by Denny Banister
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by Denny Banister
Tennessee Ernie Ford’s hit recording Sixteen Tons lamented “…I owe my soul to the company store.” While the tune was catchy and fun to sing along with (while snapping fingers), most Americans could not relate to the idea of a company store in the mid 50s when the song sold a million copies in less than a month.
During America’s industrial revolution, however, the company store was a reality for many laborers. Imagine, leaving the farm for a better way of life, only to find yourself in a dirty city working long hours and spending most of your pay at stores owned by the company employing you. Such practices by the Pullman Company, manufacturer of railroad sleeping cars, helped Labor Day become a reality.
In 1880, George Pullman designed and built the town of Pullman, Illinois, where his factory employed the town’s inhabitants. Pullman’s employees lived in row houses owned by Pullman, and their rent (determined by Pullman) was deducted automatically from their weekly paychecks at the Pullman Bank.
During a nationwide economic downturn in 1893, orders for railroad sleeping cars declined, forcing Pullman to lay off hundreds of workers. Those employees who managed to retain their jobs were forced to accept pay cuts, but their rent for mandated company housing was not reduced. “…Another day older and deeper in debt,” – the lyrics to Sixteen Tons are a little more understandable.
Pullman employees walked off the job in protest, and railroad workers nationwide boycotted trains carrying Pullman cars. The work stoppage led to riots and the burning of railroad cars, and President Grover Cleveland, pressured by railroad executives and disrupted mail train service, deployed 12,000 troops to break the strike.
After a good deal of violence and the death of two protesters, the strike was over in August of 1894, but it was an election year and President Cleveland needed the workers’ vote. Legislation was quickly adopted (unanimously) in both the House and Senate and on the President’s desk in less than a week after the Pullman strike was broken. President Grover Cleveland signed the bill making Labor Day a legal holiday, but lost the election.
When Tennessee Ernie Ford’s record was a hit, nearly half of all American workers belonged to unions, but 50 years later Americans are singing a different tune – union membership has dropped to less than 15 percent. Labor Day now serves as summer’s final fling for most Americans, not the tribute to labor unions it was in the late 1800s during the time of union organizer Samuel Gompers, the first president of the American Federation of Labor.
There is no doubt labor unions were needed to correct the many inequities faced by American laborers during the industrialization of the United States, but Labor Day should pay tribute to the workers themselves – all American workers. Union and non-union, farm and factory, rural and urban, it is the American worker who helped the United States develop the greatest production and highest standard of living the world has ever known.
(Denny Banister, of Jefferson City, Mo., is the assistant director of public affairs for the Missouri Farm Bureau, the state’s largest farm organization.)