Background Essay: Worker's Rights

Increasing immigration and manpower, technological innovations, abundant natural resources, and the human spirit laid the ground work for the United States to become a superpower in the decades following the Civil War. The economy from the late 1870s to the late 1920s was dominated by the robber barons, industrialists whose great wealth was derived in part by unchecked and non-competitive business practices. They were supported by the idea of protectionism – that private property and the wealth derived from it was sanctified and protected through the Fourteenth Amendment as a privilege and right of citizenship. However, as the corporations grew, their power was opposed by the growing American labor movement, which sought to organize workers and change unfair labor practices for the nation’s poorest citizens, who often worked on subsistence wages. The gap between the wealthy and the poor widened.

There was a feeling among many conservatives that the nation teetered on the brink of socialism, communism, and anarchy. Numerous labor strikes challenged labor and business practices. One of the first national strikes was the Pullman Strike of 1894. Workers for the Pullman Palace Car Company, a maker of railroad cars, were required to live in Pullman’s “company town” where the company controlled everything. Workers often owed all their wages back to the company to pay for food, rent and other basic services. George Pullman, the owner of the company, decreased wages by twenty-five percent as a result of the economic panic of 1893. When Pullman did not reduce the rent for housing to correspond with the wage decrease, workers staged a strike that resulted in the suspension of all rail traffic west of Chicago.

Under pressure from conservatives, President Grover Cleveland called out the National Guard to end the strike. By the end of the strike, the Guard had killed five workers and the labor leader Eugene V. Debs was tried, found guilty of violating a court injunction to end the strike, and sentenced to six months in prison.

Debs appealed his conviction to the Supreme Court, arguing that the federal government did not have the authority to issue the injunction to end the strike. The Court ruled unanimously that the federal government did have the right to issue the injunction as part of its authority to “ensure the general welfare of the public,” regulate interstate commerce and to guarantee the operations of the Postal Service.

One of the Justices who heard the case was Justice Stephen J. Field. Field was an early proponent of a free market system and of the theory of the “liberty of contract” --- that the Fourteenth Amendment requires that government not interfere with the rights of people to enter into contracts. Field led the Supreme Court to issue numerous decisions that the rights of business interests and property owners would be protected ahead of the rights of workers.