What Have We Learned? Blood in the Streets in the 1800s Explain Our Current Labor Environment

American labor history from 1886 to 1914 has many horrific events: A bomb explodes in a Chicago square. Private detectives open fire on striking steelworkers. Federal troops crush a railroad walkout. Women and children burn alive in a factory. A tent colony of miners gets attacked by the National Guard. 

These events led to labor reforms that include:

• The eight-hour workday

• The workweek defined as spanning Monday to Friday

• Child labor laws

• The right to organize as a collective

• Workplace safety codes

• Workers compensation benefits

• Legal protections for peaceful strikes, picketing and boycotting

• Freedom from “yellow-dog” contracts

• Minimum wage and overtime pay

• Unemployment insurance and 

• The Social Security Act

The protections workers rely on today exist because ordinary people risked and often lost their lives to fight for them. We don’t know most of their names, but we benefit from their courage and determination every day. Their stories faded with time and they were gradually pushed to the margins. A history of worker resistance and forced change is inconvenient for both business and government. Because remembering how change was forced makes it easier to imagine doing it again.

This month, we trace the most violent era in American employer-employee history and ask - when the social contract breaks down badly enough, what does it actually take to rewrite it?

The Haymarket Affair, 1886. The Birth of May Day (everywhere except... America!)

Chicago, May 4, 1886. Workers had been striking citywide for an eight-hour workday. At a peaceful rally in Haymarket Square, someone (their identity never conclusively established) threw a bomb at police advancing on the crowd. Officers fired back. Seven police officers and at least four civilians died. Dozens were wounded. Eight anarchist labor leaders were arrested. Four were hanged. One died in prison under suspicious circumstances. Two had their sentences commuted. One killed himself the night before his execution, reportedly by detonating a blasting cap in his mouth. 

The state never proved who threw the bomb and the evidence failed to connect most defendants to the bomber. Many were convicted under a sweeping conspiracy theory that treated radical speech and association as guilt. Six years later, Illinois Governor John Peter Altgeld reviewed the record, pardoned the survivors, and condemned the trial as a miscarriage of justice. The backlash was ferocious, and the pardons became a lasting political cudgel against him, one of the factors that helped to end his political career.

May 1 is now International Workers' Day (recognized in most countries, except ours), commemorating Haymarket and the eight-hour movement. The United States, characteristically, opted for a Labor Day in September, specifically positioned to avoid association with what actually happened in May. We celebrate labor by not remembering and not discussing how these labor rights were won.

Homestead, 1892. Carnegie's Paradox

Andrew Carnegie said he believed in unions. He wrote public essays supporting workers' rights to organize. He then left for a vacation in Scotland and put his partner Henry Clay Frick in charge of his Pennsylvania steel plant. Frick cut wages by 18-26%, locked the workers out of the plant, and hired 300 Pinkerton detectives to break the union. The Pinkertons arrived by barge on the Monongahela River at 4 a.m. on July 6, 1892. Workers were waiting.

The battle lasted about 12 hours. Seven workers and three Pinkertons were killed, and the Pinkertons ultimately surrendered. Days later, Pennsylvania’s governor sent in roughly 8,500 National Guard troops effectively securing the mill so management could restart operations and bring in nonunion replacements. Despite Carnegie publicly speaking with sympathy about labor, his company moved to break the union at Homestead, locking workers out, hiring Pinkertons, and, once the Guard arrived, bringing in nonunion replacements.

The Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers, one of the strongest craft unions in the country, was broken. Steel plants in the region would not be unionized again for over four decades. Carnegie returned from Scotland to universal condemnation, donated a library to Homestead (as one does), and devoted the rest of his life to large-scale philanthropy - something critics saw as an attempt to reclaim moral authority after Homestead.

Homestead taught the industry a hard truth: corporate values are most clearly revealed not in speeches, but in how management behaves when workers resist.

