Florence Kelley’s Rhetorical Analysis of the Eight-Hour Movement

The Boston Labor Day Parade of 1889

In 1889, the people of Boston held a grand Labor Day parade in which multiple unions pulled floats with flags, signs, and music. Labor’s great army was on the march with banners proclaiming their demands. Carpenters’ Union 33 of Boston had painted on its float, “We are organized to elevate,” and on the reverse side, “Set on 8 hours.” Other banners read: “Nine hours a day has paved a way, eight hours has come to stay” and “Less work, more recreation!”This demonstration was part of the national movement for the eight-hour day.

In fact, this movement would turn out to be one of the most important mass movements of the 19th century and early 20th century.
Fair work hours and pay for working families in big industries were nearly impossible to achieve in the 19th and 20th centuries. This was changed by the Eight

Hour Movement, a series of strikes in the 1870s-1880s in Illinois, New York, etc., that would eventually lead up to the changes that we see today in our lives and our work.

Life in Industrial America

Social and economic life began to change dramatically for Americans in the 1850s. Prior to this period, the United States had mostly been an agricultural society; people lived on farms or around small towns and villages. When many small farms started going out of business, the workers at the farms had to move out. The farming industry had become mechanized, and small businesses were now competing with big mass-producing machinery in the agricultural industries. With no one buying their produce, the farmers were forced to move from the country to industrial camps, towns, factories, and mining sites in the North and Midwest. They were working 10-12 hours a day with no weekends just to earn money. The workers had no control over their workday, and their children ended up working as well. There just wasn’t enough time or money.

The new economy was not very stable, though. New industries grew very quickly, but they also could fail and crash just as easily. As a result, Americans and immigrants began to experience economic recessions and unemployment for the first time. In 1873 there was one of the most severe recessions that had yet occurred in the U.S. Unemployment skyrocketed. This was bad for workers because they were so dependent now on wages. When they lived on the farms, they always had something to fall back on and could grow their own food. In the city, unemployment left them with nothing. To protect their income, employers responded by lengthening the work hours and cutting the pay of their workers. Ten hours of work became twelve. Twelve became fourteen.

Knights of Labor and Trade Unions

In 1874, now that no one had money or any time to spare for any of their personal needs, the workers started to form trade unions, such as the Knights of Labor. The Knights of Labor began as a group of tailors in Philidelphia, working as an organization to win the eight-hour day, the abolition of child labor, equal pay for equal work, and political reforms, including the graduated income tax. The Knights had leaders, as well. The Knights quickly formed unions in all kinds of industries and among docks and transportation workers. Their leader led them through all the strikes they participated in and accepted new people into the movement. The Knights were exceptionally good at accepting people into their movement. Whatever their race, gender, or religion, the Knights realized that everyone was going through the same adversity. The only exception was Chinese people. There was tremendous hatred and racism against the Chinese; they were believed to threaten American workers by working for much less money. The Knights took a great part in making sure the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed, which shows how much they didn’t like the Chinese. I believe that the Knights of Labor were unfair to the Chinese but also played a major role in the eight-hour movement.

The Great Uprising and Eight-Hour Movement Strikes

After several years of depression, workers were ready to protest these conditions. In 1877, there were multiple strikes, also known as the Great Uprising or Great Upheaval. This strike included mainly railroad workers, who decided to stop all trains from leaving the station until they had what they wanted: sufficient pay and shorter work hours. The Knights of Labor had members from all occupations, many of whom were railroad workers. So when the organization realized that they could have a national strike instead of just a local strike, they decided they needed to act to highlight their issues and bring these harsh conditions to the attention of newspapers, the government, and the world. They encouraged the workers to strike in protest against their mistreatment. Alongside the Great Uprising, some other large eight-hour movement strikes took place in Chicago, Illinois, and Western Pennsylvania. With these nationwide strikes, the eight-hour day movement became the main labor focus of the time.

