Workers begged business owners for fair treatment.

It would be years before President Grover Cleveland signed a bill into law making Labor Day a national holiday to celebrate the American worker. In between was a bloody, gory “hot mess.” Violence, riots, bombings, murder, and the entire railroad system surrounding Chicago screeched to a halt. Fury ignited with the Haymarket Riot in Chicago and exploded with the Pullman Strikes.

In May 1886, factory labor unions called for a strike to demand an 8-hour workday. The police tried to break up the strike. Complaining of brutality, anarchist labor leaders held a mass meeting at the Haymarket Square. After most the demonstrators left, police told the crowd to disperse. Then a bomb was thrown into the crowd. The police opened fire. Seven police officers were killed and 60 others wounded; eight civilians died and at least 30 were injured.

The riot created such hysteria, labor leader August Spies and seven anarchists were arrested, tried, convicted of murder and four were hanged. However, the trial was so fraught with flaws, obvious bias and lack of evidence that the surviving men were later granted clemency.

Chicago millionaire George Pullman manufactured luxury train cars, wildly popular in the burgeoning railroad industry. He built a state-of-the-art community south of Chicago for his workers, named Pullman, that included deluxe townhomes, schools, stores and a theater. However, when his company faced a financial downturn, he slashed wages but not the rents and other charges he deducted from employee paychecks. Many of his workers and their families had no remaining wages and faced starvation. When a committee of workers approached him in May 1894 about low wages and 16-hour workdays, George Pullman fired them. All the Pullman workers called a strike and walked off their jobs.

Viewing the Pullman workers as oppressed by an abusive boss and landlord, in solidarity, other union leaders at railroads boycotted pulling Pullman cars. By June 1894, 125,000 workers on 29 railroads had quit working. Eventually 250,000 workers in 27 states had gone on strike. Workers became enraged, set fire to buildings and derailed a locomotive. Unfortunately for them, the locomotive was attached to a U.S. mail train. President Cleveland was alarmed by the assault on federal property and sent federal troops to Chicago to stop the “reign of terror.”

In July, 6,000 rioters destroyed hundreds of railcars. Guardsmen fired on a mob, killing nearly 30 people. The strike eventually dwindled, and the railcars started to move, but at what cost? By the time the riots ended, the railroads had lost millions of dollars in damaged property and lost revenue, and the strikers had lost millions in wages. A presidential commission investigated and found George Pullman partly to blame for the strikes. When Pullman died two years later, his family buried him in reinforced concrete to prevent desecration of his body.

Henry Ford understood the wisdom of fair treatment for employees.

How much misery and mayhem would have been spared if other business owners had followed Biblical labor laws.