The Pullman Strike, 1894. Paternalism <> Power

George Pullman built his workers a town. Literally. Pullman, Illinois had company houses, company stores, a company church, a company library. Workers lived in it, shopped in it, worshipped in it. They also owed rent for the housing directly to the company that employed them. Pullman imported the “model village” concept already tested in England and Europe, then scaled it into an American system of corporate paternalism. 

When the 1893 depression hit, Pullman cut wages by 18-26% but kept rents unchanged. When a delegation of workers came to discuss this arrangement, he fired the committee members and announced he would not negotiate.

The American Railway Union (ARU), led by Eugene Debs, called for a nation-wide boycott. Workers refused to handle Pullman cars. The railroad network across the country began to slow, and in some places stop. Attorney General Richard Olney, a former railroad lawyer, obtained a federal injunction against the strike, then called in federal troops over the Illinois governor's explicit objection. (Sound familiar?)

The strategy was simple and effective. Railroads attached U.S. mail cars to trains carrying Pullman equipment. Any interference could then be prosecuted as obstruction of the federal mail. Debs was arrested for violating the injunction and served six months in prison, where he studied socialist writings and emerged committed to socialism. Federal injunctions would become one of the most powerful anti-labor tools in the country for decades.

Debs later ran for president five times. In 1920, he received nearly one million votes while in federal prison, serving ten years for opposing World War I. Woodrow Wilson refused to pardon him. Warren Harding, his Republican successor, commuted his sentence to time served in December 1921.

The Pullman Strike produced two lasting legacies:  1) Congress quickly established Labor Day as a federal holiday signed by President Grover Cleveland, whose administration had deployed the troops and 2) the conflict convinced many labor leaders that appeals and petitions alone would not be enough to secure change.

This is the story behind what Mark Twain called the Gilded Age - an era glittering with industrial wealth and technological progress, but built on deep conflict between corporate power, government authority, and workers struggling for economic security - depicted in the HBO series of the same name.

The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, 1911. Tragedy -> Reform

March 25, 1911. Closing time at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York City. A fire starts. The ninth floor exit doors are locked. Workers trying to escape are blocked. The fire escapes collapse under the weight. In 18 minutes, 146 garment workers, mostly young immigrant women, die. Many jump. Crowds watch from the street below.

The workers had struck just months earlier for safer conditions, unlocked doors, and basic protections. The factory owners had resisted. After the fire, they were acquitted of criminal manslaughter. In civil cases, they ultimately paid less per victim than they recovered in insurance.

Among those watching from the street was Frances Perkins, then working for a labor advocacy organization. She later said that the day defined her life's purpose. Within the next two years, she helped draft 36 labor reform bills in New York State, 34 of which passed. She became Franklin Roosevelt's Secretary of Labor in 1933.

The Triangle fire became the catalyst for modern workplace safety regulation. It took 146 deaths to generate the political will to require basic protections, like keeping exit doors unlocked.

In the history of labor reform, catastrophe is often the prerequisite for action.

What Violence Actually Built

The rights Americans now take for granted as basic decency and protections were not given. They were won in the wake of tragic loss.

The eight-hour workday emerged from the Haymarket movement and decades of organizing that followed. The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 established the 40-hour week with overtime pay.

Child labor restrictions came through the same Act, after children had worked in mines and mills for generations. The National Labor Relations Act of 1935 guaranteed the right to organize and bargain collectively. OSHA arrived in 1970, after enough Triangle-scale disasters to make the political math work.

The pattern is consisten - harm occurs at scale, tragedy becomes visible, and enough political pressure accumulates that the law catches up to basic human dignity, usually by one or two decades (learning is slow!)

What does that pattern imply for today? 

The Parallels (Not So Subtle)

We are not in 1886. Workers are not being shot on picket lines. For now. But the structural dynamics are familiar. Today, under the Trump Administration directives, these protections are being challenged less through repeal than through weakened enforcement, narrowed coverage, agency disruption, and rule changes that limit overtime eligibility, make organizing harder, and reduce workplace safety oversight. The result is a gradual erosion of the practical reach of labor standards, even as the laws themselves remain formally in place.

