Labor Movements

Labor Movements. Protective organizations appeared among working people as early as the 1750s, well before the industrial revolution in the United States. By the first years of the nineteenth century, journeymen artisans organized independently of their masters to protect the prices for their work and their terms of employment and apprenticeship. For the first half of the century, however, prosecutions for conspiracy left such organizations on the legal margins. As the traditional master‐journeymen relationship evolved into a more market‐oriented association, journeymen ignited a period of intense labor organization and conflict.

The Antebellum Era.

Most early trade unionists were skilled workers, but others joined the fray as well. Female textile operatives in Lowell, Massachusetts; women shoe binders throughout Massachusetts and northern New England; and less‐skilled common laborers caught the infectious spirit of revolt. The demand for shorter hours proved a common bond, and the movement for a ten‐hour day won support in Boston, Philadelphia, and other cities. However, a depression between 1837 and 1843 led to the collapse of this first general trade‐union movement.

The labor movement took on new life during the 1850s. Trade unions of skilled iron molders, puddlers, and textile workers joined forces with struggling societies of artisan craftsmen—printers, shoemakers, and tailors. The massive immigration of Irish and German workers between 1845 and 1855 provided cheap labor for railroad and canal construction as well as craftsmen to compete in the labor market. A “great shoemakers' strike” in 1860 reflected a last, massive stand by craft workers—but not the new factory operatives, who would come to dominate the industry.

The Civil War profoundly changed the American labor movement. By the war's end, the trade‐union movement included new and old trades such as the Brotherhood of the Footboard (locomotive engineers) and a revived Iron Molders' Union. In 1866 the first truly national organization, the National Labor Union (NLU), led by William Sylvis, appeared. The NLU, like the new unions of wage earners in shoemaking, the Knights and Daughters of St. Crispin, demanded the eight‐hour day and the right to organize. It also challenged the basis of the wage system by calling for land reform and cooperative production. Freedmen organized under the auspices of the Colored National Labor Union in cities like Baltimore, Maryland, and Richmond, Virginia, giving added salience to labor's demand that “wage slavery” be ended.

The Gilded Age through World War I.

The NLU collapsed during the early 1870s, soon to be replaced by a new fledgling national organization, the Noble and Holy Order of the Knights of Labor (KOL). Founded in 1869 by Philadelphia garment cutters as a secret fraternal society, the KOL grew rapidly after the 1877 railroad strikes and under Terence Powderly became the dynamic center of labor organizing. The Knights organized all sectors of workers, regardless of skill, and also attracted women and African Americans. But white hostility to black workers, especially in the South where the latter were concentrated, doomed the KOL's attempt to practice biracial unionism.

The labor movement reached its nineteenth‐century peak in 1886 with more than 700,000 workers in the Knights and another 250,000 in trade unions. That growth quickly eroded, however, as employers resisted union growth and broke strikes. By 1890, KOL membership had dwindled to 200,000, and it declined even more rapidly thereafter.

The 1890s represented a turning point for the labor movement. The American Federation of Labor (AFL), led by the former socialist cigarmaker Samuel Gompers, preached a philosophy of “pure and simple” trade unionism. Gompers urged skilled workers to “look to your union” and to distance themselves from utopian campaigns to overthrow capitalism. While he stressed caution, some workers and AFL‐affiliated unions during the 1890s proved more venturesome, particularly the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), the Brewery Workers, the Western Federation of Miners, and the Boot and Shoe Workers, which included former Knights, Populists, and socialists. The American Railway Union (ARU), led by Eugene V. Debs, embraced all categories of railroad workers but was destroyed by federal judicial and military power in the 1894 Pullman strike and boycott.

Unions affiliated with the AFL benefited from the economic growth that followed the depression of 1893–1897. Trade unions expanded rapidly between 1897 and 1904. The UMWA secured a national agreement in 1898 for most bituminous coal production, and the International Association of Machinists in 1901 won a national contract covering major firms in the metal trades. In response, many employers mounted an open‐shop (anti‐union) drive that stymied labor's growth. Facing a period of crisis, the AFL turned to politics. In the congressional campaign of 1906 and later, the AFL supported the Democratic party in the hopes of winning more union‐friendly government policies.

