While tensions between labor and management continued to heat up in the first decade of the 20th century, eastern and southern Europeans, particularly the Finns, Italians and Croatians, were most often targeted as instigators. But, not every immigrant who came to the Lake Superior copper region in the late 19th and early 20th century was spoiling for a fight. There were many who had not come to change the socio-political or economic world, but had personal goals and ambitions of their own that did not include spending the remainder of their lives working in a copper mine.

The mantra of low-paying jobs, discrimination, lack of upward mobility in society or the workplace has seldom been examined in much depth. Another mantra is that of Finnish immigrants as socialist radicals whose only mission in life was to re-order the world to their utopian vision and willing to go to any length to achieve it.

Propagating these views is largely based on judging situations and circumstances from the perspective of capitalist America in that time, rather than from the perspective of the immigrants.

While many students and teachers of history focus on low wages as one of the causes of labor unrest, the scale of wages must be compared to scales of economy between the U.S. and the countries of origin considered.

For six months ending on Dec. 31, 1912, average daily earnings at C&H were $3.22 for miners. During the same period, trammers with the same company averaged $2.84 about 11% difference. At the same time, the average daily wage for a carpenter was about $1.50. From the perspective of a Finnish immigrant, $2.84 per day was not a bad wage.

According to Artimus K.E. Holmio, in his book, History of the Finns in Michigan, one of the most frequent causes for leaving Finland was to earn money to buy a house and to finance a marriage.

“Although the workday in America was shorter than in Finland,” Holmio wrote, “wages were better, so than an unmarried man could quite easily save a sizeable amount in relatively short time.”

This begs the question: How was this possible if unskilled labor wages were as low as claimed?

In his academic dissertation, Poverty, Inequality and the Finnish 1860s Famine, Miikka Voutilainen wrote that in Finland, a male farm worker was given, among other things, 4 barrels of rye and half a barrel of barley as an annual wage. In the economy of Finnish agriculture, it would be a complex process to compare that wage to the equal value of cash wages paid to mine workers in the Lake Superior copper region.

Holmio also points out, however, that it has been less frequently shown that more work had to be done in the shorter American workday than in the longer Finnish workday, and that the pace at which work was done was much more hurried than most immigrants were accustomed.

Fast paced work was part of the nature of industrialized labor. Working quickly not only plagued mining, it was a source of irritation to employees of the Ford Motor Company when the assembly line was adopted

“It was difficult to make sure you completed all of your work before the car moved down the line to its next station,” states Ford in its article, The Moving Assembly Line and the Five-Dollar Workday. Cars would end up missing parts, or workers could end up falling over each other while putting the car together.”

Another consideration too often overlooked is in judging trammers’ wages as low and unskilled, any study of economies is ignored in favor of making a point. It is nearly impossible to compare an industrialized U.S. mining economic structure to that of a European agricultural economy, particularly when considering the instability of the European market as a result of American agricultural expansion and the decline of mining in Europe and Great Britain.

Matti Peltonen, in his article, The Peasant Economy and the World Market: Finnish Peasant Farming in the Age of Agrarian Crises, 1880s-1910s, explains that it becomes still more complicated when comparing commercial household production to capitalist agriculture, using wage labor. Mechanization of agriculture in the U.S., combined with the larger fields, improvements in transportation that lowered shipping costs, U.S. grain found ready customers in European markets, particularly in times of European crop failures.

As Peltonen points out, differences between the efficiency of a European peasant and an American farmer could be truly significant. The rich supply of less expensive grain imported from outside Europe lowered grain prices considerably in the 1870s and 1880s, Peltonen wrote, which led to a grain crisis in Europe. European wheat and grain producers could no longer compete with U.S. grain imports, which had significant negative economic impacts on small farms. Many farmers retreated from grain production and shifted to dairy farming.

Voutilainen wrote that previous to its industrial era, Finland was a primarily an agrarian country, with roughly 90% of the population engaged in agriculture, and in rural areas, the proportion neared 96%. The share of industrial labor grew only moderately during the 19th century, from 2.5% in 1815, to roughly 4% by 1870.

“The biggest social change taking place in Finland during the 1800s was not so much that the economy slowly modernized,” Voutilainen wrote, “but that the number of landless grew among the rural population.”

Michigan Technological University’s An Interior Ellis Island: Keweenaw Ethnic Groups, the Finns, mentions the number of landless as a push factor in compelling Finns to migrate:

“The overpopulation, poverty, larger number of landless people and uncertainty of employment of southern Ostrobothnia, the region of origin for most emigrants to America from 1867-1892,” the website states, “seems to have formed the primary reasons to uproot and move. During that period, sixteen thousand people emigrated from Ostrobothnia and about fifteen thousand from all the rest of Finland combined (these figures do not include ethnic Finns from Norway and Sweden). Ninety percent of emigrants from Ostrobothnia worked in agriculture and ten percent had other vocations. The development of industry in southernmost Finland shifted the labor opportunities away from rural agriculture. These economic opportunities in industrial centers in Finland and America were in contrast to the brutal upheaval of a population that had nearly doubled during the preceding two generations in northern Finnish regions such as Ostrobothnia and Satakunta. Most sought employment in the growing industries in southern Finland, the site says, but a small portion would seek opportunities in Michigan’s copper district.

While unskilled labor wages were significantly lower than skilled mining positions, they were still higher than those paid in skilled, non-mining sectors. Many eastern and southern European immigrants came to the Lake Superior region to use jobs as a stepping stone to better situations, which will be the subject of next week’s Copper Country’s Past & People.