The Labor Union Movement in America



Continuity & Change within the Labor Union Movement in America

JACKSONIAN ERA

By the late 1820s, various artisans began to show interest in unionizing. As ineffective as these first efforts to organize may have been, they reflected the need of working people for economic and legal protection from exploiting employers. These early unions were only locally organized and virtually all excluded female workers. In the case of Commonwealth v. Hunt (1842) the supreme court of Massachusetts held that unions were lawful organizations and that the strike was a lawful weapon.

GILDED AGE

Immigrants provided a cheap and plentiful labor supply during this age of industrialization. Workers had little control over the conditions of their workplace. Labor attempted to fight back, but their efforts met with little success.

Local unions in various trades joined together in citywide federations, then nationwide unions. The Nation Labor Union formed in 1866. As the first nationwide labor union, it was never very strong, and fell apart during economic depression of 1873.

The Knights of Labor was formed (1869) by Uriah Stephens and expanded rapidly under the leadership of Terrance Powdery. Membership was open to all workers, whether they be skilled or unskilled, black or white, male or female. The Knights achieved a membership of nearly 750,000 during the next few years, but found themselves fragmented by the rift between skilled and unskilled workers. The Knights, an effective labor force, declined after the Haymarket Square riots. In the riot members of the Knights of Labor where accused of throwing a bomb which killed police officers. The Knights, already fragmented, where faced with enormous negative publicity, and eventually disbanded. The public began to associate all unions with anarchy and violence.

The American Federation of Labor was founded by Samuel Gompers in 1886. The AFL was a federation that organized only unions of skilled workers. They fought for what became known as “bread and butter” unionism. The AFL is the only union from the Gilded Age that survived until today.

During the Pullman Strike in 1894, the American Railroad Union led by Eugene V. Debs (a leading American socialist) struck the company’s manufacturing plant and called for a boycott of the handling of Pullman’s sleeping and parlor cars on the nation’s railroads. Within a week, 125,000 railroad workers were engaged in a sympathy protest strike. President Cleveland moved in federal troops to break the strike. Finally a sweeping federal court injunction forced an end to the sympathy strike, and many railroad workers were blacklisted. The Pullman strikers were essentially starved into submissive defeat. The strike illustrated the increasing tendency of the government to offer moral support and military force to break strikes. The injunction became a prime legal weapon against union organizing and action.

The Sherman Anti-trust Act, enacted in 1890, was used by the Justice Department to institute antitrust lawsuits against unions. The Clayton Act of 1914 made explicit the legal concept that “the labor of a human being is not a commodity or article of commerce” and hence not subject to the Sherman Act provisions which had been the legal basis for injunctions against union organization.

PROGRESSIVE ERA

The first time a president at least somewhat sided with striking laborers was during a 1902 strike of anthracite coal miners, under the banner of the United Mine Workers, President Theodore Roosevelt intervened and appointed a commission of mediation and arbitration. In general, T. Roosevelt’s Square Deal took a pro-labor stance.

During this era, Eugene V. Debs abandoned labor in order to lead the growing political and economic movement of Socialism. Socialism and labor paired in 1905 with the creation of the IWW, or the “Wobblies” headed by Bill Haywood.

In 1911 a fire broke out at the Triangle Shirtwaist Co. in New York. About 150 employees, almost all of them young women, were killed because employers kept workers locked in. New York and the country were aroused by the tragedy. A state factory investigation committee headed by Frances Perkins (she was to become Franklin Roosevelt’s secretary of labor in 1933, the first woman cabinet member in history) paved the way for many long needed reforms in industrial safety and fire prevention measures.

During the Progressive era, Wilson’s Keating-Owen Act (1916) was the first federal law to regulate child labor, but it was declared unconstitutional in Hammer v. Dagenhart (1918). It would not be until FDR’s 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act that child labor laws would be upheld.

WORLD WAR I & THE 1920S

During WWI, the Great Migration of African-American workers to factories in the northeastern cities took place. The government granted important, albeit temporary, gains and union membership soared. The post WWI depression and Red Scare brought wages down sharply and caused major erosion of union membership-a loss of about a million members in the years from 1920 to 1923. In short, the 1920s was a bad era for unions.

GREAT DEPRESSION

In 1935, John L. Lewis left the AFL and announced the creation of the CIO, the Committee for Industrial Organization, which was a union of unskilled workers. They were reunited into the AFL-CIO in 1955.

As part of the New Deal, FDR not only passed the Fair Labor Standards Act, but also the Wagner Act, which created the National Labor Relations Board requiring employers to recognize and bargain with unions.

WORLD WAR II – TODAY

During the war, industrial jobs soared and so did union membership, but the government froze wages and limited strikes. The most respected African-American labor leader, A. Philip Randolph, organized the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and forced FDR to end racial discrimination in defense industries in 1941. After the war, the use of strikes was resumed, resulting in the anti-union Taft-Hartley Act, passed over Truman’s veto. Since the 1970s, union membership has been steadily declining in the private-sector while growing in the public sector. While unions do exist in right-to- work states, they are typically weaker. Reagan and the Conservative Coalition took a tough stand against unions in the 1980s, setting a precedent by firing striking air traffic controllers.

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