Socialists and syndicalists contested Gompers's power before World War I. In 1902 and 1912 socialists challenged his presidency. The syndicalist Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), formed in 1905, confronted the AFL from another direction. Revolts by less‐skilled immigrant workers in McKees Rocks, Pennsylvania; Lawrence, Massachusetts; Paterson, New Jersey; and other eastern manufacturing centers foreshadowed a new phase of labor mobilization, as did the IWW's organizing success among western miners, timber workers, and migratory agricultural workers.

The outbreak of World War I created both opportunities and perils for the labor movement. As war orders drove unemployment levels to near zero and American workers struck to win gains, the Woodrow Wilson administration designed new federal mechanisms to maintain labor peace. Following America's entry into the war in April 1917, Wilson created a War Labor Board (WLB) to investigate and resolve labor disputes. The WLB endorsed wage increases, the eight‐hour day, collective bargaining for union members, and representation of nonunion workers through shop committees. By the war's end, 4.2 million American workers belonged to unions. The AFL now included quasi‐industrial unions in steel and meatpacking. Large numbers of black workers for the first time entered the mass‐production industries of northern cities, where they maintained, at best, an uneasy relationship with white‐dominated unions.

The 1920s and the New Deal Era.

The immediate postwar years weakened the labor movement. Unemployment rose and employers, freed from the WLB oversight, fought to roll back wartime union gains. A major strike wave in 1919 resulted in labor defeats. Left‐wingers split into rival socialist and communist factions following the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, and a wave of antiradical hysteria shattered their influence within the labor movement. Employers promoted a new open‐shop movement through the “American Plan,” and they fought unions with company welfare programs and more worker‐friendly forms of scientific management. As a result, the proportion of organized workers fell by half.

The Depression of the 1930s and the consequent suffering of broad segments of the working class reenergized labor organizing across industrial America. The inauguration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt as president in 1933 brightened the prospects for the labor movement's renewal, as labor's political influence within the New Deal coalition stimulated expectations of a more sympathetic government climate. Passage of the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) ignited a wave of labor organizing in the mass‐production industries. In the coal fields, automobile plants, textile and steel mills, and on the docks, workers heeded John L. Lewis's hyperbolic assertion: “The president wants you to join a union.” In 1934 major and at times violent strikes swept the nation. Despite some initial success, union organizing efforts failed against firm corporate opposition. Congressional friends of labor led by Senator Robert F. Wagner of New York drafted legislation to ensure union recognition. The National Labor Relations Act (Wagner Act) that Roosevelt signed in 1935 intensified the process of union organizing.

Emboldened by rising worker militancy and the Wagner Act, leaders of a number of AFL unions joined Lewis, president of the UMWA, to form a Committee for Industrial Organization (CIO). Charged by AFL leaders with splitting the labor movement, Lewis and his allies persisted in organizing mass‐production workers. Dramatic success in February 1937—in a strike against General Motors, spearheaded by the sit‐down strike at Flint, Michigan, and in steel through a secretly negotiated contract with U.S. Steel in March 1937—catapulted the CIO into national prominence and made it a real rival to the AFL. Although the CIO's organizing drive stalled in the summer and fall of 1937, as it lost several strikes, faced more bitter employer opposition, and confronted heavy unemployment in a new economic downturn, Lewis moved to turn it into a permanent, independent organization. In October 1938, the CIO held its first constitutional convention and emerged as the Congress of Industrial Organizations.

When European war erupted in 1939, the CIO again began to grow, as did the AFL. By the time the United States entered World War II in December 1941, American mass‐production industries had signed union contracts. The war also brought new restraints on labor, however. In early 1942, Roosevelt created a National War Labor Board (NWLB), which regulated industrial relations for the duration of the war. The NWLB controlled wages in order to limit inflation, guaranteed union security in return for labor peace, and pressured employers to bargain with unions. Wartime labor scarcity brought large numbers of women and African Americans in the mass production industries. Some CIO unions, like the United Packing‐house Workers of America, took aggressive action to attack racial intolerance in the unions' ranks. By war's end, the labor movement had made unprecedented gains, having unionized nearly 35 percent of the nonagricultural labor force.

The Post–World War II Years.

