Worker relations
White workers and Chinese workers lived in separate, segregated camps. As part of their contracts, Chinese workers insisted on having their own foods and tea, imported from China or from Chinese merchants on the Pacific Coast. As a result of this segregation, and because Chinese culture valued regular washing, many of the diseases that regularly swept the white workers’ camps, such as dysentery, did not decimate the Chinese workers to nearly the same extent.
Alongside the builders were cooks and cleaners, often women, who followed the crews. Although these women did not do the chopping and blasting that the men did, they were still exposed to the same dangers of disease and weather as the men.
The Northern Pacific did not keep records of its builders, white or Chinese. As a result most of what is known of their lives has been gleaned from archaeological survey and oral history interviews with descendants. The picture painted by these sources is of a hard life, filled with backbreaking work, long hours, and high tempers. Despite that, there is evidence that it was not all work – archaeologists have found names carved into rocks along the tracks in Montana, names written in English, Chinese, and even Japanese by railroad workers, testament to their passing and their desire to leave a mark of their own on the landscape.
The Central and Northern Pacific railroads relied on Chinese and Irish workers to build their tracks. After the Chinese Exclusion Acts of 1882, both companies turned to Japanese workers instead. Immigrants were thought to work harder than US-born workers, as their situations were more desperate. Their tenuous legal status and lack of familiarity with US labor laws also made them easier to abuse. Furthermore, most of the foreign workers were non-white. This included the mostly Catholic immigrants from Ireland and Italy. Companies could therefore legally pay them less than their white coworkers and give them fewer benefits.
After the rails were built, railroads continued to rely heavily on immigrant workers. This caused tensions with the white workers and the (white only) unions. In the north, unions protested the hiring of Asian workers. In the south, the unions protested the hiring of African Americans. In both cases, unions argued that they were taking jobs from white workers and driving down the average wages. Unions successfully pressured railroads into only hiring union members, pushing out workers of color from anything except low wage, low status jobs.
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