The Pullman town analogy: Gig workers who depend entirely on a single platform for income, who must pay for their own vehicles and phone data and cannot negotiate rates, who can be deactivated without appeal, are experiencing a version of company-town economics. The language has changed. "Independent contractor" sounds better than "company tenant." The economics have not changed as much as the branding suggests.

The Pinkerton model updated: Amazon spent $14.2 million on anti-union consultants in 2022 alone, paying approximately $3,000-4,000 per consultant per day, according to Labor Department disclosures. What they spent on consultants would be the equivalent of annual salary for about 175 employees! The company used surveillance systems, consultant teams, and mandatory captive-audience meetings before the Amazon Labor Union won its election at JFK8. The warehouse subsequently saw its union certification challenged through every available legal mechanism. Chris Smalls, the warehouse worker who organized the union, had no funding, no national union backing, and no legal team when he started. Debs, in 1894 had Debs-charisma and the entire ARU. Smalls organized with a folding table, a GoFundMe, and a barbecue grill outside the warehouse gates.

The data gap, again: OSHA was created because we lacked systematic information about what was injuring and/or killing workers. Today's equivalent gap is in algorithmic management. We have almost no systematic data on how AI-driven scheduling, performance monitoring, and gig dispatch algorithms affect worker health, income stability, and turnover. The Bureau of Labor Statistics does not track gig work or algorithmic management practices. It explicitly acknowledges it has no definition of 'gig worker' and cannot identify electronically mediated employment. What’s not measured doesn't get regulated (we've been here before!)

The injunction, updated: The Pullman-era injunction that criminalized the sympathy strike remained in labor law until the Norris-LaGuardia Act of 1932 removed it. Today's equivalent is the mandatory arbitration clause buried in employment agreements that waives workers' right to class action lawsuits. The Economic Policy Institute estimates that 56% of private-sector nonunion workers (that’s over 60 million Americans) are subject to mandatory arbitration. The Supreme Court has repeatedly upheld these provisions. The actual effect - workers who are wronged have no scalable legal recourse. They can arbitrate individually, each case siloed from every other, which obviously suits employers well.

The story that runs from Haymarket to Homestead to Pullman to Triangle is a story about a recurring pattern. Power concentrates. Risk shifts downward. Protections erode quietly at the margins. And only when the human and economic costs become visible (and undeniable) does the political system respond. Today’s platforms instead of company towns, consultants instead of Pinkertons, algorithms instead of foremen, arbitration clauses instead of injunctions, and data gaps instead of factory smoke all serve the same function: control without accountability, dependence without voice, risk without transparency.

What have we learned from the Guilded Age? Rights do not disappear all at once; they thin. Enforcement weakens. Coverage narrows. Measurement lags reality. Legal remedies fragment. Each change looks technical, temporary, or administrative. Taken together, they recreate the same imbalance that earlier generations had to confront openly and at great cost.

The earlier generation eventually forced the system to see what it preferred not to measure: deaths in factories, children in mines, workers trapped without exit. Will we wait for the modern equivalents - the algorithmic injury, the systemic precarity, the silent attrition, to accumulate into crisis before we act?

When risk is invisible, reform is optional. The question is how much damage it takes to make us see it.

What Other Countries are Doing

The United States chose one path through industrial violence. Other countries chose differently, and the choices are still visible.

Germany (social market/Christian-democratic corporatism): co-determination law (Mitbestimmung) gives workers elected seats on corporate supervisory boards in companies with over 500 employees. This emerged directly from post-war reconstruction and the Allied determination to prevent the conditions that had enabled fascism, which included worker powerlessness and corporate impunity. German companies do not seem to be noticeably less profitable or less innovative for having worker representation in governance.

