The study of labor history, while rooted in the past, has everything to do with how we envision the future – and how we chart a path to get there. At the East Side Freedom Library, we think that placing the movement for the eight-hour day in conversation with the movement for a $15 minimum wage can help us learn how to shape our future.
The call for “eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will” became the rallying cry for the American labor movement after the Civil War, even as most workers put in ten-, eleven-, and twelve-hour days. Skilled building trades workers, railroad workers, miners, and factory workers came together with one vision and one voice. In 1886, the country’s two major labor organizations joined together to call for a nationwide general strike. Their members pledged to walk out on May 1 and not to return to work until every worker was offered a standard eight-hour day.
At the center of the movement was the McCormick Harvester Works in Chicago, the largest factory in the United States, with a workforce that included unskilled as well as skilled workers, and immigrants and workers of color alongside native-born whites. When police broke up a rally at the factory gates on May 4, there was violence and bloodshed. Strike leaders were arrested; some would be tried for murder and executed. The movement came to a halt for a generation, but workers and their unions revived the movement for an eight-hour day, and, after yet more years of organizing and protesting, finally received it with the passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938.
It had taken three generations to make the eight-hour day a reality. But every time the movement surged forward, it enabled the labor movement to reach beyond the boundaries of formal unions and the procedures of collective bargaining, connect workplaces with communities, unite experienced union members with women and men new to labor organization, and bring workers of color and immigrants into conversations, relationships, and solidarity with white men.
Artwork by Ricardo Levins Morales
It is frustrating that a parliamentary maneuver has allowed Congress to avoid dealing head-on with the issue of a $15 minimum wage. But that it had to consider raising the federal minimum wage from $7.25 to $15 suggests the power that this movement – and its core ideas – now manifest. The Fight for $15 began in 2012 when two hundred fast-food workers walked off the job to demand $15 an hour and union rights in New York City. Today, it is a global movement of fast-food workers, home health aides, childcare teachers, airport workers, adjunct professors, retail employees, and other underpaid workers in over 300 cities on six continents. Unions are among this movement’s most important supporters and resources, but it also includes workers without union affiliations, members of worker centers, teenagers, seniors, and immigrants with and without documentation, encompassing a diverse group of whites and people of color with men, women, and individuals across the spectrums of sexual orientation and gender identity.
In its inclusive membership, its vision of broad and sweeping change, and its insistence that all workers should share in the wealth that they produce, we can recognize this movement’s kinship with the movement for the eight-hour day. Organizers of the Fight for $15 proclaim on their website: “When we first took the streets, the skeptics called us dreamers. They said a $15 wage was “unwinnable.” We didn’t listen. We organized and we fought for what we knew was right. We’ve already won raises for 22 million people across the country – including 10 million who are on their way to $15/hr – all because workers came together and acted like a union.”
The workers rallying outside the McCormick Harvester Works on May 1, 1886, would have understood them perfectly. As the East Side Freedom Library curates conversations between the past and the present, in the wake of the pandemic and the murder of George Floyd, we try to be guided by this message, too.
Peter Rachleff and Beth Cleary