In our Season 2 finale, we look at the people who have been there throughout all of the other episodes—the laborers! We also try to consider what types of labor today share the physical toll and the meager wages with laborers of the past.
Some resources for more information on the topics in this episode:
Check out Billy Smith’s books: Much of our conversation with Smith centered on his The Lower Sort: Philadelphia's Laboring People, 1750–1800, but he has a great new book out about the Yellow Fever epidemic, Ship of Death: A Voyage that Changed the Atlantic World.
For primary sources on the Great Migration in Philadelphia, there’s no better place than GoinNorth.org.
To learn about the contemporary unions we mentioned, check out their websites: the National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON) and UNITE HERE Philly
Thanks again to our season sponsors Linode and Temple University’s History Department as well as the companies and organizations which sponsored episodes along the way, the Carpenters’ Company of Philadelphia, Beyond the Bell Tours, The Center for Art in Wood. Thanks also to the Philadelphia Cultural Fund for their support of the Elfreth’s Alley Museum and the Museum Council of Greater Philadelphia which awarded us a micro grant which directly supported this second season of The Alley Cast.
SOURCES
Blakney, Sharece, “Armstrong Association of Philadelphia,” Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia: https://philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/archive/armstrong-association-of-philadelphia/
Grubbs, Patrick, “General Trades Union Strike (1835)” Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia: https://philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/archive/general-trades-union-strike-1835/
Kelleher, Deirdre, “Immigration, Experience, and Memory : Urban Archaeology at Elfreth's Alley, Philadelphia” (Dissertation) Temple University, 2015.
Laurie, Bruce, Theodore Hershberg, and George Alter, “Immigrants and Industry: The Philadelphia Experience, 1850-1880,” Journal of Social History 9, no. 2 (Winter 1975)
Licht, Walter, Getting Work : Philadelphia, 1840-1950
Newman, Simon P., Embodied History, Chapter 1: Almshouse Bodies.
Sendroff, Lily, “The Case For the Domestic Worker Bill of Rights: ‘Called Essential, Treated As Expendable,’” Ms. 8/11/2021
Sivitz, Paul and Billy G. Smith, “Philadelphia and Its People in Maps: The 1790s,” Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia: https://philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/archive/philadelphia-and-its-people-in-maps-the-1790s/
Smith, Billy G. “The Vicissitudes of Fortune: The Careers of Laboring Men in Philadelphia, 1750–1800” in Work and Labor in Early America, ed. Stephen Innes.
Theodore, Nik, “Regulating Informality: Worker Centers and Collective Action in Day-Labor Markets,” Growth and Change 51, no. 1 (2020)
TRANSCRIPT
Imagine a meandering walk from the piers of Philadelphia toward Elfreth’s Alley in 1790. Sailors scurry up the rigging of brigantines as stevedores carry off the ship’s cargo, and load it onto hand carts, with which carters will whisk that cargo away to its final destination. Heading inland, we’re passed by a young woman carrying two full buckets of water fetched from a well; she will use it to wash the clothes of her employer’s entire household, soaking, scrubbing, and wringing out each piece with the same strength she displays in carrying the water. There is a building under construction, and men hauling lumber to the site.
Were we to complete the same walk in 2021, we might pass landscapers tidying up the park at Race Street Pier, street cleaners sweeping the sidewalk, a trash collecting crew driving down Elfreth’s Alley, and myriad other working Philadelphians. These jobs, both in the 18th century and the 21st, are neither well-compensated nor prestigious. Yet they are essential to the life of the city.
Welcome to the Alley Cast, a podcast from the Elfreth’s Alley Museum in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. We trace the stories of people who worked, lived, and encountered this special street for over 300 years. While the stories we tell often center on Elfreth’s Alley and the surrounding Old City neighborhood, we also explore threads which take us across the city and around the globe.
This season is all about work, and in this season finale we will be discussing laborers in Philadelphia, past and present.
Episode 8: Laboring Philadelphians
But what do we mean when we talk about “laborers”? The census records for Elfreth’s Alley list people working as laborers from the 18th century through the mid-20th century and many laborers have already popped up in this season of the Alley Cast: In the boarding house episode, the boarding house thief required the assistance of a laborer to bring in their luggage--a laborer almost certainly not in on the ruse. Isaac Zane, the master carpenter, employed at least a couple laborers throughout his career. Before wood became cabinets, trees had to be felled and transported to Philadelphia, whether down the Delaware River or all the way from the Caribbean and this certainly relied on laborers, both enslaved and free.
But what did that term mean at various times and what does it mean today?
