The Fight for the Ten-Hour Day on the Puget Sound
A historic, voluntary move by the Puget Mill Company to limit the workday sparks a push for better labor conditions in the mills.
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 Puget Mill Company recently requested the board of labor be reduced from twelve and a half hours per day to ten. The mill now serves as a model for labor at their thresholds. It was supposed by the public that this would, within a few days, be followed by the other mill companies, and that from one end of Puget Sound to the other, ten hours would be recognized as a fair day's labor. Yet, however, no other company has followed the good example which has been set, and, except in the case of the employees of the Puget Mill Company, no move has been made by the mill-owners in favor of a general reduction. The workmen of Puget Sound are deeply interested in securing a reduction of the number of hours of labor for which a day's wages is paid. Throughout the Eastern States, ten hours is generally accepted as the ordinary working day. On Puget Sound, however, the great milling companies cling to the antiquated rule of twelve, or twelve and a half, hours per day. Why this should be so, it would puzzle the most astute observer to say. The workman in a Puget Sound mill performs as much work in an hour as does his brother in a mill on Saginaw Bay, and there is no sufficient reason why the former should toil for twelve hours before his day's labor is regarded as complete. Justice and reason are alike on the side of the employee in this matter.
“The workman in a Puget Sound mill performs as much work in an hour as does his brother in a mill on Saginaw Bay, and there is no sufficient reason why the former should toil for twelve hours.”
This 1886 editorial captures the early battle for a standard workday in Washington's timber industry, reflecting a tension between capital and labor that defined the region's growth. Today, that struggle has shifted from manual hours to the 'gig economy' and the quest for a living wage in an increasingly expensive urban landscape, proving that the definition of a 'fair day's labor' remains a moving target in Seattle.
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