The Common Laborer

By: Eugene V. Debs

Narrated by: J. T. Murray

Length: 7 mins

Publisher's summary

Eugene Victor Debs (1855 - 1926) was a political activist, trade unionist, and five times the candidate of the Socialist Party of America for president of the United States. This essay appeared in the Terre Haute Locomotive Firemen’s Magazine, April 1890.

Debs expresses concern for the vast number of workingmen without trades, who are often termed “unskilled” laborers. He argues that their importance in carrying forward the great industrial enterprises of the world has not been recognized in the past, and was not appreciated at the time. He also mentions that the term “skill” is often used in a sense which does great injustice to men who do not wear the badge of some particular trade, and hence, the term “skilled laborer” is never applied to men who are known as “common laborers.”

He states that “the American idea is to obtain such wages for work as will make the American home comfortable, where there shall be an abundance of food, decent clothing, apartments for rest and recreation...fit places for American children to be born and reared, and when the wages are sufficient to secure such needs the American idea is to maintain them, and when wages fall below securing such requirements the American idea is to organize for the purpose of obtaining them.”

Debs emphasizes that the American workingman is an American citizen, and that he has the same sovereign rights and prerogatives as any other citizen. To that he adds that if the workingman can secure sufficient wages, he will be in a position to appreciate his privileges and dignity.

Public Domain (P)2020 Museum Audiobooks

It was then as it is now

He is then what we are now. Often you get the wrong person in the right time, but rarely you get the right person in the wrong time. Eugene V Debs is one such. Had he been born one century later, he would have rattled the foundations of our current system and had success in making life better for the poor majority. Now it’s up to us to be our own version of Debs.