The term “laborer” seems like a broad one, in many ways--it can simply mean someone who works. But historically it has been applied to much narrower groups of people, in ways that have a lot to do with class, race, and gender.
In this episode, we’re going to try to unpack some of the limits that have been applied to the label and try to look beyond the label.
We do need a working definition of the word, and a quick look at a few dictionaries suggests that a laborer is someone doing manual labor for wages. They often use that other word that we’ve been talking about this season “unskilled.” Yet all work deserves dignity and we are going to continue to interrogate the usefulness of formal training as the only facet of work worth rewarding.
Let’s look at laborers in early Philadelphia--looking at the first United States Census we find four Alley residents listed as laborers: Philip Hartnot, Henry Sharp, Jacob Snyder, and Peter Bicknell. It’s a small sample size but it tracks with trends over at least the next century: they are male and they are white. Yet clearly, there were people who were neither male nor white doing manual labor, and many of them were doing so for wages. Historian Seth Rockman, in his fascinating work on 19th century Baltimore, showed how it was useful to look at the whole class of laboring people at the bottom of the economy, looking not just at those who were labeled as laborers but to include enslaved and indentured workers as well. Rockman successfully used accounting ledgers to track some of these workers, and we hope to eventually do the same here in Philadelphia, but we have not completed that time-intensive work yet.
Instead, looking at our favorite sources--the city directories and the census--can give us an idea of where those who were called laborers lived in early Philadelphia. A map by Paul Sivitz and Billy G. Smith shows that the majority of laborers in the 1790s lived at the North, South, and Western extremes of Philadelphia--basically at the edge of town. But the map also shows that laborers crowded into the narrow alleyways that cut through blocks between the more prominent streets, places such as Elfreth’s Alley, where housing was relatively affordable and there was still access to the port and other places to find work in the city.
But we want to try to understand more about laborers than where they lived. How can we learn about the lives of a whole class of people who, by virtue of their poverty, their transience, and often their lack of education didn’t leave much of a trace in the historic record? I talked to historian Billy G. Smith, one of the scholars who has managed to do just that.
Billy G. Smith: Because nobody writes their own life story, or if they did, it doesn't still exist. So we've got lots and lots of things like on the famous founding fathers, where you get all of their writings, but you can get virtually nothing written by these people. So you've got to go in different ways. Look at official records, like tax lists are used on house directories quite a bit to our criminal directory. So wherever sort of people encounter government agency, and that government agencies recorded something taxes, and censuses to, then you can track a lot of these people.
These kinds of official documents give a narrow view of each person’s story, but taken as a whole, can offer insights about a whole class of people. As one example, Smith used these records to reconstruct the diet of Philadelphia’s poor, or as they were often called, “the lower sort.”
Smith :Well, the records that I stumbled across, once again, were official records, and they were official records of the ALMS house. And also, I think I use some from Pennsylvania hospital for the sick poor. And the ALMS house recorded every day, what they bought in terms of foodstuffs, so I could track those foodstuffs over a 50 year period, the cost, and also with the diet itself was everything from peas to flower to tea. And what I did was take that as sort of a minimal diet, that more than likely, would be familiar to a laboring class person who was not in the ALMS house, something of that sort. So that was just a great cache of records. But it took a long time to process things like that. On a day by day basis, I must say, I wouldn't have the energy or patience anymore, it was good. I did all that when I was young. But it's a, it's a pretty minimal diet, I'm, it's, they do have probably more meat, for example, just to pick one item than you would have if you were in Britain. But there's actually more variety perhaps, than we might commonly think, in the 18th century for a lower class person or vegetables in the summertime in the springtime,
Scholar Simon P. Newman looked at some of those same sources--the collections of the Almshouse and the Pennsylvania Hospital--and used the admission records to learn about the ways in which the people coming to these institutions for help were judged to be deserving or undeserving of that help. These judgments were made purely on the appearance and behavior of the person asking for help, and so the records often include some descriptions of them, colored by the biases of the administrators who examined them. To Newman, these descriptions are a valuable insight into the belief systems of the time, but also bear witness to the lives of Philadelphia’s poor. Their scars gained from work or disease or misfortune, their clothes indicating something about their place in society.
I want to note that though there were some people who arrived at the Almshouse who couldn’t work, the vast majority were put to work there as a way to defray the cost of their food and shelter and as an attempt to reform them and get them working once they left the almshouse. These were laborers, whether they were considered that at the time or not.
I asked Smith for some context for some of the laborers working in early Philadelphia; where did they come from? What kind of work did they do?
