How we got labor unions and workers’ rights…lest we forget

Here are a few excerpts from an essay I wrote last year on the social gospel in America:

According to historian Howard Zinn, 1,118,000 children under the age of sixteen were employed in this country in 1880. On May 1, 1886, nationwide strikes occurred: 350,000 workers in 11,562 establishments walked off the job. In New York City, 25,000 of them marched in a torchlight parade to protest capitalistic injustice. That year, 1886, was called “the year of the great uprising of labor.” There were over 1,400 strikes involving half a million workers.

The Homestead Strike of 1892 bore witness to the increasing divide between labor and owners. Workers walked off the job in Pennsylvania at the Carnegie-Phipps steel mill. There was violence and bloodshed. At this time a factory worker earned $446 annually, a miner earned $393 per year, a school teacher $273 per year. But Andrew Carnegie’s income was $4,000,000 a year.

December 1907 was a bad month for miners. A West Virginia coalmine explosion killed 361 miners; an explosion in Pennsylvania killed 239 miners; in Alabama a coalmine explosion killed 91 miners. But there were positive signs on the social front: twenty-three states passed laws reducing work hours for men employed in mines, smelters, underground work, and train operators.

Walter Rauschenbusch was a pastor in the slums of New York City. In 1892 he went to John D. Rockefeller and told him, “It has been a hard year for many of our people. Many of them have been laid off for weeks, and even months.” That took guts.

Urban pastors like Rauschenbusch supported the causes of the Progressive Era. These causes included taxation of income and inheritances, safety standards for factories, shorter work hours, accident and unemployment insurance, public health initiatives, old age pensions, regulation of tenements, and conservation of natural resources.

New York City changed Walter Rauschenbusch. He never forgot the funerals he performed for children who had died from disease, abuse, neglect, or starvation. He never forgot the plight of the workers and the unemployed. To him, “the Gay 90s” were not gay at all. Machines, money, and the metropolis were killing people…

And so we have come a long way from those days, largely because people spoke up, churches got involved, workers united, and government policies became more humane—but not without effort and sacrifice. The work goes on now under different circumstances, yet it’s based on the same principles of the dignity of human beings and social justice. The Gospel of Wealth is a false gospel.