Strikes and Industrial Conflict

Strikes and Industrial Conflict. The strike has been the primary expression of collective action by American workers since the beginning of the industrialization process. Although strikes occurred prior to the industrial transformation of the United States in the late nineteenth century, they were relatively infrequent and local events initiated by skilled workers belonging to small trade organizations, which rarely survived the frequent economic depressions that wracked the early national economy.

The Nineteenth Century.

By the mid‐1800s, as technological innovations eroded the privileged position of many skilled craftsmen, a new era of industrial and labor relations arose. One of the first “industrial strikes” occurred in the textile mills of Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1834 when over eight hundred women walked off the job protesting a reduction in their wages. The strike failed, but two years later an even larger group of women struck and successfully forced employers to restore the wage cuts. The largest pre–Civil War labor dispute began in February 1860 among the skilled shoemakers of Lynn, Massachusetts. At the peak of the strike, between ten and twenty thousand workers across New England joined in support of Lynn's men and women shoemakers and helped them win a partial victory.

The Civil War and Reconstruction years saw relatively few notable strikes. The Gilded Age, however, witnessed the emergence of massive and sometimes violent labor disputes between a new class of industrial workers and large corporations. Most of these disputes ended peacefully, either in the defeat of one side or in compromise. Violence primarily marked those disputes where employers refused to negotiate, hired strikebreakers, or called in state or federal troops. The first of the great industrial battles began on 16 July 1877 when railroad workers in Martinsburg, West Virginia, struck to protest a reduction in wages. The strike quickly spread as railroad workers around the nation walked out in sympathy. Violence erupted when the governor of Maryland ordered the state militia to restore order in Baltimore, where crowds of strike sympathizers occupied the streets. At the end of the melee, nine workers were dead, most of the railway station was destroyed, and the strike had been dealt a fatal blow.

Despite the unrelenting resistance of most employers, workers continued to strike. One of the most famous “strikes” of the period began in July 1892 when the general manager of Andrew Carnegie's steel plant in Homestead, Pennsylvania, Henry Clay Frick, locked out the workers in an attempt to break their union. Frick hired operatives from the Pinkerton Agency, a private‐detective and security‐guard firm, to reopen the plant and provide protection for strikebreakers. The strikers defeated the Pinkertons in a pitched battle, but the strike collapsed when the governor of Pennsylvania dispatched state militia to occupy the town of Homestead. By September the plants were operating normally, without union labor.

Workers also lost the Pullman strike and boycott of 1894. Unable to defeat George Pullman by themselves, his workers appealed to Eugene V. Debs, president of the American Railway Union (ARU). ARU members voted to support the strike, which brought out more than 260,000 railroad workers and effectively paralyzed the nation's railroad system. Once again government officials sided with business. Attorney General Richard Olney obtained legal injunctions interdicting union activities, sent federal troops and marshals to enforce the court orders, and had Debs and other ARU leaders arrested for disobeying the injunction. This federal intervention effectively terminated the strike, and by mid‐July most of the defeated strikers had returned.

1900 to 1945.

Strike activity remained at relatively high levels during the first two decades of the twentieth century. In May 1902, the United Mine Workers of America struck in the anthracite coal fields of Pennsylvania, demanding union recognition and better working conditions. As coal production fell precipitately, President Theodore Roosevelt pressured the employers to negotiate an agreement meeting many of the union's demands. These years also witnessed a series of strikes by immigrant clothing workers; the most famous of these, “the uprising of 20,000,” was a 1909 walkout by women garment workers in New York City. The syndicalist Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), which aimed to organize all workers into “One Big Union,” also led several mass strikes, the most notable of which occurred in Lawrence, Massachusetts, in January 1912 when roughly twenty thousand textile workers staged a successful walkout. The success of the IWW proved short‐lived, as a year later (1913) its members lost a strike by silk workers in Paterson, New Jersey.

The World War I years were especially strike‐ridden. Workers in large numbers voted to strike as their wages failed to keep pace with rapidly rising prices. More strikes occurred in 1915–1916 than in any comparable earlier period. The number of industrial disputes fell slightly in 1917 and 1918, largely owing to the efforts of the National War Labor Board (NWLB), which responded to organized labor's demands in exchange for a no‐strike pledge. Nonetheless, well over a million workers walked picket lines in 1918. The cessation of hostilities brought an end to the NWLB and unleashed a tidal wave of industrial unrest. In 1919 over four million workers, including nearly 600,000 coal miners and 300,000 steelworkers, went on strike to preserve their wartime gains. Without government support, however, workers lost the most crucial postwar industrial battles.