Smith: So a lot of these labors to go back to those common people are born to, you know, impoverished families, either in America, or there's a great deal of emigration at this point to from Europe, and from Britain. And they're born poor, and they don't learn really any occupational skills, which means you're going to be a laborer, who the kinds of things they do in Philadelphia, is construction work. And there's a lot of that that city is growing incredibly rapidly at the time. So there's building going on everywhere. So you know, you'd be carrying lumber around helping carpenters, things of that sort, loading and unloading ships, the ships that come from Britain, and also the ones that are sent out to the Caribbean and things, you've got to get goods on and off of that. And that's one of the that kind of trade is one of the center parts of Philadelphia, it's one of the reasons it's on the Delaware River there because you can get the ships coming and going. So that's another big occupational job for common everyday workers.
In his book “The Lower Sort,” Smith writes that despite the examples of socioeconomic climbers such as Ben Franklin, many laborers remained laborers all of their lives. I asked him about the opportunities and limitations laborers faced when attempting to better their lot in life.
Smith: So I think there's two different ways to look at that, that question as to social mobility, economic mobility, and whether you can move up or not up the ladder. And one is sort of individual initiative is what Americans tend to emphasize. But I think the second is societal forces. And you know, what's happening in the society, what's happening in the larger economy and things of that sort, which are beyond your control. So in terms of just individuals themselves, I'm guessing that working hard probably does make a difference. But it's not it's not going to make the you know, the be the item that's going to ensure success by any means. A lot of what might make you successful, if you're starting as a labor over something well known before that is, how do you get trained, what kind of occupational skills do you have, and that's often mostly dependent on your father's position. How wealthy as your father, and whether or not when you get to the age of 12, or 13, whether or not your father is wealthy enough to buy you an apprenticeship in, let's say, a merchant house, in which case you're on the fast track, kind of like maybe going to Harvard or Yale, but that you're on the fast track to, you know, being able to be a merchant, which are the wealthiest people here, or your father doesn't have that money doesn't make you an apprentice to anything, you don't learn any skills. Or maybe your father has a little bit of money and can apprentice you to become a shoemaker, while shoe makers are gonna make a modest living at the house for their entire lives. So that's one of the things is just training. And, you know, that's the luck of the draw,
Once the die was cast and someone entered the world of work as a laborer, however, there were occasionally opportunities that presented themselves. Economic booms and getting the right job at the right time could mean that a laborer moved themselves up the tax brackets. At the same time, economic depressions and the cruel anarchy of epidemics lurked on the other side of that coin.
Smith: So it's things like that there's business cycles to economic depressions, and also, you know, economic boom times. And for example, to go back to this, you know, when can you move up? Well, if there's any time, it would probably be the 1750s and early 1760s, when the economy booms, and then again, in the 1790s, the first decade of the new nation, when Philadelphia is the capital of the United States at that point. And there, that's your best chance, if you know, if you could control when you were going to be there to be able to move up.”
Indeed, Smith’s research shows that during the 1790s, about 20 percent of laborers in Philadelphia acquired marketable occupational skills and became mast makers, coopers, and carpenters. This statistic doesn’t take into account enslaved labor or include a wide variety of women’s work, but is still a remarkable statistic.
Having missed out on a plum apprenticeship, these laborers still managed to join the ranks of craftspeople, gaining economic power and prestige. At first glance, early Philadelphia seems to offer an example of that dichotomy we are trying to complicate between skilled and so-called “unskilled” labor. I asked Dr. Smith what he thought of those terms and their usefulness in this era:
Smith: And I do think it's really important to consider this skilled versus unskilled kind of labels and who puts it on and women to come and you know, how accurate is it? Now, if you're, you know, if you were a laborer in Philadelphia in maintenance, and treating, you're carrying wood around for carpenters or shipbuilders or something like that? Well, that's pretty unskilled. It takes a lot of muscles, but it's pretty unskilled. On the other hand, I think what happens to a lot of these people, is you become sort of a worker, if you're working hard, and the carpenter likes you and things like that, and you're working suddenly for him. And, you know, he might start to trust you by teaching, also beneficial themselves, teaching you some skills of carpentry, let's say, or shipbuilding or things of that sort. So that might be one way that you do become skilled, and you know how to do their stuff. And you at least learn a little bit about carpentry, things like that. I would say in a similar way, for a lot of these laborers, they will go off to sea for a while they'll go on a ship Delta comm Mariners, it's called at the time. But you know, working on a ship with all these sails, and you're responsible with the crew, that's very skilled, you're gonna learn a lot in terms of doing that. And even though there may be a lot of physical labor involved, but getting, you know, all this stuff together of sales and things and that's what it is definitely skilled labor, even if it's classified subsequently as unskilled.
