The High Price of Corporate Greed in 1884
A historic editorial from Snohomish highlights the divide between executive pay and the struggles of the working man.
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 recent troubles east of the mountains have been felt even on the Pacific slope. Here a poor man can procure him a home and be independent. Yet no just man can say that the railroad employees have no reason to complain, though we condemn most emphatically a resort to riotous violence. That system of legislation that permits corporations to pay to Presidents, Superintendents, and Attorneys salaries from $10,000 to $25,000 and even more per annum, build palatial offices that cost two or three times as much more, spend hundreds of thousands in subsidizing Congress, State legislatures, and the Press, enter into competition with rival roads, cut down freight and fare below remunerative figures, then reduce the wages of employees to starvation prices, at a time when all the necessaries of life are so unprecedentedly high, is an act of oppression that loudly calls for redress. If expenses must be reduced, let them commence at the other end of the list first, and then the working men will have less ground of complaint.
“If expenses must be reduced, let them commence at the other end of the list first, and then the working men will have less ground of complaint.”
This 1884 editorial echoes the exact tension of today's Washington, where the rapid rise in the cost of living and housing continues to spark intense labor activism. The argument—that austerity should start with executive compensation rather than the wages of the workforce—remains a cornerstone of the modern labor conversation in the Pacific Northwest.
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