Labor Day a Reminder all American Workers Have Benefited from Work of Unions
Greg Wilson/Anderson Observer
Labor Day arrives in South Carolina with cookouts, boat ramps, football, retail store sales and the late-summer ritual marking the unofficial end of summer, even though it’s still hot enough to make ending summer feel like a matter of optimism rather than weather.
The holiday itself offers a more difficult inheritance.
It was born from an American labor movement that demanded the right to organize, to bargain, to work fewer hours, to earn enough to live and to return home safely. Its history includes parades and speeches, locked factory gates, injunctions, blacklists, company police, racial exclusion, mill towns and, in one Anderson County field, the graves of seven textile workers killed during a strike.
South Carolina’s labor history is not primarily a story of unions winning broad and durable power, but one of repeatedly trying to build power in a state where employers, political leaders and much of the business culture have long opposed it.
The conflict has unfolded in Charleston’s port, the Upcountry’s textile mills, hospitals, factories, warehouses and public institutions, shaped by race, gender, industrial change and the state’s 1954 right-to-work law.
The legacy remains visible today, where union members account for an estimated 2.7 percent of South Carolina wage and salary workers, among the lowest rates in the nation and far below the national rate of 10 percent.
That figure does not mean South Carolina workers have lacked grievances, courage or collective action, but that the institutions surrounding them have often made enduring organization unusually difficult and dangerous.
Even the origin of Labor Day itself is unsettled.
For decades, Labor Day was attributed to Peter J. McGuire, the carpenter, labor leader, co-founder of the American Federation of Labor and general secretary of the Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners. McGuire was said to have proposed a holiday honoring workers “who from rude nature have delved and carved all the grandeur we behold.”
But another candidate has challenged that account, Matthew Maguire, a machinist associated with the Central Labor Union in New York and Local 344 of the International Association of Machinists. Later evidence suggests that Maguire, not McGuire, may have proposed the observance in 1882. Though the two men had nearly identical names, shared connections to the labor movement and became the subjects of a historical dispute that has lasted longer than either man’s reputation might have predicted, the U.S. Department of Labor acknowledges both possibilities.
The first Labor Day celebration took place Tuesday, Sept. 5, 1882, in New York City. By 1894, 23 states had adopted it. That year, after the federal government used troops and an injunction to suppress the Pullman railroad strike, Congress unanimously created a national Labor Day holiday. President Grover Cleveland signed the legislation June 28, 1894, designating the first Monday in September as the observance.
The timing was political as well as ceremonial. Cleveland and Congress were attempting to repair relations with workers after a conflict that had disrupted rail traffic across the Midwest and ended with federal force.
Labor Day’s national history is filled with similar moments: the Haymarket protest of 1886, which became central to the international fight for the eight-hour day; the violent Homestead Strike of 1892, which weakened early steel unionism; the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911, which killed 146 workers and accelerated workplace-safety reforms; and the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, which established a federal minimum wage, overtime rules and child-labor protections.
But in South Carolina, the struggle took a different shape.
Before textile mills dominated the Upcountry and Piedmont, organized labor existed in South Carolina among Charleston’s skilled trades, with printers, longshoremen, shipyard workers, cigar makers, bricklayers and others connected to the port economy.
The industrial workforce that emerged later in the textile districts developed under a different system.
From the late 19th century through much of the 20th, mill owners built and ran company towns. They offered work, housing, company stores, schools, churches, recreation programs, baseball teams and basketball leagues. The mill was not simply the workplace, it was the landlord, the commercial center, the social sponsor and the institution around which a family’s life was organized.
The arrangement offered real benefits. It also made union organizing dangerous.
A worker considering a union did not merely risk losing a job. In many mill villages, that worker could risk a house, access to credit, a place in the community and the security of relatives who also worked at the mill. Employers used paternalism, anti-union campaigns and the threat of closure to discourage organizing.
Race made the problem more difficult, with black South Carolinians concentrated in agriculture, domestic service, low-wage work and segregated occupations. Major federal labor protections initially excluded many agricultural and domestic workers, leaving a large part of the Southern Black workforce outside the protections available to industrial employees.
The result was a labor movement divided by race, geography, job category and the very communities it hoped to organize.
The Great Depression made the tensions of mill life impossible to ignore. Textile workers faced low wages, long hours, “stretch-out” policies that assigned more work to fewer people, job insecurity and management systems that often reached beyond the factory floor.
In 1933, Greenville textile workers conducted a major, largely unsuccessful strike. The next year, the United Textile Workers called a nationwide walkout on Labor Day, Sept. 1, 1934.