Sweden, Denmark amd other Nordic countries (social-democratic corporatism): built sectoral bargaining systems where industry-wide agreements set floor conditions, with company-level bargaining building on top. This means employers compete on quality and efficiency rather than on who can push workers to the bottom. Danish unemployment insurance covers up to 90% of prior wages for qualifying workers for two years. The flexibility this creates, "flexicurity," means workers can accept layoffs without catastrophic personal risk, which makes labor markets more dynamic, not less.

Denmark (social-democratic, “flexicurity”): pairs easier hiring/firing with a strong income floor for eligible unemployed workers. Benefits can run up to two years, with high replacement rates for lower-paid workers (commonly cited “up to ~90%” for lower earners). That safety net changes the bargaining psychology: workers can take risk, move jobs, or accept restructuring without immediate catastrophe to their finances and health.

The Netherlands (consensus corporatism / “polder model”): formalizes consultation across levels: works councils inside firms, sectoral bargaining at industry level, and national institutions that coordinate social-economic policy. It’s a “governance” approach to labor relations built to prevent constant open conflict. 

France (statist/social-democratic blend): uses a more state-centered mechanism: the statutory workweek was reduced to 35 hours through the late-1990s/2000 reforms (with bargaining layered on top). That reflects a political tradition where the state plays a larger direct role in defining baseline employment conditions.

Canada and England/UK (liberal democracies with universal health coverage): health coverage is universal (e.g., England since the NHS era; Canada through tax-funded provincial plans under national standards), the employment relationship is less “sticky.” In the U.S., tying health insurance to employment increases the personal downside of job loss, quitting, or striking (it indirectly dampens worker exit and collective action). 

Lessons: Strategy, Policy, Programs

Strategy: Visibility precedes protection.

The Triangle fire made invisible workers visible. The Homestead battle put Carnegie's stated values against his actual behavior in direct public contrast. Today's visibility problem is opacity built into the work itself. Algorithmic management systems are proprietary. Gig worker earnings data is held by platforms. AI-driven hiring and performance tools operate without external audit. Organizations that want to lead (vs just comply) should start auditing how AI tools affect employee outcomes by race, gender, and class; what the actual economic trajectory of their contingent workforce looks like; where performance monitoring systems create stress without improving performance.

Since Trump came back into office, he has instructed what’s left of the Department of Labor (DOL)  to not enforce the 2024 DOL independent contractor rule, and began moving to revisit/rescind it. The practical effect: more workers remain classified as contractors, where pay algorithms, “deactivations,” and earnings volatility stay inside proprietary systems and outside many of the strongest labor protections.

Policy: The injunction always comes back in a new form.

Every generation of labor law produces a mechanism that sounds neutral and functions as a suppression tool. Mandatory arbitration is the current version. Reforms focused on individual rights, rather than collective voice, are easier to neutralize. When you can only fight one at a time, the employer with a good legal team wins by attrition.

For HR leaders: examine your own organization's arbitration agreements, non-compete clauses, and non-disparagement provisions. Ask who benefits from those provisions. Ask whether they reflect the values you actually want to embody.

Recent Trump policy direction reinforces the shift from collective power to individual dispute resolution. Changes at the National Labor Relations Board narrow protections and remedies for concerted activity, while federal policy continues to favor broad enforcement of mandatory arbitration under the Federal Arbitration Act. The result is familiar: systemic problems are fragmented into private, one-by-one cases where patterns remain hidden and employers win by scale.

Programs: The education question is always funding.

After Haymarket, labor organizations funded workers' education centers, "labor colleges," and reading rooms. After Sputnik (as we covered in our Jul 2025 post), federal funding transformed engineering education. After each crisis, whoever controls knowledge-transfer shapes the next generation.

Today's equivalent: which workers have access to AI literacy training? A 2024 Brookings analysis found that within occupations, lower-skilled workers often capture larger productivity gains from AI (a potential equalizer?) though economy-wide inequality effects remain unclear. Organizations designing upskilling programs only for knowledge workers are replicating the pre-FLSA pattern of investing in those who already have leverage and extracting from those who don't.