One example of how skill acquisition could radically change the course of a person’s life is a man named Cuff Douglas. Douglas was born enslaved and grew up in a forced labor camp. When the man who enslaved Douglas died, his will included a manumission clause, which allowed Douglas to purchase his freedom from the enslaver’s heirs. Douglas did so, earning money by working in his few hours to himself. It seems that he had trained as a tailor, though whether he received formal training or not is unclear. Having purchased his own freedom, Douglas set about purchasing the liberty of his wife and three children. He then led a career as a tailor. In 1779, we know that Douglas rented house #117 Elfreth’s Alley because he is listed on the tax rolls. We know all of these facts about Douglas’ life because he recounted a brief version of his life story as a testimonial to an abolitionist, who delivered the account to abolitionists in London likely as evidence that formerly enslaved people were able to make lives for themselves. Despite the condescension of even having to argue that formerly enslaved people could succeed, Douglas’ story does show that some skills could be parlayed into significant social and economic gains.
In addition to the cycles of the economy, the seasons of each year presented new challenges for laborers as the available work fluctuated with the weather:
Smith: The seasonality of work is very important in the 18th century. And it really affects people detrimentally, who were toward the lower classes, what happens and things like okay, so Philadelphia is this big trading center with ships coming and going through the Delaware River. Well, in the 18th century, though, when it gets to be about November, ice starts to come into the Delaware River and continues through February. Now, I don't know what global warming exactly how it is today. But this is what's happening anyway, in the 18th century. Once you get ice in the Delaware River, that means that ships that are wooden ships, can't come into it anymore. Because they're afraid they're going to be sunk you know, there's going to hit some ice and make big holes, essentially, in the hull. So things seem to shut down in terms of employment, if your job as a laborer is to load goods on and off ships, well, for three months a year, you're not going to be able to do that, because there aren't any ships. And so even if you have maybe making decent money for eight or nine months a year, when you come to this kind of crunch time, in November, December, it gets really difficult for working class people, because you just can't find labor at that point. And that you had mentioned, one of the things I was able to track and in the ALMS house, there was how people sometimes, not always, sometimes could use it as a strategy to keep themselves alive. That is, you know, in November, December, things slow down. And you try and get into the alms house, just so you can eat basically just, you know, you can put our they'll put food on the table for you. And you'll have to work by the way when you're in your own house, too. So it is kind of a weapon, we say, a strategy to keep yourself alive through that cold winter months when you can't find much work.
The demand for laborers ebbed and flowed with the port conditions, but the supply of laborers was also changeable as events across the ocean brought people to Philadelphia.
Smith: They're restrained by the forces above them. And I mentioned before, one is this migration that's coming over from Britain in Europe creates at various times a labor surplus. In Philadelphia, you know, the migration mostly is pushed out of Britain or Scotland or Ireland, poor people moving over, throughout the entire 18th century. And landing in Philadelphia, a lot of them. But you know that that's dependent on what's happening in Europe. And it's, it's often a push factor as much as a pull factor to get here. But what it means in in a place like Philadelphia, or New York, or Boston or something, is that it's sometimes you have mass migration, lots of unskilled people coming in, and therefore you have this huge labor surplus, which means that employers in a capitalist system can minimize the wages that they pay to their workers. It's a little bit like we see today, it seems like you know, parallels in some ways that you can, if you have a huge labor surplus, you don't have to pay your workers very much.
While we often talk about Elfreth’s Alley as a neighborhood of artisans in its early history, early records list several men working as laborers on the Alley like the four men I mentioned earlier who appear on the 1790 census. The only one of these men who appears to have lived on the street for a length of time was Peter Bicknell. After several records where he’s listed as a laborer or a porter, in the 1796 directory and subsequent mentions, Bicknell is listed as a bottler, suggesting that he found steady employment, perhaps with slightly more prestige.
Other laborers listed in the census and directories do not reappear, perhaps a sign that they moved to find steady work or didn’t stay in one place for long.
When we come back, we’ll shift ahead to changes in the labor system in the 19th century.
Welcome back! In other episodes here, we’ve talked about the shift from traditional working relationships to capitalism that occurred around the turn of the 19th century sort of in advance of, or alongside, industrialization. For laborers, this meant more competition and less job security. That era also brought changes to Elfreth’s Alley, as the occupations of residents shifted.
Deirdre Kelleher, who we heard from in Episode 3: Building Houses, Part II, wrote about this shift in her dissertation about Elfreth’s Alley. While this street was home to some laborers in the 18th century, their numbers increased in the 19th century. By 1867 and 1868, the city directories show 32 Alley residents working in what Kelleher called “labor-intensive” occupations: “16 laborers, two draymen, two porters, and two stevedores.”
