In the image, their wages are being described as horrible.

Could you list sources of linen/textile workers vs lumberjacks? As industrialization occurs, wages for machine operators tend to go up, as they require skill to operate. Over the years, textiles have shifted from hand labor to looms, and lumber has shifted from hand-saws and horses to chainsaws, heavy lifting equipment, and trucks.

To make things easier for others:

• Link 1 - Picture
• Link 2 - Article

Link 1 states that the image is from 7 February 1883.

Well, the message of the cartoon is clearly that wage workers were not getting a fair return on their labor, and a disproportionate amount of the value they produced was being reaped as profits by industrialists. Historians refer to this outlook as producerism, which was espoused by the Knights of Labor and other industrial unionists.

Don't forget that the fifty years that followed the end of the Civil War represented one of the most rapid periods of economic expansion in American history: national wealth rose from $16 billion in 1860 to $88 billion in 1900. A disproportionate share of this wealth was controlled by a small number of wealthy individuals; 24 of the 30 wealthiest Americans in history made their fortunes in the late 19th century.

So the cartoon implies that the fortunes of Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jay Gould, and other robber barons were based on the exploitation of cheap labor by their corporations. Were they correct?

There were two major sets of data collected during the latter part of the 19th century relative to wage rates and trends in the United States: the Aldrich Report (based on data collected by the Commissioner of Labor in the northeast during the early 1890s) and the Weeks Report, collected through the 1880 census.

The Weeks Report is available here. There’s a lot of regional variation, and the data is a little spotty, but there is some suggestive information. For example, at a cotton mill in Connecticut wage rates ranged from 45 cents a day for a doffer (who would typically be child) to $2.22 a day for a machinist (p. 331) in 1880.

The Aldrich report is available here.

There’s also a useful data series from this 1898 report from the Department of Labor. Unfortunately, the occupations listed in the report don't correspond to the occupations depicted in the cartoon.

Average weekly wage rates in Massachusetts (p.695), which in 1881 ranged from $5.95 for workers in the carpeting trade to $18.00 for agricultural laborers, with board. In Wisconsin, daily wage rates (p. 704) ranged from $1.14 (factory operators) to $2.71 (masons and bricklayers) in 1895. (See also this analysis of wage rates by occupation.)

Anyway. To answer your question, the consensus is that the wages paid to American workers were steadily increasing – in fits and starts, and with a great deal of variation according to industry and region – during the late 19th century. On the other hand, the cost of living (measured by the cost of various commodities) was also rising, so a nominal increase in wages didn’t necessarily mean higher real wages. As economic historian Clarence Long put it:

Average annual earnings adjusted for changes in living cost rose about 46 percent between 1860 and 1890… as expected from the similar behavior of money wages and earnings. But the failure of earnings to rise as much as wages in money terms by 1870 or 1880 meant that real earnings also manifested less progress. Higher living cost, in combination with probably fewer average days of employment, caused real annual earnings to be lower in 1870 by about 10 percent. By 1880 they were above 1860 by only 6 percent, compared to 18 percent for real daily wages. While two-thirds of the net rise in real daily wages occurred in the 1880's, nearly nine-tenths of the rise in real annual earnings seems to have occurred in that decade.

Furthermore, an 1895 report from New York indicated that wages typically only represented a third or less of manufacturers’ costs in most industries, while profits ranged from 5% in the textile industry to 20% in the printing trades.

So wage rates weren’t horrible – they compared well with European countries, for example – but given the rapid rate of economic growth during the Gilded Age, workers could be forgiven for saying that they weren’t getting their fair share of the economic pie.

Finally, linen workers were paid well because they had a skilled trade that wasn’t yet mechanized. Unlike cotton, which was spun and woven in industrial mills (to a large extent using child labor), the flax plant is more laborious to work as a thread – and thus attracted higher prices and more skilled labor.