by
Fred Glass
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In August, wagon drivers in San Francisco established a political association and elected one of their members, James Grant, to a seat on the city council. In 1853, pressured by steadily growing numbers of workers’ organizations, the California State legislature passed the first protective labor law, limiting legal hours of work to ten in a day.
Historian Lucille Eaves, writing more than a half century later, puzzled over these actions: “There are evidences of such early trade-union activity in San Francisco that one is tempted to believe that the craftsmen met each other on the way to California and agreed to unite.” Alternative answers to Eaves’s whimsical conspiracy theory are not hard to find. Scarcity of labor, a violent culture, and traditions of working-class organizing carried from elsewhere by the immigrant population help us to understand how collective worker activities occurred from the outset.
In the days before modern collective bargaining laws, spontaneous acts of collective violence could seem a useful path of action to workers without recourse to other means of solving their problems.
California workers benefited more, in the long run, from political experiences imported by Forty-niners from the East Coast and other countries. The Irish—the largest group of Europeans—brought their traditions of anticolonial organizing to America. German artisans, though fewer in number, carried their experience of craft organizations and socialist politics in their flight from the failed European revolutions of 1848. English workers came with Chartist ideas of republicanism. Such streams of political thought—along with currents of homegrown American revolutionary traditions—fed the formation of unions and short-lived but influential workingmen’s parties in the eastern states in the 1820s and 1830s.
The early workers’ organizations supported free universal public education and extending suffrage to white working men (in the earliest days of the republic, nonproperty owners couldn’t vote). The parties called for the abolition of prison labor and the end of imprisonment for debt. They were sympathetic to unions, whose members wanted dependable, secure employment with higher wages and shorter hours of work.
We might ask why printers built the first union in California. The answer is that members of this occupation were literate, had deep roots in guild traditions, and were already doing similar things around the country. The enthusiasm for public education in the early republic created a readership for newspapers, books, and printed materials of all kinds. The spread of literacy meant growing markets for the printed word and jobs for printers. But the industrial revolution, urban competition, and advances in printing technology put steady pressure on the craft of printing. Printing had been based on hand-run printing presses, and on guilds, in which masters taught apprentices and journeymen and all shared age-old cultural traditions and expectations.
The first to act, printers were soon joined in organizing by San Francisco workers of many occupations, including unions of sailors, musicians, cigar makers, dockworkers, painters, and others. From practically the beginning of the Gold Rush, collective actions by workers contradicted the common image that popularly represents mid-nineteenth-century California: the lone miner, pan in hand, wresting a fortune in precious metal from the land through the sweat of his brow. He existed, briefly, but was never typical, and soon gone. James Marshall, the carpenter and millwright credited with discovering gold, died a penniless alcoholic.
In the 1850s the first workers’ institutions began to take root in the conditions faced by California workers in their places of employment and elsewhere in the frontier society. However, due to the state’s volatile new economy and the strongly held belief in individual initiative shared by mid-nineteenth-century workers, these early organizations were mostly ephemeral. Only the printers’ and longshoremen’s unions managed to last out the decade.
Many impatient workers didn’t wait for a law. In December, the union of ship caulkers (workers who sealed ships watertight) struck and became the first granted the new hours. Other maritime unions quickly achieved the same goal in the early part of 1866, some by walking off the job, others through simpler negotiations with their employers.
In February, the state assembly passed a version of the eight-hour bill and sent it to the state senate. Kenaday presented a twenty-two-foot-long petition with 11,000 signatures supporting the eight-hour day to the senate. But after vocal opposition from the iron trades’ employers association, the bill was narrowly defeated. Kenaday later sent the petition on to the California delegation to the U.S. Congress, when it was considering an eight-hour bill for federal workers. That law passed in June 1868.
Despite the show of strength, only a few thousand workers were employed under eight-hour contracts, out of 60,000 in the city. Employers formed a ten-hour league society in response to the workers’ movement. Ship employers, starting with the Pacific Mail Steamship Company, fired employees who had been working eight hours and advertised back east for replacement workers. A compromise was reached when the fired workers were allowed to return at eight hours per day but with a slight cut in pay.
Momentum grew until the San Francisco Board of Supervisors passed a law establishing the eight-hour day in all city and county employment. Finally in February 1868 an eight-hour-day law for all California workers was passed by the state assembly and state senate, and signed by the governor. A huge torchlight procession in San Francisco celebrated passage of the law, the second statewide eight-hour law in the country (after Illinois the previous year). Far from perfect—the law lacked effective enforcement mechanisms—it nonetheless marked a high-water point for the struggle for a shorter workday.
More than a century after the deaths of Leland Stanford, Charles Crocker, Collis Huntington, and Mark Hopkins, their continuing presence in the state remains impressive. Their names are still memorialized on cities, streets, banks, hotels, libraries, parks, beaches, schools, and universities. They had failed at gold mining, succeeded in retail businesses supplying miners, and converted their modest storekeeping fortunes into the seed money for the Central Pacific. Yet, how accurate is it to describe them, as standard histories do, as “the men who built the railroad” across the Sierras?
In June 1867, several thousand Chinese workers had had enough. They went on strike near Cisco, proclaiming “Eight hours a day good for white men, all the same good for Chinamen.” They wanted forty dollars a month, up from thirty. The Central Pacific, perhaps unwilling to imagine its “pets” might think for themselves, told the newspapers that the strike must have been the result of agitation by Union Pacific representatives. The company wanted to maintain the public impression that it treated its workers well and that only external meddling might have induced the workers to take such drastic action. When the laborers refused a Central Pacific offer to raise their wages to thirty-five dollars, the company surrounded their camps with armed guards, choking off food supplies. After a week, the workers were forced to return to their jobs with no improvements in hours or pay. Nonetheless, an interesting event had occurred: the largest job action yet seen in California and by a group of workers believed to be strike-proof.
A handful of men made large fortunes through their positions atop the Comstock mining companies and its web of financial interests. The silver kings, as they were called, joined with the Big Four railroad owners to employ the most skilled building craftsmen to raise enormous mansions on Nob Hill. No costs were spared. Their ornate homes featured some of the finest furnishings pillaged from European cultural history. Charles Crocker’s 12,500 square foot house boasted a seventy-six foot tower and a theater. Mark Hopkins’s garish wooden castle included an oak-paneled dining room with seats for sixty. Silver mining engineer and capitalist George Hearst had a mansion built a block away from Crocker’s. His son, William Randolph, later to become owner of the nation’s most extensive media empire, drew inspiration for his San Simeon castle from memories of the neighborhood of his youth.