LABOR DAY

 

LEARN ABOUT THE HISTORY OF LABOR DAY - U.S. HISTORY at THE NATIONAL ARCHIVES

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NARA gov : LABOR DAY

Excerpt: The National Archives and Records Administration holds records created or recieved by the U.S. Government on issue of labor and labor rights, including records on unions, strikes, and responses, debates about women and children in the workplace, and the Government's role in providing economic security and workplace rights....

WHAT WAS MINIMUM WAGE WHEN YOUR ANCESTOR WAS BORN? INTRODUCED IN 1938 - MAYBE YOU HAVE A MINIMUM WAGE STORY?

U.S. Department of Labor - Minimum Wage History  (Check the state as well!)

Did you earn minimum wage at your first job?  I did and the employer, a chain "Five and Dime", was exploitive.  Management treated us like you know what.

It was apparently legal to not pay us for up to 10 (or maybe that was 14 minutes) after punch out, but woe to you if you didn't punch in on time. I'll never forget the time I forgot to wear my smock and got told off by the personnel manager. So night after night they kept us there working past what we would be paid.

There was no Christmas bonus or gift. Crushed candy canes were thrown on the table in the so called lounge - almost at us as if we were dogs. Many of us could not afford to buy a sandwich for our lunch.  I recall cashiering without breaks and with my lunch half hour delayed and delayed, almost feeling faint and eating a lot of candy at the register.

This was not my first or last exploitative punch clock type employer and it all made me want to have my own business. With no start up capital. 

Stories of your own our your parents and ancestor's employment can be part of your family history story.

Here are some questions you might ask:

What was your first paid job?  How much were you paid?  What did you do with the money?

How old were you?

Did you "have" to work?

Was working your idea or did your parent's insist?

I found the information on this page of interest.  All the talk of "high" wages for what used to be minimum wage work today makes it sound like you can afford to live as an independent person on minimum wage.  Certainly not in my area.  When about $36,000 a year qualifies you for discounts on your utilities as a low income worker, you know $16 an hour is not going to do it.

However, here in the United States we seem to be proud of our struggles. Sometimes a family manages to make it past the poverty barrier.  Sometimes it takes generations.

ON THE SLAVS and ITALIANS and JEWS IN THE 1870'S : THE HISTORY OF WHITE PEOPLE

pages 234-235 Nell Irvin Painter Author

..." Economic hard times further aggravated labor tensions. In the 1870's Slavic and Italian coal miners in Western Pennsylvania suffered abuse, ostracism, cheating, incarceration, and attack. The U.S. Army massacred Lakota (Sioux) at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, in 1890, as lynching that scourge of black Americans, took the lives of eleven Italians in New Orleans in 1891. Elsewhere labor conflict brought out company private militia (such as the Pinkertons) and state and national guards to course striking workers, as in the Homestead, Pennsylvania, steelworks in 1892...

A notable instance of anti-Semitism occurred in 1877 when a Saratoga Aperings hotel refused to admit the New York financier Joseph Seligman, whose bank had helped fiance the Union during the Civil War. Organized outbreaks of anti Jewish violence occurred for the first time during the Depression of the 1890's.  In Lousiana and Mississippi night riders attacked Jewish families and businesses. Personal abuse like stone throwing, hitherto occasional, became common throughout the North. When their employer hired fourteen Russian Jews, five hundred New Jersey workers rioted for three days in 1891, forcing Jewish workers and residents to flee..."

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Commentary from ANCESTRY WORSHIP GENEALOGY

I you're writing an authentic family history, it's important to relay the memories of relatives and their experiences with ethnic and religious prejudices. Placing the story in history can help the reader's modern perspective.  If there are various stories that do not agree, it is good to publish them all, crediting the story teller and their relationship to the story.