The Fishermen’s Union Versus the Open Market
An editorial from 1888 examines the tension between organized labor tactics and the rights of individual workers on the Seattle waterfront.
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.
There is nonsense being talked about fishermen who have five hundred acres among them and who have agreed to labor or not to labor at any price. It is the right of any man or all men to regulate their own conduct to please themselves as long as they do not interfere with the right of others, but it is quite another thing to force such regulations upon those who have not consented to them and who do not wish to do so. We are told that an association of fishermen have fixed the price to be charged for salmon caught in the Sound, that they will not permit anybody to sell salmon for less than this fixed rate, and that they will not allow any person not a member of the association to fish at all. If a serious effort is made to enforce these decrees, the officers of the law will have something to say in the matter. One man has as much right as another to fish in the Sound, and nobody has the right to say how much or how little shall be charged for the fish caught. If the fishermen's union does not wish to get into trouble, it would do well to confine the exercise of its authority to its own members.
“One man has as much right as another to fish in the Sound, and nobody has the right to say how much or how little shall be charged for the fish caught.”
This 1888 editorial perfectly encapsulates a recurring Seattle conflict: the friction between collective labor action and the market-driven ideology of the region's elite. Just as the paper viewed the 19th-century fishing union as a 'tyrant' over the open market, today's headlines regarding gig-worker unions and housing-related labor strikes show the same fundamental debate over who has the right to control the local economy.
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