The people working in these labor-intensive occupations often clustered together on the Alley. The 1860 census, for instance, shows that many of the laborers lived in the houses which had been built in Bladen’s Court. This little byway, about five feet wide, ran between #115 and #117 Elfreth’s Alley, and had been created to give access to the backs of several lots along Front Street. By the mid-19th century, there were five houses built in an area that included the rear of those lots as well as the rear of #117 and #119 Elfreth’s Alley. In these five small houses lived possibly as many as 12 laborers in 1860, along with their families and a handful of folks who listed other occupations on the census. The surnames of the Bladen’s Court residents--Morissy, O’Neill, Mack, Bohen, McCarty, Moran, Grandfield, Downing, McCann--suggest that many of these families were of Irish descent, and the census confirms that indeed most of them were direct immigrants from Ireland.
A study of immigrants’ roles in industry between 1850 and 1880 found that 30.3% of Irish immigrants were primarily employed at day labor, with another 3.3% working as carters in 1850, while only 11.6% of German immigrants were working in similar roles. These scholars attribute this difference to the higher percentage of German immigrants arriving in Philadelphia with training at various craft trades. Both immigrant groups, which made up the majority of immigrants to Philadelphia—and Elfreth’s Alley—in the mid-19th century, were much more likely to work in these labor-intensive and precarious jobs than native-born white Americans.
By the end of the 19th century, despite the early edge provided by their skill as artisans, German immigrants as a whole were not better off than Irish immigrants, as the trades at which many German immigrants worked withered in the face of mechanization. Some so-called “unskilled” laborers were able to join trades, such as printing, construction, and the metal industries, which were experiencing growth.
These industries, like seafaring and house building a century earlier, actually provided informal on-the-job training and a path to upward mobility.
Remember, as we said in the first episode of this season, the industrial era was the context in which the terms “skilled” and “unskilled labor” arose. Often these labels were applied to workers within one factory, with the expectation that unskilled workers could move into skilled positions.
While these European immigrant groups often found themselves entering the American workforce at the ground floor, Black Philadelphians found themselves relegated to a separate workforce entirely. In W.E.B. DuBois’ study of the Black population in the 7th Ward in the 1890s, he found that 90 percent of all working Black women and 60 percent of all working Black men worked in domestic service. At the same time, only about 30 percent of European immigrant populations and a meager 10 percent of American-born Philadelphians were working in service. The majority of Black men not employed in service work were employed as day laborers, primarily in hauling and carting.
Before we move on to the 20th century, I want to highlight one particular event which stands out in the 19th-century story of labor in Philadelphia. In 1833, labor organizers in the city created the General Trades’ Union, one of the first labor unions to accept workers in so-called “unskilled” positions into its ranks. Near the end of May in 1835, coal heavers on the docks along the Schuylkill River initiated a strike, demanding a ten-hour workday.
On June 3rd, as the coal heavers paraded through the city publicizing their demand, workers at various other trades, including carpenters and shoemakers joined them, reportedly chanting “We are all day laborers!” as they went. The General Trades’ Union went into overdrive, distributing materials and orchestrating parades and other pageantry around the city to invite other workers to the cause.
By June 10th, nearly 20 thousand workers in over forty trades--and including some city workers--had joined the now city-wide and general strike, all asking for a ten-hour day. To put this in perspective, the entire population of Philadelphia at this time was under 100,000, so about 1 in 5 of all Philadelphians was striking.
Philadelphia’s Common Council agreed to the city workers’ demands and the majority of workplaces followed suit by the end of June.
Over the next seven months, other strikes supported by the General Trades’ Union were all successful and in 1836 the union came to the aid of striking dock workers facing criminal charges, but the string of victories was followed by an exodus from many workers having achieved their goals. Management also got more organized to counteract union tactics, and the financial panic of 1837 spelled the end of the General Trades’ Union.
Day laborers would have few options for union participation for the next century, but for a brief moment, the workers of Philadelphia had come together and won a tremendous victory!
By the early 20th century, Philadelphia was densely industrialized. In 1915, a nameless young man was interviewed by researchers investigating employment in the city. He gave an account of a day he spent looking for work:
“I got up at 5:30 and went to Baldwin's and was told no help was required. From there, I went to Hale & Kilburn at 18th and Lehigh Avenue and met with the same answer. I then walked to 2nd and Erie Avenue to Potter's Oil Cloth Works, and they needed no help.