The number of strikes steadily declined throughout the 1920s and remained stable during the first years of the depression of the 1930s. Beginning in 1933, however, the number of strikes exploded. Not only did more strikes occur, but the primary reason behind them also shifted. Before the Great Depression, nearly all strikes concerned wages, hours, and working conditions. While these issues remained important, the industrial unrest beginning in 1934, when waterfront workers in San Francisco, teamsters in Minnesota, and 500,000 textile workers across the nation struck, was fueled by the strikers' demand for union recognition. This initial burst of labor activity declined in 1935 and 1936 after the U.S. Supreme Court declared unconstitutional the National Industrial Recovery Act and its protection of workers' rights to organize. Beginning in late 1936, however, a second wave of industrial strikes spurred by passage of the National Labor Relations Act (Wagner Act) involved millions of American workers. The Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), which had split from the American Federation of Labor (AFL), stood at the forefront of the movement, leading walkouts in the unorganized mass production sectors of the economy. The best‐known CIO‐led work stoppage, the Flint sit‐down strike, began on 30 December 1936 when General Motors (GM) employees in Flint, Michigan, sat down on the job and occupied the company's plants. Their innovative tactics forced GM to recognize and bargain with their union, the United Automobile Workers. By June 1937 nearly 500,000 workers, inspired by the union victory at GM, had participated in sit‐down strikes that spread across the nation.

The number of strikes fell between 1938 and 1940 as a return of depression conditions slowed the economy and increased unemployment. As the war in Europe stimulated the economy and solved the persistent problem of unemployment, however, strike activity intensified. In 1941 two million workers participated in over 4,200 strikes in the auto, coal, textile, and steel industries. Determined to maintain wartime production, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt appointed a wartime labor board to alleviate the causes of industrial conflict. When the war ended, however, American workers by the millions once again went on strike, demanding the higher wages denied them during the war. In 1946, almost two million workers, including 300,000 meatpackers and 750,000 steelworkers, walked picket lines. This number rose in April when John L. Lewis, president of the United Mine Workers, called out 400,000 miners. In all, the year following the end of the war witnessed a record number of labor disputes; close to five million workers participated in over 4,600 strikes, and, more importantly, unlike the comparable 1919 strike wave, workers managed to retain and solidify their wartime gains.

1945 to 2000.

Although several large walkouts occurred between 1947 and 1951, the overall number of strikes averaged only one‐third the number recorded in 1946. One of the largest strikes of this period erupted in 1952 when 560,000 steelworkers threatened to walk out if their wage demands were not met. President Harry S. Truman's seizure of the steel plants temporarily delayed the strike but when the Supreme Court ruled this action unconstitutional, the workers resumed their walkout. Despite the steel strike, the rest of the decade was marked by the solidification of a relatively peaceful collective bargaining system between well‐entrenched unions and large industrial corporations.

Beginning in the late 1950s, the fortunes of organized labor, and the number of strikes began a long decline that continued into the 1990s. By 1965 only 25 percent of the labor force belonged to unions while the numbers of workers outside the labor movement grew rapidly. One of organized labor's few successes during the 1960s and 1970s involved migratory agricultural workers organized by the Mexican American labor leader César Chávez in California's farms and fields. Chávez used innovative consumer boycotts to organize the table grape pickers. As the labor movement entered the 1970s and 1980s, however, successes were few and far between. A moribund economy and the decline of traditionally unionized industries eroded the base of the labor movement. Thus, despite a brief flurry of strike activity in the early 1970s and growth in public‐sector unions, by 1978 labor still counted only about a quarter of the workforce in its ranks. Organized labor's rapid decline continued in the last two decades of the century. In 1980, 795,000 workers participated in strikes; by 1988, this number had plummeted to 118,000. Overall, between 1980 and 1997 strike activity fell to the lowest level in American history—lower even than the late 1920s and first years of the Great Depression. Although labor engaged in a number of large, well‐publicized work stoppages in 1997, such as the Teamsters' successful strike against United Parcel Service, the percentage of workers belonging to unions continued to decline as did the number of workers choosing to go on strike.
See also Automotive Industry; Gompers, Samuel; Homestead Lockout; Immigrant Labor; Industrialization; Industrial Relations; Iron and Steel Industry; Labor Markets; Labor Movements; Mining; New Deal Era, The; Railroads; Railroad Strikes of 1877; Reuther, Walter; Textile Industry.

Bibliography

Florence Peterson , Strikes in the United States:1880–1936, 1939.
David Montgomery , Strikes in Nineteenth‐Century America, Social Science History 4 (February 1980): 81–103.
P.K. Edwards , Strikes in the United States: 1881–1974, 1981.
H. Gutman, ed., Who Built America? Working People and the Nation's Economy, Politics, Culture, and Society, 1992.
Walter Licht , Industrializing America: The Nineteenth Century, 1995.
Melvyn Dubofsky , Industrialization and the American Worker: 1865–1920, 1996.
Jeremy Brecher , Strike, 1997.

Douglas J. Feeney