How much of the New South ideal was rooted in reality? Southern industries still lagged behind their northern competitors. Southerners who took jobs in the region’s new mills and mines found that industrial development did not necessarily lead to economic prosperity. In 1887 the North Carolina Bureau of Labor interviewed mill workers regarding their working conditions. The following excerpts offer insight into the lives of both employers and employees.
DURHAM
EMPLOYER We have a very moral place; we have no drinking around our mill. In answering the question about the saving of earnings, we do not know just how many save their money, but we do know of several who have from $100 to $500 now, which they have saved up since they came to our place. Our operatives we think make as much and several of them more, than at any other mill in the State. They seem perfectly satisfied and we have had no trouble whatever in regard to strikes, etc. Our mill has only been running about two years and only a few have built houses, though several are speaking of it now.
EMPLOYEE There are about 225 to 250 hands engaged at different classes of work in this mill, about 100 of them children—many of them very small children, under 12 years of age. Wages are about as good here as at any mill in the State and I think better than at many of them, the only trouble about wages is that they are not paid in cash—trade checks are issued with which employees are expected to buy what they need at the company’s store, which is not right. The same system is practised I am told, at most of the cotton mills in the State, but that does not make it right and just. The tobacco factories in this town pay the cash every week. Any man who has ever tried it knows there is a great difference in buying with the cash. This, with the long hours required for a day’s work (12 hours), is the only cause for complaint: the officers are kind and close attention to work and sobriety and morality is required of all who work here. . . .
RANDOLPH
EMPLOYEE I work in the cotton mills. They employ men, women and children—many children who are too small to work, they should be at school; the parents are more to blame than are the mill-owners. The hands in the mills in this section are doing very well, and if they only received their pay weekly in cash instead of “trade checks,” and store accounts, they would not complain if they were paid in cash and were allowed to buy for cash where they pleased, it would be much better. Ten hours are enough for a day’s work. I believe the mills here would be willing to it if there was a law making all conform to it. I believe compulsory education would be a benefit too.
Source: W. N. Jones, First Annual Report of the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the State of North Carolina, 1887, 149–50.