6.7 Labor in the Gilded Age

By 1900 most American workers earned wages from an employer rather than working for themselves. A typical factory or mill worker put in ten to twelve hours a day, six days a week. Mines, railroads and steel mills killed and injured thousands of workers each year, and there was no workers' compensation. Children worked in textile mills, coal mines and canneries, and women worked in garment shops, often for lower pay than men.

Real wages are wages measured by what they can buy. Because prices fell for much of the period, many workers' real wages actually rose. Still, depressions brought wage cuts and mass layoffs, and jobs were insecure. Many workers felt they had lost the independence of skilled craftsmen and become 'wage slaves'.

Some workers lived in company towns, where the employer owned the housing and stores. In the South, convict leasing hired out prisoners, mostly Black men, to private companies under brutal conditions.

• Great Railroad Strike (1877): after wage cuts on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, strikes spread nationwide. President Rutherford B. Hayes sent federal troops, and about 100 people died. It was the first nationwide strike.
• Haymarket affair (1886): at a Chicago rally supporting an 8-hour day, someone threw a bomb that killed police officers, and gunfire followed. Anarchists were convicted on thin evidence. Many Americans linked unions with violence and radicalism, and the Knights of Labor collapsed.
• Homestead Strike (1892): at Carnegie Steel's Homestead, Pennsylvania, mill, company chairman Henry Clay Frick locked out the union. A gun battle with Pinkerton guards left several dead, and the state militia broke the strike. The steel union was crushed.
• Pullman Strike (1894): the Pullman Palace Car Company cut wages during the depression but did not lower rents in its company town. Eugene V. Debs's American Railway Union refused to handle Pullman cars, paralyzing rail traffic. A federal court issued an injunction (a court order) against the strike, and President Grover Cleveland sent troops. The Supreme Court upheld Debs's jailing in In re Debs (1895).

Employers had powerful tools: lockouts, blacklists of union members, private guards, strikebreakers, and yellow-dog contracts in which workers promised not to join unions. Courts issued injunctions, and governors and presidents sent troops. Divisions within the working class, between skilled and unskilled, native-born and immigrant, and white and Black workers, also made solidarity hard. Union membership stayed a small share of the workforce, but the struggles of this era laid groundwork for later labor laws in the Progressive Era and New Deal.