The right to fair pay and fair rates

In 1883 Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt attended a fancy-dress ball that outshone any ball New York had seen, wearing her electric light dress. Railroad tycoons like Cornelius Vanderbilt hosted such opulent affairs with profits from their monopoly corporations. The starvation wages they paid their workers led to the Great Uprising of 1877 and the Pullman Strike of 1894. In the late 1800s, when collective bargaining arose, 10% of the U.S. population owned more than 70% of the nation’s assets. This structural inequality contributed to the upheaval that resulted in the World Wars and the Great Depressi...