A thanks to the laborers who came before us
A recent Facebook post claims that most of the benefits won for laborers by the blood and sacrifice of unions were instead a gift to his employees by Ford founder and owner, Henry Ford.
I have read and researched Mr. Ford’s historical triumphs, and it’s true he was years ahead of the auto industry with assembly line techniques he learned in meat processing plants. Early on, his workers enjoyed an ease of production unavailable to the hand-built assembly plants. And the techniques Ford applied provided another benefit: for the first time, employees building the Model Ts could afford to buy one.
But beyond that, early industrial America was more the nearly inhuman production processes assessed by Eric Loomis in his shocking treatise, “The History of America in Ten Strikes.”
In it, Loomis takes a gestalt view of the early clothing industry and the ridiculous use of child labor, long hours and next to nothing wages. In overcrowded sweat shops in the northeast, women and children worked long hours in terrible conditions. Any complaint would bring discipline or firing; wages were a mere pittance, barely enough to survive.
There was no impetus by industry to improve conditions in any way. Most manufacturing, spurred by increasing population and the Industrial Revolution, scrambled to meet demand. Workers were treated as machines, easy to replace any that failed.
I challenge the idea that working conditions over decades and centuries would have improved substantially without laborers conjoining to demand better conditions and more humane treatment. Strength of unity is the foundation of unions and labor associations.
The concept of equal rights and due process have been under constant attack in one way or another throughout United States history, and maybe never as much as today.
In a country and a century that revered the ingenuity and strength of individuals like Ford, Vanderbilt, Rockefeller and others, laborers were just another means to an end with a beating heart, and the need for their respect and the dignity of a livable wage was ignored.
The Industrial Revolution brought prosperity to the steel industry and also great demand for the fuel needed to make steel. Along with the burgeoning need for labor, trade unions also grew, among them, AFL-CIO, and the United Mine Workers.
Meteoric growth in these industries ignored, maybe even understandably, the basic needs of laborers as they raced to fuel the bottom line of profit.
A competent study of the reasons for the rise and fall of one of the country’s largest steel makers is “Sparrows Point, Making Steel,The Rise and Fall of American Industrial Might” by Mark Reutter.
His analysis points to bottom line greed and terrible employer/employee relations as a major reason for the bankruptcy of industrial giant Bethlehem Steel. I personally witnessed some of Sparrows Point’s inadequate safety procedures while I spent two years there as a millwright trainee in the pipe mill.
Steel industry businesses were stocking products for a planned strike. Hiring hundreds a day and placing untrained workers in critical jobs resulted in a high incidence of industrial accidents. Everything was geared to run the mill at top speed. My right leg was severely injured when a trainee bridge crane operator misread a signal and toppled a spare roll housing on me.
Years later, serving nearly half my teaching career as a local association president, it was shocking to witness a few co-workers who could not or would not see the value or necessity of a union. Most did not realize that before Act 195 of 1970, Pennsylvania teachers could not negotiate salaries or demand just cause.
The right to negotiate did not come easily. Teachers had historically been compensated by whatever practice the local school board decreed, some rules extending back to colonialism. Teachers’ strikes were met with criticism, ridicule and in many cases violence.
So this year, like every year since Tuesday, Sept. 5, 1882, celebrations of labor universal will happen across America. Laborers will march. They will not be marching as educators, steelworkers or miners, nor as longshoremen or truckers, public workers, nurses or farm workers.
They will march, sing and celebrate every fight and every victory, great or small as the American labor team. They will march to celebrate the laborers who came before, who fought the good fight, those who suffered and bled and those who died, so that every worker be recognized, respected and compensated fairly.
Labor is, after all, the first breath of freedom.
Roy Hess Sr. is a retired teacher and businessman from Dawson.