by
Fred Glass
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During the thousands of years before the Spanish came, the work of the Indians simply provided for living. From the Spanish point of view, it was the other way around: the Indians lived to work for them. The precipitous loss of half the Native Californians within a single lifetime followed their transformation from free subsistence hunter-gatherers into a class of coerced laborers, forced to create a surplus for their Spanish masters.
FROM THE GOLD RUSH emerged not only gold. Sifting through its events, we find the glimmering origins of California’s industrial economy, its transportation systems, its premier urban center, and the first signs of organized labor—workers learning to represent themselves and their interests collectively to the rest of society.
Prior to the Gold Rush there was no labor movement, for there was no working class, no capitalist class, and no relationship binding them one to another, in a manner central to the state’s economy. There was, in fact, no state, and comparatively little economy. The land was at the farthest reaches of the American frontier. In such a place before modern social classes had taken root, an ambitious individual could make rapid improvements in his life.
Scarcity of skilled labor in the early years of the city enabled wages for construction workers to shoot erratically at moments to astronomical heights. Merchants and builders were forced to pay top dollar to men willing to give up the opportunity to try their fortunes with a pick and pan. Laborers at construction jobs could make ten to fifteen dollars a day for a while.
As wages declined in the gold fields (by 1853 miners were averaging five dollars per day), the price of labor in the city tended to fall as well. But the cost of living continuously overshadowed wages. When bread went for a few pennies a loaf elsewhere, in San Francisco it sold for a dollar. Construction materials, too, went for exorbitant rates: bricks, like eggs, could also cost a dollar apiece. This inspired the genesis of several brickyards south of Market Street, along with foundries, a stone quarry, and lumber mills.
One way around the high cost of construction labor was to import it. A banker paying to build an office building at the corner of Montgomery and California streets in 1851 purchased granite cut in China. But when the stone blocks appeared, they could not be assembled: the instructions had come in Chinese. The banker sent across the sea for Chinese stonemasons. Working from sunrise to sunset, each day they received a dollar, a half pound of rice, a quarter pound of fish, and an hour lunch break. Here began a California employment tradition: import foreign labor to undercut local labor costs.
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In November 1849, San Francisco carpenters earned $12 a day (in New York carpenters made less than $2) but still couldn’t keep up with enormously inflationary prices for food and rent in the rapidly growing city. On November 10, when their employer refused to raise their pay to $16, a group of these workers declared the first recorded strike in California history. A week on strike brought a compromise: a dollar a day raise, from $12 to $13, to be followed by another dollar increase after three weeks.
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.