Then to the Hess Bright Company, at Front and Erie Avenue, and again met with the same result. Next I came back home at 2nd and Lehigh A venue for a meal. In the afternoon, I went to Edward Bromley's; no help needed; from there to a firm at American and Girard Streets, with the same result. Then I recalled at the Barnett File Works, again with the same result. I tried two other places in the neighborhood, whose names I have forgotten, and none had any work. Often I would go out and after meeting with bad luck day after day, would say to myself at night, "the job has got to find me," but the next morning I would feel differently about it.”
This young man walked a total of about eight miles, and was nearly constantly passing factories. In fact, experts estimate that within a one mile radius of the average person living in industrial Philadelphia were sixteen thousand industrial jobs. Though this man did not find a job on this day, there has rarely been such a density of jobs in this city’s history.
Yet many of those jobs were not open to everyone. At least several of the companies this man visited--with an exception of Baldwin Locomotive Works--would have turned away Black workers even if they had positions vacant. And around the time of this man’s odyssey, many Black Americans were making odysseys of their own to industrial cities including Philadelphia.
We’ve discussed the Great Migration before—in episodes 6 and 7 of season 1--but it’s worth exploring again. From 1916 to 1930, something like 1.6 million Black Americans moved from the American South northward and westward. Well over a hundred thousand of these migrants arrived in Philadelphia during that period, some directly recruited by industries such as the railroads and foundries--Midvale Steel alone hired 4,000 Black Southerners--and many more following family members and friends. This influx was welcomed by heavy industry, which needed staff willing to work in dangerous settings for meager wages, but Black Philadelphians, both newcomers and more established residents, were shut out of a wide variety of jobs.
While previous populations of newcomers had found some degree of opportunity in laboring for low wages and learning skills on the job, African Americans, those who had been in Philadelphia for generations and those new to the city, found those opportunities hard to come by throughout much of the first half of the 20th century.
Black young people in Philadelphia were shut out of apprenticeship programs and vocational schools and surveys showed that the majority of Black craftspeople in the city had received their training in the American South.
Yet even with training, finding employment was no guarantee, and many Black craftspeople found it impossible to work in white-owned businesses. For instance, in 1910, all seventeen African-Americans trained in printing were working in Black-owned print shops or for Black newspapers.
The prejudice that kept African Americans out of the city’s main workforce took several forms. A 1940 survey of 60 Philadelphia firms showed that 18 would not consider hiring Black workers, whether out of quote “personal disapproval,” or fear of backlash from employees or customers. Another twelve firms said they had just never considered hiring Black employees. Twenty-one employers were noncommittal and one wouldn’t participate in the survey. Five companies offered to interview select Black applicants, and only three said they already employed Black workers--those three firms collectively employed five Black clerks.
Some white workers also contributed to the exclusion of Black workers in organized and unorganized ways. The trade unions of the city almost exclusively prohibited Black membership; in 1910, the cigar-makers union was the only white-led union to admit Black workers. And exclusion from unions led to exclusion from work opportunities.
Walter Licht, in his book, Getting work : Philadelphia, 1840-1950, sums it up:
“The marker in general did not function on behalf of blacks in the city. African-Americans, young and old, should have been employed in greater numbers in Philadelphia industry; their labor, after all, could have been purchased cheaply, so favoring whites unnecessarily boosted the wage bill of employers. Employer prejudice and white worker resistance-that is, racism-combined to undo the not always benevolent but nonetheless normal workings of the marketplace.
For blacks, relief would have to come through extra-market forces, first through concerted pressure by black church leaders and organizations like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Urban League co increase the hiring of blacks in Philadelphia, and second and most important, through the ultimate intervention of the federal government.”
And indeed, in response to the segregation and discrimination they faced, Black Philadelphians built networks to facilitate employment and built political force through organizations such as the NAACP to combat these prejudiced practices. The Armstrong Association, which we talked about briefly last year in our episode on housing conditions, was one organization that took action to address the segregation of Philadelphia’s workforce. The Association invested in vocational training and also worked to directly place Black workers in positions through employment offices, which had some degree of success.
If we zoom in on Elfreth’s Alley, the 1930 census offers us a glimpse into the lives of laborers on the street during this time period and how they might have fit into these larger trends. Last season we introduced you to three Black families who lived at #135 Elfreth’s Alley in 1930, the Mortons, Wilsons, and McCraes. Robert Morton and Charles Wilson were able to find work in a shovel factory and Nettie McCrae gained employment at a garment factory. While the census that year doesn’t give us any sense of the wages the residents of #135 earned in their respective factory jobs, it does tell us that they collectively paid $50 per month for the home they shared.
