Labor paper blasts Great Northern over disaster wages
An editorial criticizes the railroad for paying poverty wages to workers clearing snow in the aftermath of the deadly Wellington avalanche.
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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.
Reports have come from several sources that the Great Northern railroad company paid the munificent sum of 15 to 17 1/2 cents an hour to their shovelers at the scene of the Wellington disaster, and charged them $3 a week for board. All this for working waist-deep in snow in a freezing temperature at the most exhausting kind of labor. If this is true, and knowing the paltry wages the railroad company is accustomed to pay for its unskilled labor we do not doubt it, sympathy for the Great Northern company is entirely out of place. Sorrow for the dead and sympathy for the bereaved loved ones is fitting and proper, but we can shed no maudlin tears over the Great Northern Company over the disaster that has overtaken it.
“Sorrow for the dead and sympathy for the bereaved loved ones is fitting and proper, but we can shed no maudlin tears over the Great Northern Company.”
This is a direct, stinging critique of corporate exploitation immediately following the Wellington disaster, which killed nearly 100 people. It highlights how the labor press used local tragedies to argue for structural economic change and workers' rights against powerful rail monopolies.
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