The General Textile Strike quickly became one of the largest labor actions in American history. Within a week, nearly 500,000 workers from Massachusetts to Mississippi had left their jobs. In South Carolina, about 43,000 women and men participated, shutting down roughly two-thirds of the state’s textile mills.
In the 1920s and 1930s, textile workers in Anderson County worked more than 50 hours per week, with men averaging 53.7 hours and women 52.9.
Workers sought better hours, wages, lower production quotas and meaningful protection from the conditions that had made factory life increasingly punishing. The strike made clear that Southern textile workers, often depicted as passive by mill owners and national observers alike, could organize across communities and state lines.
But the strike also revealed the limits of that power.
Federal mediation ended the national walkout without securing the durable changes many workers had hoped for. In the South, workers faced retaliation, blacklisting and continued resistance from mill owners. A worker could join a strike and later discover that employment had become unavailable not only at one mill but across an entire region.
The most painful chapter of the strike occurred in Anderson County.
On Sept. 6, 1934, at the Chiquola Mill in Honea Path, special deputies fired into a crowd of striking textile workers. Seven people were killed, and at least 14 were wounded, though other accounts place the number of injured at 30.
The dead included Claude Cannon, Lee Crawford, Ira Davis, E.M. “Bill” Knight, Maxie Peterson, C.R. Rucker and Thomas Yarborough. Six died at or near the mill; Rucker died later from his injuries. Accounts of the shooting note that all but one of the men were shot in the back while trying to flee.
Some reported a machine gun on the roof of the mill aimed at the strikers jammed, likely saving many lives.
Two days later, 10,000 people gathered in a field for the funeral of the first six victims. The mass burial became one of the largest public expressions of grief in South Carolina labor history.
The violence at Chiquola Mill — often remembered as “Bloody Thursday” or as part of the Uprising of ’34 — did more than end a local confrontation. It helped crush organized labor in the Southern textile industry for generations.
Workers had demonstrated that while they could shut down mills, they had not yet found a way to protect themselves from the social, economic and physical consequences of doing so.
After World War II, the Congress of Industrial Organizations attempted to change that equation.
In 1946, the CIO launched Operation Dixie, its ambitious drive to organize Southern workers. Textile mills were a central target. They were among the South’s largest employers, and they represented a growing threat to unionized manufacturing elsewhere in the country.
Northern and Midwestern companies were moving work southward, drawn by lower wages, lower union density, favorable tax policies and a political culture eager to recruit industry. Labor leaders feared that the nonunion South would undercut wages and working conditions nationwide.
Operation Dixie sent organizers into South Carolina’s mill towns and rural communities. The campaign had money, national attention and a plausible economic argument, but it did not build the durable membership base unions sought.
The South Carolina Encyclopedia describes the campaign as a major but inept organizing effort that ended quietly in 1951 with few successes.
The causes were overlapping:
Employers conducted aggressive anti-union campaigns.
State and local officials generally favored business.
Racial divisions weakened cross-racial solidarity.
Cold War politics allowed opponents to label unions — particularly the CIO — as outside agitators or politically suspect.
Textile workers feared losing jobs, housing or both.
The workforce was scattered across mill villages and rural communities.
Operation Dixie’s defeat helped establish the South’s reputation as a low-union region. It also made the region more attractive to manufacturers looking for a workforce with fewer organized protections.
The collapse was not simply a failure of union strategy, it was a victory for a particular economic model where industry recruited through low labor costs, limited collective bargaining and political promises that companies would find a friendly home.
South Carolina formalized that model March 19, 1954, when it enacted its right-to-work law.
The law declares that a person’s right to work cannot be denied or abridged because of membership or nonmembership in a labor organization. It bars agreements that make union membership a condition of employment and restricts certain union-security arrangements.
Supporters describe right-to-work laws as protections for individual employees, who should not be compelled to join or financially support a union. Labor advocates argue that the laws weaken unions by permitting workers to receive the benefits of collective bargaining without paying dues, reducing the resources unions need to negotiate contracts, represent members and sustain organizing efforts.
The law became part of South Carolina’s economic-development identity. Politicians and business recruiters promoted the state as a right-to-work location, presenting low unionization as an advantage in attracting manufacturers, automotive suppliers, distribution centers and other employers.
The practical result has been a labor environment in which workers may organize and bargain under federal law but face structural disadvantages in building membership and maintaining contracts.
South Carolina’s economic-development language often emphasizes jobs, investment and growth. Its labor history asks another question: Under what conditions are those jobs created, and how much voice do workers have once they arrive?
But the state’s most famous modern labor struggle did not take place in a textile mill, it unfolded in Charleston hospitals, where labor rights and the civil rights movement met in the same conflict.