A postwar strike wave—the largest in American history—swept through the nation's mass‐production industries in 1946. Unlike the 1919 strikes, this time employers did not break the unions. Instead they established a pattern of postwar collective bargaining through which workers conceded much to management in return for higher wages and fringe benefits. A 1950 agreement between the Ford Motor Company and the UAW, the so‐called Treaty of Detroit, exemplified the postwar union‐management bargain.

Politically, the labor movement suffered a number of defeats in the immediate postwar years. Republicans regained control of Congress in 1946 and the following year passed the anti‐union Taft‐Hartley Act. That law, combined with rising anticommunist and anti‐Soviet hysteria, caused a split in the CIO. In 1949–1950, the CIO expelled eleven left‐led unions, because their leaders refused to sign non‐communist affidavits.

Despite the booming postwar economy, the labor movement, especially the CIO, showed signs of decline. New technologies associated with automation swept across unionized industries. Overseas competition and the shift from manufacturing to service‐sector employment further reduced union membership. Despite the merger of the AFL and CIO in 1955, unions failed to advance. Organizing in the South faced added obstacles as whites mobilized against the civil rights demands of African Americans.

The factors that curtailed postwar organizing intensified after 1960. Unions found themselves restrained by new government regulation such as the 1957 Landrum‐Griffin Act and rising corporate resistance. The Vietnam War deeply divided the labor movement as Walter Reuther of the UAW led a revolt against AFL‐CIO support for the war. Insurgencies challenged many union leaders who had lost touch with younger rank‐and‐file workers. One of the more prominent opposition movements—Miners for Democracy—witnessed the 1969 assassination of its popular leader, Jock Yablonski, by hirelings of UMWA president Tony Boyle. In steel, rank‐and‐file insurgencies challenged leaders who promoted labor‐management cooperation.

The Late Twentieth Century.

Economic contraction and deindustrialization in mass‐production industries in the 1970s and early 1980s accelerated the decline in union membership. Republican party hegemony in national politics in the 1980s weakened labor and made the National Labor Relations Board less effective in protecting workers' right to unionize. Key strike losses by the air‐traffic controllers (1981), Hormel packinghouse workers (1987), and corn‐processing workers in Clinton, Iowa (1980), and in Decatur, Illinois (1994), further depleted union ranks and morale. Isolated victories occurred, but by the mid‐1990s union membership had reached its lowest point since the early 1930s: less than 15 percent of the nonagricultural labor force (and under 10 percent in the private sector).

Two signs of revival appeared in the late 1990s. First, service‐sector workers won significant gains, largely as a result of the entry of women and minority workers into unions, led by a new cadre of organizers dedicated to building a more diverse and militant labor movement. Second, the AFL‐CIO chose a new leadership in 1995, with John Sweeney of the Service Employees' International Union as president. This leadership revitalized organizing campaigns, encouraged city and state federations to act politically, and sought to rebuild labor's alliances with other social movements. The U.S. labor movement, moreover, evinced new interest in building international alliances with workers overseas while simultaneously fighting international trade agreements, such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), that free capital from national regulation.
See also Anticommunism; Automation and Computerization; Automotive Industry; Canals and Waterways; Depressions, Economic; Foreign Trade, U.S.; Industrialization; Iron and Steel Industry; Labor Markets; Lowell Mills; Mining; Multinational Enterprises; National Association of Manufacturers; National Recovery Administration; New Deal Era, The; Populist Era; Racism; Sit‐down Strike, Flint; Social Class; Socialism; Socialist Party of America; Strikes and Industrial Conflict; Work; Working‐Class Life and Culture.

Bibliography

David Brody , Steelworkers in America: The Nonunion Era, 1960; reprint, 1998.
Richard Oestricher , Solidarity and Fragmentation: Working People and Class Consciousness in Detroit, 1875–1900, 1986.
Robert Zieger , American Workers, American Unions, 1920–1985, 1986.
Melvyn Dubofsky, ed., Labor Leaders in America, 1987.
David Montgomery , The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865–1925, 1987.
Kim Moody , An Injury to All: The Decline of American Unionism, 1988.
Bruce Laurie , From Artisan to Worker: Labor in Nineteenth‐Century America, 1989.
Lizabeth Cohen , Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939, 1990.
Melvyn Dubofsky , The State and Labor in Modern America, 1994.

Shelton Stromquist