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Index to the Annual Reports of the Michigan Department of Labor, 1884–1920
by
Le Roy Barnett
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For many years I have consulted the old annual reports of Michigan's Department of Labor and been greatly impressed with their contents. These little-known publications contain a wealth of information about workers and those who hired them in our state during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Because these government reports are rich in data yet mostly unexplored by researchers, I have indexed the series both to publicize this valuable textual resource and to aid scholars who might find this information useful. |
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The Bureau of Labor & Industrial Statistics was created in 1883 by Public Act 156 for the purpose of gathering information on wage earners of almost all types and their places of employment. Included within this agency's purview were such matters as accidents, strikes, trade unions, and even the social conditions of workers no matter what their age, occupation, gender, or the location of their jobs. |
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Ten years later in 1893—by virtue of the passage of Public Act 126—the legislature also established a corps of factory inspectors to annually visit and report on manufacturing establishments in Michigan. These inspectors' findings were published separately until 1902, when they became an integral part of the volumes covered by this study. Consequently, the annual reports of the Michigan Bureau of Factory Inspection from 1894 to 1901 will not be included in this index. |
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In 1909 (by Public Act 285), the Bureau of Labor & Industrial Statistics became the Michigan Department of Labor. This agency retained responsibility for assessing "the conditions of all manufacturing establishments, hotels, stores, and workshops where labor is employed, [along] with such other matter[s] relating to the industrial, social, educational, moral, and sanitary conditions of the laboring classes" of the state. Because the agency's duties were little changed, it was eventually decided that the renamed office would continue to use the numbering sequence of its predecessor's annual reports. |
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The last chapter in this brief tale occurred early in 1921 (by Public Act 43), when the Department of Labor was reorganized into the Department of Labor and Industry. The enabling legislation no longer required the publication of an annual report, simply stating that one could be printed "if so ordered by the Board of State Auditors." Because such a directive was never issued, the 1920 report is the last one included in the following guide. |
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In the index below, years are in bold type followed by appropriate page numbers for that particular annual report. The dates are taken from the spines of each volume and are also, conveniently, the year of each publication's pressrun. However, users should be aware that the information contained in the books is generally for the year prior to the date recorded. For instance, statistics on barber shops in the 1916 volume were gathered in 1915. |
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Throughout this guide I have included a limited number of references to specific Michigan firms. I took this step when descriptions of these establishments were located in obscure places in the text, thus making them difficult to discover. However, most enterprises featured in the annual reports are not listed in the index. These individual business summaries have been omitted because it seems likely that users will have no trouble finding most vignettes about our extractive ore industries under Copper Mining and Iron Mining, interurban firms under Electric Railways, "stogie" manufacturers under Cigar Industry, and so forth. |
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