The Other 364 Days
September 7, 2026
In the spring of 1894, the Pullman Palace Car Company cut wages again in its shops on Chicago’s South Side. Jennie Curtis had sewn there for almost a decade: carpets, drapes, the tapestry on the seats of the finest railcars in America. A year earlier, the best seamstresses in her department could make $2.25 a day. Now the same work paid only 80 cents.
Jennie’s father had also worked for Pullman. When he died, he owed the company $60 in back rent. Like most workers, he had lived in company housing. The company collected his debt from Jennie’s paycheck, deducting it week after week until her earnings barely covered her own rent. On June 21, at the convention of the American Railway Union, she rose and told the delegates what she and many others were experiencing: subsistence wages, a dead father’s debt still coming out of her pay, colleagues in her department going hungry doing the work that kept Pullman’s dining cars dressed in silk and velvet. The delegates had argued for days over whether to boycott Pullman cars. After she spoke, they voted yes.
The boycott spread quickly down the rail lines, and within a few days, Washington responded twice. On June 28, President Grover Cleveland signed legislation that established Labor Day as a federal holiday. On July 3, that same administration sent troops into Chicago to break the strike that Curtis’s testimony helped ignite. A holiday honoring labor and an army sent against laborers — five days apart, from the same government. The workers were asking for wages they could live on. They received recognition on paper and rifles in the streets.
Jennie Curtis hadn’t asked for much. She wanted a day’s labor to be enough to live on. Fifty-four years later, the world finally put that demand into writing. Article 23 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights says everyone who works has a right to pay that ensures “an existence worthy of human dignity,” and the right to join with others to protect it. Article 24 adds rest, reasonable hours, and paid holidays. Walk through the Idaho Human Rights Memorial, and you’ll find these words carved into stone. It’s worth pausing to read them carefully because the work of making them true is not finished.
That work reached a federal courtroom just last month, but it started a year earlier. Last fall, the U.S. Department of Labor lowered the wage floor for farm laborers. The government sets that wage floor to protect everyone in the field — citizens and the guest workers who come here each season on H-2A visas — so that no one’s need for work becomes an excuse to pay anyone less. When the government cut pay for guest workers, citizen farmworkers’ wages fell alongside them. Irene Mendoza is one of the workers affected. A Texan who picks and packs green beans and potatoes, she said the $3.22-an-hour cut dropped her rate to $13.78 an hour.
Mendoza explained that the loss would make it hard to pay for her children’s education and keep her own health insurance. She and seventeen other farmworkers, backed by the United Farm Workers, sued in federal court. They argued that a wage floor built to protect workers shouldn’t become a tool to pay any of them less. On August 26, U.S. District Judge Kirk Sherriff ruled the cut unlawful and ordered the Department of Labor to set new rates, telling employers they might owe back pay. The case isn’t finished. But Mendoza made the federal government explain itself in court, and the judge agreed with her.
A hundred and thirty-two years apart, and it’s still the same argument. Someone at a distance decides what a person’s day is worth. The person answers back that it’s worth more. Whether that answer holds depends on who else is willing to say it out loud.
Dignity at work isn’t hard to name, even when it’s hard to win. It looks like a wage that covers rent, real rest, and being treated like a person instead of a line item. Most of us don’t own big companies like Pullman. We aren’t the Department of Labor, and we don’t set Idaho’s wage floor. But most of us do employ someone, manage someone, buy what someone else made, or get served by someone at the end of a long shift. We set the wage. We determine the schedule. We tip, or we don’t. We ask how the food got to our table, or we don’t think about it. Dignity is never granted from afar. It’s claimed by people willing to say their labor is worth more than they’re being paid, and it’s honored — or it isn’t — in a hundred decisions the rest of us make every day.
One woman’s testimony changed a vote in a union hall in 1894. Another woman’s testimony changed a judge’s mind in federal court last month. Today, someone is topping onions in Caldwell, and someone is running a register in Meridian while the rest of us take the day off. This holiday exists because working people insisted their lives had worth. A day off honors them. Affirming their worth the other 364 days moves us closer to a community where human rights are a lived reality for all.