Workers formed eight-hour clubs or leagues in industrial cities and areas across the country. These were political clubs. They held meetings, had speeches, proposed legislation for shorter hours, and held rallies and marches for the eight-hour day. James Green, a historian, writes, “The one cause that brought diverse groups of workers together was the campaign to shorten the work day.” In Chicago, the Eight-Hour League was in several different neighborhoods. It also held the first statewide convention of the grand Eight-Hour League. They drafted a platform that declared:

The eight-hour system was essential to the health and well-being of wage earners and their families, and workers themselves must take united action to win it. Their concerted effort must allow no distinction by race or nationality and no separation of Jew or Gentile, Christian or Infidel.

The Boston Eight-Hour League published an Annual Report of its activities. “Our first public effort was the printing and circulating of Petitions for an Eight Hour Law, followed by hearings before the joint Special Committee on Labor of the Legislature. These hearings were conducted by a Committee of the League and addressed by the members.” They then went on to explain why the issue was vital to their actions as a movement. “In the minds of those present, the Eight Hour Idea seemed to contain the single issue because its theory led directly to the root of the evil, poverty, and because it was the first step towards its extinction.”

Eight-hour leagues even wrote their own songs. Sometimes they used existing tunes like “John Brown’s Body” or “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” One of these songs was written by E.R. Place in 1878. The chorus sang:

“Eight Hours! Eight Hours Shall Bring the Jubilee;
Eight Hours! Eight Hours Shall set the people free;
Less for daily drudging counts, the more for you and me.
Ring through the world the grand chorus!

Many of the songs were published in labor newspapers. Another one written by John McIntosh first appeared in 1877. It proclaimed:

Eight Hours a Day, fellows
Justice, fair play, fellows
Never say, Nay, fellows,
Eight Hours a Day!”

Florence Kelley and the Fight Against Sweatshops

Jane Addams’ Hull House worked with eight-hour leagues too. Florence Kelley was a reformer who lived and worked at Hull House. In 1890 Hull House reformers investigated workplaces and housing across Chicago to see the conditions. Florence Kelley published an essay in Hull House Maps and Papers called “The Sweating System.” It was a report that explained the working conditions of the people working in small clothing factories where they were given low wages with long hours and under poor conditions. These were known as sweatshops. She also saw the problem of long hours. She wrote:
The consequence of the concentration of the manufacture of garments into short, recurrent seasons is extreme pressure upon the contractor for the speediest possible return of the garments given him, and, hitherto, this pressure had forced the sweater’s victims to work far into the night, and to disregard Sunday and all holidays.”

This information shows that Florence Kelley understood the adversity all sweatshop workers were going through. Still, not much improved over the next decade. In the 1880s, there was another depression. Wages were cut again. The work hours once again increased. But because these responses only created more frustration for the workers, it increased more people’s motivation to enter the union and fight to change the conditions. They had given up their whole lives, working the whole day with no rest and no relaxation, only to live in poverty. As Lucy E. Parsons wrote, urging workers to join the union, “...toiling for a bare existence: not for a living, for the vast majority of them do not live, they barely exist. If they should stop to think, they would soon better their condition.” This time, they came up with the slogan, “Eight hours for work, Eight hours for rest, Eight hours for what we will.” This showed exactly what they wanted to win: fair work hours with time for sleep and recreation. “What we will” could mean whatever a person wanted: time for family, education, reading, church, or playing.

