On Labor Day, Where’s Labor? How Did American Workers Lose Their Power?
MINNEAPOLIS — (Analysis) Three scenes from America’s class war:
In 1897, the president of Fulton Bag and Cotton Mills in Atlanta hired 20 Negro women to work in the folding department of one of the mills. The other 1,400 workers, all white, promptly walked off the job in protest. According the historian Philip S. Foner in his book Organized Labor and the Black Worker, the company agreed to fire the black workers on one condition: the white workers would have to work overtime for free.
