The Struggle for Labor's Worth
As telegraphers across the country walk off the job, the local press debates the morality of corporate monopolies versus the rights of the individual laborer.
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 telegraphers' strike continues. Business is impeded and public needs are disregarded. Popular sympathy is naturally on the side of the employees, and we believe it will be found that the most influential and reliable public journals will have expressed themselves hopeful of the ultimate success of the strikers. A neighboring contemporary declares that this strike should be made legislatively impossible, blaming the men who refused to work longer at starvation wages to gratify the greed of a soulless management. How can a strike be made legislatively impossible while the telegraph system is the subject of private ownership on the one hand and the Declaration of Independence concedes to men the right to the control and use of their own labor? A citizen owns in fee simple his physical and mental powers, subject only to the demands the State may have upon him. Labor is as much a marketable commodity as its product, which is called capital. The Government has no more right to compel the laborer to sell his labor for less than his personal appraisement thereof, than it has to force the corporation to pay more than the market value of such services.
“Labor, be it mental or physical, is as much a marketable commodity, as much the subject of ownership, as its product, which, aggregated, is called capital.”
This 1883 editorial highlights a perennial tension in Seattle: the conflict between corporate 'monopolies' and the rights of workers to collectively bargain. Today's gig-economy debates over the 'ownership of labor' mirror these 19th-century arguments, showing that the civic fight over whether a human being's time is a commodity or a sovereign right remains central to the city's character.
From readers
No comments yet. If you know something about this story — a correction, a family memory, a source — it belongs here.