The image above shows an illustration of the eight-hour movement’s slogan: Eight hours for work, Eight hours for rest, Eight hours for what we will.
The 1886 strike wave was one of the major moments in winning the eight-hour day. This was one of the times that the workers really tried to win. But, the reason it didn’t work was because the separate unions were so divided. The Knights of Labor were focused on acting and winning the eight-hour day, whereas the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers, another union, didn’t think it would be time for a strike yet. The unions disagreed so much that Jay Gould, the owner of many railroads, said, “I can hire one-half of the working class to kill the other half.” The Knights rapidly declined. This shows that it would take years and a new government to be able to unify the labor movements and achieve their goal of the eight-hour day. In fact, some states passed laws in favor of the eight-hour day. The National Consumers League, led by Florence Kelley, said in 1911 that “Two States have enacted an eight hours law for women of all ages in the industry- Washington and California. Two others have enacted nine hours laws-Utah and Missouri.”But the laws were not enforced, and the labor movement was too weak to do it themselves. As a result, the eight-hour movement had not yet been won.

Legacy of Hull House and Women in the Labor Movement

One legacy of Hull House was that groups supporting women workers continued to support shorter hours for them in the early 20th century. These included the National Consumers League, led by Florence Kelley, and the U.S. Women’s Bureau. Women still worked in sweatshops and other low-wage places. The U.S. Women’s Bureau conducted investigations of places where women worked in 1922. In Maryland, the Bureau found that in industries, “more than two-fifths of the women of the survey had a working week in excess of 48 hours, and more than two-thirds of them had an indus­trial day of more than 8 hours.” In laundries, they worked more than 50 hours a week. The report concluded, “a sufficiently large proportion of women worked unduly long hours to indicate the inadequacy of the present law permitting 10 hours a day and 60 hours a week.” On the eve of the Great Depression, the eight-hour day was still a barrier that had not been broken.

The New Deal and The Fair Labor Standard Act

The big turning point happened after the Great Depression of the 1930s when Franklin Roosevelt got elected as President in 1932. Previously, the government had paid no mind to the unions and labor organizations, but President Roosevelt reinforced the laws that had previously been passed.
Evelyn Macon was a laundry worker in New York in the 1930s. She describes her work day as a press operator. “Slavery is the only word that could describe the conditions under which we worked. At least 54 hours a week, it was speed up, speed up, eating lunch on the fly, perspiration dripping from every pore for almost ten hours per day. ...The girls who worked in the starching department used to sing spirituals to enable them to breathe, standing ten hours and sticking their hands into boiling starch...”

The workers were finally content with their pay and work hours. Then in 1938, the Fair Labor Standard Act (FLSA) was passed, which created the forty-hour work week and minimum wage. Now, the workers only had to work 40 hours a week (eight hours a day), and they had minimum wage. ($0.30, which was equivalent to $5.38 in 2019 dollars) Workers also had the weekend off of work. Unfortunately, the Fair Labor Standards Act excluded domestic work and agricultural fields, continuing racial discrimination. It put a legal foundation in place, though, for people to fight for their inclusion regardless of job or workplace.

This movement influenced the foundation for modern, regulated work weeks and the minimum wage that Americans still receive today. It took several decades, but the barrier was broken. After World War II, different groups of workers, especially women and African Americans, gradually did win inclusion in the FLSA and the 40-hour work week: from agricultural workers to hospital workers and nursing home workers. All across the U.S., there is now a minimum wage for all races and genders, excluding no one. The Eight-Hour Day movement won the goal of dignity, health, and recreation captured by the original slogan: Eight hours for work, Eight hours for rest, Eight hours for what we will.

References:

1. "Labor's March: Grand Parade by Members of Boston Unions." The Boston Globe, September 3, 1889.
2. "The Knights of Labor and the Fight for Worker Rights." The Labor Advocate, April 20, 1878.
3. "The Great Uprising: Railroad Workers' Strike of 1877." Railway Worker's Journal, August 15, 1877.
4. "Eight-Hour Leagues and Labor Movement Rallies." The Worker's Tribune, October 10, 1880.
5. Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, 29 U.S.C. § 201 et seq.
6. Dubofsky, Melvyn, and Foster Rhea Dulles. Labor in America: A History. New York: Wiley, 2010.
7. Montgomery, David. Workers' Control in America: Studies in the History of Work, Technology, and Labor Struggles. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

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