DAYS OF REST COME FROM ‘LABOR UNREST’
September 3, 2022 -Durt Fibo

All across America, you will notice that business managers are absent, relaxing and roistering through a four-day feast. Welcome to “Labor Day”, the national holiday assigned to the first Monday of every September. This cæsura was officially initiated on June 28, 1894 by President Grover Cleveland to placate the very workers his government had sent the army to shoot, leaving around 90 dead or wounded during the Pullman Strike, which had wound down just eight days before.

The strike had lasted over two months. It was the culmination of the desperation and impossible pressures crushing down on US laborers from the high-risk heights of global high finance and its Panic of 1893. Wheat crop disasters, property and other speculation collapses on at least two other continents melded into to a lava-flow of international runs on the gold held by the U.S. Treasury. As investments turned to liquid excrement, the cloacas of credit constricted, and the centers of European commerce rapidly sold off their American stocks for American gold. Within the US, stock prices plummeted and citizens ran like hell to withdraw their money from banks, of which some 500 had to close down. Farms died and 15,000 businesses perished. For US workers every aspect was worse; unemployment suddenly rose to 43% in some states, and only soup and bread lines kept many from starving.

George Pullman, who had created the popular Pullman Sleeping Car, was alarmed by the fall in demand for his products. When he had his industrial plant built, he’d simultaneously erected an entire town for his employees, just south of Chicago. Up to 1894, he ran the town like a despot, charging rents while refusing any variant of buying options, intruding on the workers’ lives and in their homes, monitoring upkeep and morality, and stringently censoring outside press and in-town speech. Pullman’s response to the economic breakdown was to cut wages by 20 to 25%, with no reduction in rent whatsoever. Needless to say, all other prices in the company town also remained at pre-crash levels. As Pullman refused to hear any pleas from the workers, they reacted to their utter doom by going on strike on May 11th.

Initially, only around 35% of the Pullman workers were members of the American Railway Union, which had Eugene V. Debs as its president. Although the ARU had organized the action against the Chicago factory, the rebellion quickly expanded to a boycott of the use or servicing of all Pullman cars on every railway line in America. Other union and craft associations joined the action; first switchmen refused to handle Pullman cars, but when railroad companies tried to punish them, the ARU called for a full strike against all railroads on June 26th. Now the disobedience exploded: within four days 125,000 workers on 29 railroads in 27 states either struck or resigned rather than touch a Pullman.

As the workers were shutting down the country, Debs was constantly trying to contain their outrage, with Debs, Illinois Governor John P. Altgeld and Mayor John Hopkins all telegraphing and maneuvering to avoid violence, but Altgeld was pressured into inflicting regular forces and state militia troops on the workers as a means of keeping the army from worsening the situation. Despite their efforts, with President Cleveland’s assent, United States Attorney General Richard Olney ordered federal troops to the center of the disruption. Chicago strikers were eventually facing 3,100 policemen, 5,000 deputy marshals and 6,000 federal and state troops. Consequently, on July 6th, 700 railroad cars in Chicago were allegedly torched by strikers and their allies. On July 7th, the National Guard fired directly into a crowd, killing 30 and wounding uncounted more.

Altgeld actually denounced the involvement of the federal troops as unconstitutional. Unfortunately, the government’s justification came from judges, who had produced a ruling which –among other sophistries– prohibited by law any senior members of the ARU from “compelling or inducing” any railroad employees “to refuse or fail to perform any of their duties.” By the wisdom of the law, Debs was prohibited from communicating at all, to anyone, his alerts against committing violent acts. By this point, violence was running through many cities across the nation. But the extent of the violence precipitated by the introduction of the federal soldiers finally wore away the general support the strikers had earned; the ARU evaporated, the strike dispersed, and Debs was convicted of violating a court order and sentenced to 6 months in prison. On July 20th, the army was recalled. On August 2nd, the Pullman Company reopened and announced that it would rehire former strikers only if they signed a promise to never join any union in the future.

Perversely, the government had used the Sherman Anti-Trust Act to argue the court into ruling the strike illegal. This 1890 law was originally meant to curb the monopolies of wild industrialists, granting the federal government power to prevent or dissolve combinations, trusts, or any unreasonable restraint in the realm of interstate commerce. To shatter the unions involved in the strike, the court decided that the American Railway Union and other supporters were engaging in a conspiracy to boycott in violation of the Sherman Act. This could be said to be the root of all modern-day ‘right to work’ anti-union ruses.