Metal Workers Strike Against the Eight-Hour Day Opposition
Strikers in the metal trades enter their sixth month of labor action, defying industry leaders like Harrison Gray Otis who seek to suppress the eight-hour workday.
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 strike among the metal trades mechanics of the coast has been going on for six months with no sign of weakening. Despite the slack season when there is a natural surplus of skilled mechanics, manufacturers are finding it next to impossible to get men to finish contracts. The 'free and independent workmen' working in the 'open shops' of the Metal Trades association are largely incompetent. The association shops are in a bad way and dare not bid on new contracts. A hurry-up call to the 'big sticks' of the Manufacturers' Association brought the contemptible Otis and John Kirby, Jr., to the Northwest to apply starch to the backbones of the discouraged metal trades employers. In Los Angeles, the boys are putting up a magnificent struggle. Locally, the situation is unchanged; not a man has become disheartened or returned to work.
“The tendency of the times the world over is for shorter hours of labor. Shorter hours in the interest of health, of humanity, of the home and of the family.”
This captures the brutal nature of early 20th-century 'open shop' drives. The mention of General Harrison Gray Otis, a notorious anti-union publisher in Los Angeles, highlights the national reach of anti-labor propaganda that Everett organizers were actively fighting.
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