Recent Trump policy direction reinforces that pattern. Proposed federal budget reductions for workforce development, adult education, and job-training programs, including cuts to the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA) and related reskilling initiatives, shift the burden for AI and digital training back to employers and individuals. When public investment shrinks, advanced skills concentrate among workers whose firms can afford to train them, while lower-wage and contingent workers fall behind. The next generation’s opportunities are shaped not by need or potential, but by who already has institutional backing.

Measuring Transformation: Then and Now

Then:

• Union membership peaked at 34.8% of the workforce in 1954, largely as a result of protections won through decades of conflict

• The 1938 FLSA reduced average working hours from roughly 53 per week in 1900 to 40.3 by 1948

• Real wages for nonsupervisory workers grew faster in the three decades after WWII than in any period before or since, rising 91% in real terms.

Now:

• Union membership stands at 10% of the workforce in 2025, 6% in the private sector

• Productivity grew nearly 70% from 1979 to 2018, while hourly compensation for production/nonsupervisory workers grew just 12% (to put a fine point on it - productivity grew six times faster than typical worker pay)

• Amazon, the largest private employer in the US, has challenged nearly every successful union election through legal objections, captive-audience meetings, and multi-year delays in bargaining

• Worker confidence in the right to organize is at its highest point since 1965 in public polling, while the legal infrastructure to act on that confidence has weakened

Your Sphere of Influence

The Haymarket martyrs didn't get to see the eight-hour day. The Triangle fire victims didn't get to see OSHA. Debs didn't get to see the Wagner Act. None of them were waiting for someone else to start.

What They Did	What You Might Try
Made invisible working conditions visible through documentation and testimony	Audit one practice in your organization that affects workers but generates no data (e.g. algorithmic scheduling impact on income stability, monitoring tool effect on turnover, contingent worker access to benefits)
Built alternative information channels when company narratives distorted reality	Conduct a pay equity analysis and publish the results internally, not just the commitment to conduct one
Engaged political processes even without formal power	Comment on one proposed federal or state rule affecting workers in the next 90 days. Rulemaking comment periods are public and surprisingly influential
Created coalitions across workplaces	Connect with HR peers in your industry to share data on AI tool adoption and workforce impact, before vendors define those terms for you
Held employers accountable for the gap between stated values and actual behavior	Review your organization's arbitration agreements and non-compete provisions. Ask whether they would survive public scrutiny from the workers they bind

The Question That Remains

Organizations today have inclusion and equity statements, ethical AI commitments, and worker well-being initiatives. Most also have mandatory arbitration clauses, algorithmic performance systems with no appeal process, and contingent workforces that sit outside nearly every stated commitment to employee welfare.

The gap between stated values and actual systems is where the next crisis will likely emerge. Today, crises begin with a leaked dataset, a viral termination story, a class-action filing, a regulatory investigation, or a sudden loss of talent in critical roles. Will that gap get closed by internal leadership or by the external pressure that history suggests follows when leadership waits too long? This is a governance decision about risk, reputation, and long-term enterprise value. To be seen. 

As we described in our previous post, Bagley documented the gap between what Lowell promised and what it delivered. It took her four years to build a movement. It took 30 more years to change the law. We don't have 30 years for most of what's changing now. The difference is that in 1844, workers had decades to organize a response. AI deployment cycles operate in quarters, not decades. Labor law still moves in generations.

Violent conflict was not inevitable in 1886 or 1892. It became inevitable when those with power repeatedly chose to treat worker demands as threats rather than as information about a broken system. When systems lag values, the result conflict but also turnover, disengagement, litigation, organizing drives, regulatory scrutiny, and ultimately higher operating costs.

We can recognize some of the patterns. We can see that the pressure will come. Will organizations act while change is still a leadership choice or will they wait until it becomes a negotiation under duress?

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This is the third post in our 2026 series "What Have We Learned?" Next month: The New Deal's Architect. Frances Perkins handed FDR a list of non-negotiables before accepting the Secretary of Labor job. She got every one of them.