Great Northern Cuts Wages 40 Percent—and the Car Cleaners Walk Out
Unorganized car cleaners and repairers at Interbay quit when pay fell from $50 to $35 a month; the railroad filled their jobs with 'green men' the same day.
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.
A heavy reduction in wages was announced yesterday in the mechanical department of the Great Northern road, or rather in those branches of the department where the employees are not organized, embracing car cleaners and car repairers, and a strike of the twenty to twenty-five men interested was the result. The reduction is only a trifle less than 40 per cent. The car cleaners were cut from $50 a month to $35, the car repairers from $55 to $35, and their foremen from $75 to $45. All the men affected in this city and at Interbay quit work, but their places were mostly filled during the day by green men, the work not requiring special skill. It is understood that the men affected at New Westminster, B.C., also quit work. Superintendent Copeland went up to that city yesterday to procure new men. This cut in wages is general in this class of workmen all along the line, and as they are not organized the opposition to the enforcement of the order will be spasmodic and local.
“The reduction is only a trifle less than 40 per cent.”
A 40 percent pay cut and same-day replacement of workers is not a Gilded Age curiosity; it is the template for modern labor fights over scheduling, subcontracting and the fragility of unorganized work. The Interbay yards are now a different landscape, but the question—who absorbs the risk when a railroad cuts costs?—has not aged.
From readers
No comments yet. If you know something about this story — a correction, a family memory, a source — it belongs here.