The Shingle War at Ballard
Workers at the Seattle Cedar Lumber and Stimson mills walk off the job to resist a wage-cutting campaign, testing the limits of non-union labor.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
The shingle weavers at Ballard struck yesterday because of the attempt on the part of the mills to reduce wages, according to the new schedule adopted by the Manufacturers' Association last month. The Seattle Cedar Lumber Company and the Stimson Mill Company started to work part of their shingle mills under the reduced schedule of wages, which was to go into effect July 1. The union men refused to work at the reduced wages, and the mills attempted to run with non-union or 'scab' crews. The Seattle Cedar Lumber Company ran until 9 o'clock, when it was forced to shut down because they could not work the mill with the unskilled men employed. A. W. Hight undertook to do their filing, but the saws would not work. H. Talmadge was Stimson's filer and Gus Brinkman took charge of their ten-blocker. Both of these men are experts at the business, but they stopped working at 9 o'clock, refusing to work longer with the non-union crew. The men are making no disturbance. There is no sign of anything unusual about the town except a rough piece of a shingle bolt nailed to a post in front of the post office, with the inscription: 'This is a specimen of a scab shingle, 5 to 2,' which the passers-by examine with a smile.
“The mills can not be run with green hands who are ignorant of the business, because they will lose more through the ignorance and unskillfulness of the non-union men than the difference in wages demanded by the union men.”
This 1893 standoff captures the early tensions of Seattle's labor history, where specialized mill work was the lifeblood of a growing city. The 'shingle weavers' were early pioneers in trade organization, struggling against wage suppression—a theme that persists in modern Seattle’s ongoing debates over living wages and labor rights in an expensive, booming city.
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