Three child coal miners with mules, Gary, West Virginia, 1908
13 November 2020
A graveyard shift is a late-night work schedule, often starting at midnight and continuing on until morning. Why it is called graveyard is not known for certain, but it’s likely because it is late, dark, and quiet, with few other people around.
The phrase first appears in the context of mining, with that industry being one of the first to operate twenty-four hours a day. Prior to electrification, night-time shifts in most industries were often unprofitable because of the costs of lighting, but that was irrelevant for mining, which required lighting regardless of the time of day.
The phrase is recorded as early as 9 August 1884, when it appears in The Mining Record in reference to an Arizona mine:
Have resumed work. On Monday afternoon superintendent Hammond received a telegram directing him to resume operations in the mine, and at 6 P.M. the graveyard shift went below, while the whistle sounded loud and long, confirming the good news.
And a definition of graveyard shift appears in Colorado court records from 1894:
Several shifts were at work, and, at the date named, William Sharp and his companions were employed on what is well termed among miners “the graveyard shift," from midnight on to the morning.
As electrification progressed and it became profitable to work at night, the practice and term moved into other industries.
The term swing shift, however, seems to have arisen in another industry and under different circumstances. Today, the term usually applies to the shift between the day and graveyard shifts, but originally it referred to an irregular shift, an unusually long one of eighteen hours or more. And swing shift is first recorded in the context of railroad workers, although it may also have gotten its start in coal mining, as uses in that industry are recorded shortly afterwards.
The earliest examples of swing shift that I have found are from a protracted strike at the Scranton Traction Company, which operated streetcars in that Pennsylvania city at the turn of the twentieth century. From the Elmira Gazette (New York) of 24 June 1899 under the optimistic headline “Strike May Be Settled To-Day”:
The men complain of the system of work known as the “swing shift,” preferring to work a straight shift of nine and ten hours.
The headline was optimistic because a year and a half later, on 28 December 1900, the same paper reported under the headline “Strike Settled”:
The men formerly worked on what is known as the swing shift system, and were frequently required to work eighteen hours for $1.80. Under that system there were three crews to each two cars. Under the new plan there will be two crews for each car. Each crew will work but nine hours a day.
There’s a reference swing shifts relating to coal miner strikes that occurred in 1900–01 over the issue of swing shifts in a 1905 study of colliery labor organization by Frank Warne:
Firemen refused to work in a number of collieries in which officials attempted to introduce the “swing” shift.
And in 1902 the swing shift is again the subject of a strike, this time by coal miners employed by the Lackawanna Steel Company of Scranton. As reported by the New York Times on 13 March 1902:
At the Woodward colliery to-day the refusal of Superintendent Phillips to reinstate the discharged firemen or to change the swing shift order was reported by the committee to the 950 men. His proposition to give the discharged men other work and allow the shift to be made in the middle of the week was refused.
And a 1902 commission reviewing the Lackawanna strike provides more detail in its reporting:
He was one of a committee of Delaware, Lackawanna and Western engineers who on February 12, last, requested District Superintendent Williams in writing that the swing shift be not abolished, but that the twenty-four-hour Sunday shift be continued.
Uses of swing shift in the current sense of a work shift between the day and night shift are in place by the 1940s.
There’s an old bit of internet lore that would have the origin of graveyard shift being in an early modern practice of posting a vigil at cemeteries to listen for the sounds of people who had been mistakenly buried alive. This, obviously, is utter nonsense.
Sources:
“12.000 Miners May Strike.” New York Times, 13 March 1902, 1. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.
Bissell, P.J. “Mollie Gibson Consolidated Mining and Milling Company v. Sharp” (1894). In T.M. Robinson, Reports of the Decisions of the Court of Appeals of the State of Colorado, vol. 5 of 20. New York: Banks and Brothers, 1896. 323. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2020, s.v. graveyard shift, n.
“Mining Notes.” The Mining Record, 9 August 1884, 86. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. graveyard, n.
“Strike May Be Settled To-Day.” Elmira Gazette (New York), 24 June 1899, 1. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.
“Strike Settled.” Elmira Gazette (New York), 28 December 1900, 1. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.
Warne, Frank Julian. The Coal-Mine Workers: A Study in Labor Organization. New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1905, 144. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Wright, Carroll D. “Proceedings of Friday, Dec. 5 [1902].” Proceedings of the Anthracite Mine Strike Commission. Scranton: Scranton Tribune, 1902–03. 69. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Photo credit: Lewis Wickes Hine, 1908, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Records of the National Child Labor Committee.