Democratic Sentinel, Volume 12, Number 45, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 30 November 1888 — The Pauper Labor of America. [ARTICLE]

The Pauper Labor of America.

E change: “Me maka fif-i-ty cents a day, me liva fiva tollass a month, and me send money to olla country.” It is a pity that the man who made this statement and his surroundi gs could not be reproduced in a photographic picture for our readers, says the Philadelphia Record correspondent, writing from Hazleton, Pa. It would tell the whole story of the degradation of labor by powerful corporations in the coal regions. This man’s case is an extreme one, of course, but his story illustrates all the evils which have been inflicted upon the Lehigh coal country by the introduction of cheap foreign labor in and about the tames. He is an Italian and stood in the doorway of atypical Italian shanty at Honey Brook this afternoon while he talked about his work, his wages, and his hopes of returning to Italy a rich man some time in the future, on 60 cents a day. The man was not young, bat appeared to be reasonably vigorous. He works in a breaker, for 60 cents a day, and said that there were 40 or 50 others in the neighborhood who were glad to get work in the breakers at from 80 cents to sl, and many loaded coal and worked as miner’s laborers at $1 a day. Five other Italians stood about riffle this man talked with a reporter. They were "11 young, stro g and active men. Two of them were working iu the strippings, where the coal is taken from the surface aUer a few feet of soil has been stripped off. These men said—through their friend, the worker in the breaker—that they were paid from $1 to $1 10, and appeared to think they were lucky to get this, as some of their countrvmen, they said, were working at other places for less.