Working Conditions and the Texas Labor Movement, 1870-1910

Working Conditions and the Texas Labor Movement, 1870-1910

Mine workers in Thurber protested long hours and harsh working conditions. The man on the ground in front is demonstrating the position in which miners had to work much of the time.

Thurber Historical Association

Working conditions for early industrial workers in Texas were harsh. They often worked 12 to 16 hours per day for very low wages. Conditions in factories and industry were often dangerous. Sometimes workers' pay was delayed, or their wages were cut without warning. If workers were injured, they had to pay for their own medical care, and they lost all wages while they were sick or injured. They were not paid for holidays or vacations. Sometimes workers in mines, sawmills, and factories were injured so severely that they could not work again. But the bosses refused to improve safety, and did not pay workers when they were injured on the job.

Housing for workers was often poor and unhealthy. Those who worked in company towns, such as Thurber, were paid in scrip rather than money. Scrip could only be used at company stores, which charged high prices. Workers seldom made enough to buy all the food and supplies they needed. Many owed the company stores money. Because they owed money to their bosses, they could not leave. They were like slaves.

In the 1870s, workers across the nation began to organize into labor unions. Unions arose in Galveston, Houston, and other Texas cities. African American leader Norris Wright Cuney organized black dockworkers in Galveston into a union called the Screwmen's Benevolent Association. The Knights of Labor, a national union organized to fight for better working conditions, spread across Texas.

NORRIS WRIGHT CUNEY (1846-1898). Born to a white planter and a slave mother near Hempstead, Texas, he attended a school for blacks in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, before settling in Galveston. There he met George T. Ruby, president of the Union League. Cuney studied law and in 1871 was appointed president of the Galveston Union League. Cuney’s career was a mixture of success and failure. He was defeated in the race for mayor of Galveston in 1875 and for the state House and Senate in 1876 and 1882 respectively. But in appointed offices and as a dispenser of patronage, Cuney was powerful. He served as a delegate to every national Republican convention from 1872 to 1892. He became inspector of customs of the port of Galveston and revenue inspector at Sabine Pass in 1872, special inspector of customs at Galveston in 1882, and finally collector of customs of the port of Galveston in 1889. In 1886 he became Texas national committeeman of the Republican Party, the most important political position given to a black man of the South in the nineteenth century. One historian of the Republican Party in Texas characterizes the period between 1884 and 1896 as the "Cuney Era." In order to lead Texas blacks to increased prosperity, in 1883 Cuney bought $2,500 worth of tools and called together a group of black dockworkers, which he eventually organized into the Screwmen's Benevolent Association. He carried this fledgling organization into open competition. He was also strongly committed to education. He was appointed a school director of Galveston County in 1871 and supported the black state college at Prairie View (now Prairie View A&M University).

Prints and Photographs Collection, Norris Wright Cuney file, The Center for American History, The University of Texas at Austin; CN 01074

These unions tried to fight for better working conditions. When bosses refused to improve conditions, unions called strikes. Workers walked off their jobs to protest working conditions. In the 1870s telegraph workers in Houston, typographers (secretaries) in Austin, brick workers and dockworkers in Galveston, and railway workers all went on strike. Some strikes were successful. In other cases, all the workers lost their jobs. In the early 1880s more than a hundred strikes occurred in Texas. In the Cowboy Strike of 1883, ranch hands went on strike against large ranches that were operated mainly for profit by corporations or out-of-state owners. In the Capitol Boycott of 1885, workers building the new state capitol went on strike.

"Given the American image of the allegedly individualistic Texas cowboy, the 1883 strike by the mounted wage hands may be considered bizarre. But western resentment toward eastern capital was directed in part against vast ranches owned by absentee landlords in the northeast and in Britain ... Some 200 strikers rode out of the bunkhouses of every major ranch in the Panhandle around March 23, just before the spring roundup ... A troop of Texas Rangers was called to aid in dispersing the striking cowboys, but probably never had to go into action. There was an almost constant flow of farm boys, accustomed to even lower wages in central and southern Texas, streaming through the Panhandle looking for work, and they broke the strike in four or five weeks."

Texas State AFL-CIO, Austin, Texas. Text from Dr. George N. Green, Age of Excess, upub. ms

The largest strike was the Great Southwest Strike of railway workers in 1886. Martin Irons, a leader of the Knights of Labor, called a strike against the Texas and Pacific Railway. Jay Gould owned this railroad and many others in Texas and across the nation. In the Great Southwest Strike, union workers disrupted railroad operations. Gould called out scabs (men hired to work and break the strike) and armed guards. Violence broke out. The public turned against the strike, and the governor sent troops to break it up. The union lost.

After this strike, the Knights of Labor lost members. Other labor unions, such as the Texas State Federation of Labor, continued to fight for better working conditions. But there were few other large-scale strikes until the oilfield strike of 1917 and the pecan-shellers' strike of 1938.

Cartoon attacks Jay Gould, owner of the Missouri Pacific Railway, The M.K.T. and other midwestern railways. could is famous for saying, "I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half."