Seattle Bricklayers Push for a Nine-Hour Day
The city's bricklayers' association counted 29 members and commanded $5 a day—more for top hands—as workers eyed shorter hours without a pay cut.
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 Seattle association comprises a membership of twenty-nine persons. The objects of the association are protective and beneficial in character. The bricklayers here now work, when putting in full time, ten hours a day the first five days of the week and nine hours on Saturday, for which they receive $5 a day. Superior workmen are paid more, getting $6.00 and $7.00. An effort will shortly be made to make nine hours a full day's work for every day in the week, the men to receive the same wages as heretofore. An intelligent bricklayer tells us that there are several reasons why bricklayers receive higher wages than operatives and mechanics generally. These reasons are that the work is hard, that there are fewer men to do it and that bricklayers being at a premium are enabled to command almost any wages they desire to ask. These reasons resolve themselves finally into one reason, viz., that the work is very hard. Apprentices in but few cases can or will stand it, and they give up the business before completing their trades. Neither can the work be prosecuted every day in the year, but a good deal of time is lost through rain and cold.
“An effort will shortly be made to make nine hours a full day's work for every day in the week, the men to receive the same wages as heretofore.”
The fight over hours and pay in Seattle's building trades is more than a century old. Then as now, construction workers organized to turn dangerous, intermittent work into something closer to a living wage—and the nine-hour-day campaign foreshadowed the eight-hour movement that would reshape American labor.
From readers
No comments yet. If you know something about this story — a correction, a family memory, a source — it belongs here.