Meanwhile, down the street lived Harry Hurst, his wife Florence, and their four daughters. Harry Hurst had been born in Germany and immigrated to Philadelphia as a young person with his parents. His father worked as a laborer in the factories of Philadelphia’s Northern Liberties neighborhood and Harry followed his father’s line of work-- by 1930 was working in a machine shop as a laborer. The Hursts paid monthly rent of $8 for the rental unit behind #126 Elfreth’s Alley. Remember Deirdre Kelleher’s excavations we talked about in episode 3?
Deirdre Kelleher: So the walls that we found were comprised of brick and some dressed stone, and the brick, we could see where is reused. So there were some reused brick that had remnants of like mortar on it from a previous wall. So we could see that some of it was being reused. One wall had some brick as well as dressed stone. So it looked like it was kind of expedient construction in the sense that they were taking materials that were available in the area, and building up to create these structures in the back. So they were improvising and using the resources that were there.
That was the home, probably in very rough condition, that the Hursts lived in. The rear quarter of the first floor was a privy, which the second and third floors extended over. The entire rental unit was under 600 square feet of living space.
It seems very possible that the Hursts were the last residents of this back tenement; in 1937, the back tenement was torn down and the back wall of #126 rebuilt.
By 1940, the Hursts had moved to more comfortable quarters at #137, for which they paid $14 per month. That year’s census shows Harry working for the Works Progress Administration, likely still doing manual labor at the age of 46. The census also shows that in the previous year, Hurst had only been able to find work for 24 weeks of the year, earning a total of $315 in 1939.
From the few records we have of these families living on the Alley, it is hard to draw too many conclusions about their experiences as laborers. We don’t know how Robert Morton, Charles Wilson, Nettie McCrae, and Harry Hurst found work, or how many doors were closed to them. But from the little we know, it seems that they lived difficult lives, full of uncertainty and physically-taxing work.
World War II provided a huge uptick in demand for workers, both as soldiers left the working ranks and as wartime industrial production ramped up. This increase in demand would allow Black Philadelphians to enter industrial fields in ways not seen before as employers rolled back discriminatory policies, but industries had already begun to leave cities such as Philadelphia, seeking lower wages and cheaper land. While some manufacturing remained, Philadelphia’s economy experienced a shift toward the service industry especially among the populations which had previously done manual or day labor.
Over the 20th century, America as a whole became more racially diverse as immigration increased from non-white countries and newcomers have often been put into informal economies.. Immigration especially from Mexico and Central and South America was encouraged by the agriculture industry through programs such as the Braceros. After these temporary immigration programs ended, agricultural businesses continued to use immigrant labor whether it was legal or not.
In addition to agricultural work, day laborers today often work as cleaners, construction workers, landscapers, and movers. Day laborers have developed organizations with which to self-regulate what is a very unregulated and volatile market. One way they have done this is by developing brick and mortar centers where would-be employers can come to recruit laborers with set wage minimums.
If we zoom out a little bit, however, we can see that there are many other jobs which could fall under a similar category, from Uber Driver to part-time cashier. Today there are a wide variety of jobs which take a toll on workers’ bodies and expose them to potential harm without providing a living wage or job security.
While some laboring jobs are well compensated and come with benefits and job security which allow workers to make their job into a career, many of these jobs continue to offer minimum wage, which has not kept pace with inflation. Employers often offer limited hours and seasonal employment as ways to limit their costs. The rise of the “gig economy“ in which workers are paid, often through apps, as contract workers has made more of these workers’ employment precarious and cut down on the employer’s responsibility to the worker.
The pandemic has shown many of these workers to be “essential” though they do not receive corresponding compensation. Think of the grocery store workers and Instacart shoppers and delivery people who kept us fed during city and state lockdowns and the lingering peril. Think of the sanitation and transit workers who have put their bodies on the line to keep the systems of the city operating.
While the neighborhood surrounding Elfreth’s Alley has priced out most current-day laborers as residents as it has become a prosperous area known for its art galleries and theater spaces, it is still a place where those earning at or below a living wage continue to work. It is not a rare sight to see cleaners toting their tools through these narrow streets. Domestic work is often informal and precarious and lacks workplace protections of other professions, having been officially excluded from the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 along with agricultural workers and independent contractors. Fewer than one in five domestic workers have written agreements with their employers, nearly a quarter report feeling unsafe at work and a third do not receive breaks for meals or rest.
Many forces have combined to limit the ability of today’s laborers to unionize. These jobs span a wide variety of settings and tasks. Anti-union legislation has weakened the ability of workers to take collective action. But there are some groups working to change that, to give those working under these precarious conditions a safety net and a political voice. Across the country, the National Day Laborers Organizing Network, quote “improves the lives of day laborers, migrants and low-wage workers” and “build[s] leadership and power among those facing injustice so they can challenge inequality and expand labor, civil and political rights for all.”
