The Price of a Mill Hand's Life
An anonymous laborer exposes the exploitative wage practices of the Puget Mill Company, detailing how the firm undercuts competitors by replacing white workers with Chinese laborers at subsistence wages.
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.
In your editorial of the 14th instant headed 'The Ten Hour Movement,' you represent the Puget Mill Company as being much interested in the welfare of the working men of Puget Sound. Now, for the benefit of your readers and the public generally, I will submit a few questions, which, being asked and not answered, would not answer the purpose for which this is intended. First: Why did the Puget Mill Company withdraw from the Lumberman's Association of Washington and Puget Sound last August? Second: Why doesn't the Puget Mill Company request the neighboring mill companies to reduce the wages of their employees to correspond with those of the Puget Mill Company? Answer: It is a positive fact that more than one of the said neighboring mill companies actually pay from 10 to 20 per cent more wages than the Puget Mill Company does. Third: Why doesn't the Puget Mill Company discharge the Chinamen in their employ and give food and shelter to the poor white wanderers who are today seeking employment on Puget Sound? These men will tell you that they are dead broke and do not know where their next meal is to come from. Answer: It is because they can hire a Chinaman for $1 per day and board himself, and to a white man they would have to pay from $1.50 to $2.00 and board for each day's work. It is the almighty dollar the Puget Mill Company is after and not the benefit of those whose condition they pretend to champion.
“It is the almighty dollar the Puget Mill Company is after and not the benefit of those whose condition they pretend to champion.”
This letter, written in 1884, highlights the intense labor conflicts and anti-Asian sentiment that defined Seattle’s early industrial development. Today's debates over gig economy wages and the displacement of local workers by cheaper, precarious labor echo these same century-old questions about who a company is really serving: its workers or the 'almighty dollar.'
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