Featured on PDR in the collection Mayday, Mayday: Capital and Labor (1907)

The reverend William Schuler Harris’ Capital and Labor (1907) frames its titular subjects as locked in a perennial struggle, “dating back to the time when the Egyptians laid the lash upon their slaves”. Writing in the early twentieth century, Harris is skeptical of the “orator [who] frequently soars into ecstasies over the privileges of the American workers”, for he sees how the labor force is suffering under the “galling yoke” of trusts and monopolies. Substitute those scourges of the Gilded Age with unfettered multinational conglomerates and something similar holds true today. The author’s list of obstacles facing workers are as relevant now as they were more than a century ago: the needs of “civilized life” increase more rapidly than wages; the skilled worker remains at…