The Eight-Hour War: Metal Trades Try to Block Panama Fair
Everett labor leaders expose an attempt by regional employers to force open-shop conditions on the San Francisco World's Fair.
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.
Immediately after the metal trades and machinists of San Francisco signed an agreement making the eight-hour day the standard workday in Northern California, the metal trades of the Northwest held a meeting at the Arctic Club in Seattle. They dispatched a telegram declaring they would only cooperate with San Francisco in securing the Panama-Pacific Exposition if it were built and maintained on the 'open shop' principle. A.H. Garrison, the metal trades' mouthpiece in Seattle, insisted that they had already won the fight against local machinists and demanded that San Francisco stop sending strike funds into the Northwest. Everett machinists, however, see this as a desperate attempt to disguise their failure. They point out that despite these blusterous resolutions, the Northwest remains the 'cheapest place' for scabs to work, with skilled labor fleeing for better wages elsewhere. The battle for the eight-hour day continues, and the unions remain convinced that they have the best of the fight.
“It is so easy to settle a labor war with a resolution. All it requires is 'we resolve' and presto, progress, retreat, until we call you up again.”
This 1910 dispute over the 'open shop'—a term used then to bust unions and undercut wages—echoes contemporary debates over labor organizing and the precarious nature of gig economy contracts in the Pacific Northwest. The tension between local industrial power and regional labor movements remains a hallmark of Everett's civic identity.
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