National Consumers League

Home > Social Sciences and the Law > Sociology and Social Reform > Social Reform

National Consumers' League. Formed in 1898 from several local leagues that united to fight urban sweatshops, the National Consumers' League (NCL) is one of the oldest organizations in the United States devoted to improving the conditions under which goods are made.The league's impact was especially great during the Progressive Era, when it championed the passage of state labor laws protecting women wage earners and restricting child labor. Based largely on a constituency of middle‐class women, the NCL also worked closely with labor unions.

The NCL's first executive director, Florence Kelley, was also its most historically significant. Serving from 1898 until her death in 1932, Kelley motivated the organization to challenge business practices that exploited wage‐earning women, children, and men. In Muller v. Oregon (1908), the NCL prepared a brief that persuaded the U.S. Supreme Court to uphold the constitutionality of state laws limiting the hours of women workers. Between 1910 and 1920, the league pioneered in the passage of state minimum wage laws for women, which established precedents for the minimum wage provisions of the federal Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, which included men. In the 1920s and 1930s, the NCL investigated and publicized the exploitation of agricultural workers.

After World War II, reflecting the growth of consumer culture, the NCL expanded its goals to include the defense of consumers' as well as workers' interests. Today the league monitors the effectiveness of legislation and regulations affecting consumers and reports on the conditions under which goods are made.
See also Consumer Movement; Economic Regulation; Nader, Ralph; Women in the Labor Force.

Bibliography

Josephine Goldmark , Impatient Crusader: Florence Kelley's Life Story, 1953.
David J. Rothman and Sheila M. Rothman, eds., The Consumers' League of New York: Behind the Scenes of Women's Work, 1987.
Kathryn Kish Sklar , Florence Kelley and the Nation's Work, 1995.

Kathryn Kish Sklar

National Consumers' League organization designed to promote better conditions among workers by encouraging the purchase of articles made and sold under improved working conditions. The movement started in England (1890); the U.S. group was founded (1899) by Florence Kelley and her followers. The league undertook to investigate factories and to educate consumers in purchasing habits. For many years the league used a label for goods which had passed inspection, and many consumers learned to purchase only those goods thus labeled. Many of the objectives of the league became law, e.g., shorter hours, minimum wages, payment for overtime, and the abolition in most states of child labor.