In 1969, more than 400 African American hospital workers — most of them women — struck the Medical College Hospital and Charleston County Hospital. Their grievances included low wages, racial discrimination, limited advancement, arbitrary discipline and the firing of workers who challenged unequal treatment.
The strike began March 19 and lasted roughly 100 days at the Medical College Hospital and another three weeks at Charleston County Hospital. The workers were affiliated with Local 1199B, a health care union connected to the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union. Mary Moultrie emerged as one of the movement’s central leaders.
The strikers demanded union recognition, a grievance procedure, a raise to the federal minimum wage and the reinstatement of workers who had been fired.
Their movement drew support from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, civil rights organizers, national labor figures and activists across the country. The hospital strike became nationally significant because it joined issues that South Carolina’s social order had long kept separated: race, class, gender, public employment and collective bargaining.
The workers faced injunctions, arrests and official resistance. More than 1,000 people were jailed during the broader campaign.
The settlement on June 27 did not provide formal union recognition, but it returned fired employees to their jobs, created a grievance procedure, produced wage increases and established a credit union.
The Charleston strike did not overturn South Carolina’s right-to-work system. But it did something more immediate, demonstrating that workers could win meaningful changes even within that system, particularly when labor organizing became inseparable from a broader demand for civil rights and human dignity.
By the late 20th century, the textile economy that had defined much of South Carolina began to collapse or move overseas.
Mills closed. Company towns lost jobs and population. Downtowns built around shift changes, mill payrolls and factory workers saw their commercial life thin out. Workers moved into automotive manufacturing, aerospace, logistics, health care, construction, food processing, retail and service work.
The industries changed, but the questions did not.
Can workers organize without retaliation? Can a union build a stable majority before an election? Will an employer remain neutral, oppose the campaign or move the work elsewhere? How much influence should state and local governments exercise when a union campaign begins? Can workers build solidarity across race, gender, occupation and political identity?
The modern South Carolina economy, especially in Anderson County, includes global manufacturers, large distribution operations, hospitals, universities, ports and service industries. It also retains the structural legacy of the mill era: a dispersed workforce, employer resistance, right-to-work law and a political culture that often views unions as a threat to economic development rather than as a tool of worker power.
The state’s 2.7 percent union-membership is the numerical expression of that history.
But Labor Day is not only a measure of membership.
It is a reminder that workers in South Carolina have organized when the risks were high. Textile workers shut down mills in 1934. CIO organizers crossed the South during Operation Dixie. Black women hospital workers in Charleston made labor rights a civil rights issue in 1969. Workers today continue to confront questions about pay, safety, benefits, scheduling and workplace voice.
The holiday began as a demand that labor be visible. More than a century later, the people who work in South Carolina’s factories, hospitals, warehouses, stores, schools, restaurants and construction sites remain visible every day.
The question, as it has always been, is whether they can be heard together.
Fortunately, South Carolina workers still benefited from the legacy of labor unions.
Most of the conditions Americans now regard as ordinary — the eight-hour day, the 40-hour week, overtime, child-labor restrictions, minimum wages, workplace-safety standards and the two-day weekend — emerged from decades of organizing, strikes, public reform and legislation. Unions did not create those protections alone as lawmakers, courts, journalists, civil-rights advocates and reformers all played essential roles. But organized labor supplied much of the pressure that made reform politically unavoidable.
The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, for example, established a federal minimum wage, curbed oppressive child labor and set the country on the path to the 40-hour workweek with overtime protections. The National Labor Relations Act of 1935 gave many private-sector workers the right to organize, choose representation and bargain collectively without employer coercion.
The gains visible in union contracts are often more immediate: wage floors, regular raises, health insurance, pensions, paid sick days, vacation, predictable schedules, apprenticeship programs and grievance procedures.
Workers covered by union contracts earn, on average, 12.8 percent more than comparable nonunion workers, according to the Economic Policy Institute. They also have greater access to employer-sponsored health and retirement plans.
Those benefits have often spread beyond union shops. When a union contract raises standards at a major employer, competing companies may increase pay or benefits to retain workers or discourage organizing. That spillover helped build a more secure mid-century working class, though its rewards were never shared equally: Black workers, women, farmworkers, domestic workers and many Southern workers were frequently excluded from early protections or denied equal access to unionized jobs.
Labor’s most enduring accomplishment may be the principle beneath the benefits, a principle not shared by many South Carolina workers, where employees do not have to confront an employer only as isolated individuals. The right to act together — over pay, safety, schedules, insurance, discipline or dignity on the job — changed work from something imposed entirely from above into something that could, at least in part, be negotiated.
Labor Day celebrates these accomplishments as well as highlighting there is much more to be done.