Another union, Unite HERE, represents workers in a variety of hospitality settings. As the website of the Philly chapter puts it: “UNITE HERE is the union that welcomes you to Philadelphia. We serve the food, hold the door, carry the bags, clean the rooms, and wash the laundry. We are among the largest unions in Philadelphia, representing 7000 hotel, gaming, and food service workers.”
A “laborer,” as we have defined it for this episode, is a broad term, but I have used it to try to capture a wide variety of working environments that share similar vulnerability. We left this episode until the end because laborers were there in every episode at some point. The work of people in these precarious positions is integral to all of the types of work we have discussed, and the exploitation and denigration of laborers has been a recurring theme of this season of the Alley Cast.
The shift from an apprenticeship system based on unwritten codes of obligation to wage labor systems allowed employers to profit when immigration and migration caused labor surpluses and thrust journeymen and day laborers into precarity. Collective action and the labor movement shifted the balance of power back toward laborers within certain settings, but the global migration of manufacturing away from cities such as Philadelphia and the reorientation of the economy to service jobs have again placed laborers in precarious positions. The past year and a half has offered a reality check about the place of work in many people’s lives. As workplaces seek out a new rhythm, it will be interesting to see if laborers who have historically had very little power can leverage their essential status in the face of ongoing financial precarity and the continuing threat of a pandemic.
A programming note: I am calling this a finale because we planned out these eight episodes, but there may be more to come. For our Patreon, I edited down some highlights from the interviews we did for this season that didn’t make the episodes. That episode will likely eventually drop into this feed at some point and more may follow. Finally, there are topics we talked about doing whole episodes on which just didn’t fit into this season’s plan. It’s possible that some of those ideas might come to fruition at some point but I don’t know when. Watch this space!
History is a group effort and I want to take this end of season moment to thank a bunch of people. First, thank you for listening along with us— this show wouldn’t exist without an audience. Thanks to Isabel Steven and Joe Makuc who worked on Season 1 and who set the bar for this show way higher than I intended and I’ve been playing catch up ever since! Thanks to Enya Xiang and Margaret Sanford who put a ton of work into this season— none of these episodes would have happened without them and they were all made better by the conversations the three of us had. The same can be said for the Managing History class at Temple University in the fall of 2020; thanks to Dr. Hilary Iris Lowe for putting this podcast at the center of that course and to the students who grabbed that baton and ran with it: Jeannette Bendolph, Margaret Sanford, Lauren Kennedy, Gwen Franklin, Paige Bartello, and Brian Wallace.
Thanks to all of the experts who chatted with us for this episode and to those for whom the timing didn’t quite work out. Huge thanks to Dr. Billy Smith who was so generous with his time—I think he was the first interview I did and he ends up in this last episode.
Thanks again to our season sponsors Linode and Temple University’s History Department as well as the companies and organizations which sponsored episodes along the way, the Carpenters’ Company of Philadelphia, Beyond the Bell Tours, The Center for Art in Wood. Thanks also to the Philadelphia Cultural Fund for their support of the Elfreth’s Alley Museum and the Museum Council of Greater Philadelphia which awarded us a micro grant which directly supported this second season of The Alley Cast.
Some credits specifically for this episode:
In addition to the sources cited by name, this episode drew heavily on the work of Walter Licht, the team of Bruce Laurie, Theodore Hershberg, and George Alter, Sharece Blakney, and Patrick Grubbs. We also drew on some resources from the Goin’ North Archive, an online collection of oral history interviews and primary documents of the Great Migration in Philadelphia.
The songs used in this episode are “Open Flames” and “An Oddly Formal Dance,” both by Blue Dot Sessions, both used under Creative Commons license.
This podcast is recorded on the unceded indigenous territory of the Lenni-Lenape people, who were and continue to be active stewards of the land. We recognize that words are not enough and we aim to actively uphold indigenous visibility and sovereignty for individuals and communities who live here now, and for those who were forcibly removed from their Homelands. By offering this Land Acknowledgment, we affirm Indigenous sovereignty and will work to hold the Elfreth’s Alley Museum accountable to the needs of American Indian and Indigenous peoples.
Thank you for listening to Season 2 of The Alley Cast! Remember that one of the best ways you can support our work is by telling other people about this show and rating us on apps such as Apple Podcasts.
You can sustain the work of the Elfreth’s Alley Museum by making a donation at elfrethsalley.org/donate or by joining our Patreon at patreon.com/elfrethsalley.
Thank you and take care!
