LABOR

LABOR. As the nearly 4 million Americans recorded in the census of 1790 grew to more than 280 million in 2000, the character of their work changed as dramatically as their numbers. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, most Americans were farmers, farm laborers, or unpaid

household workers. Many were bound (as slaves in the southern states, indentured servants elsewhere). Most farmers, craft workers, and shopkeepers were proprietors of family businesses. Most workers were of British origin, though there were large German and African American minorities. Many workers received part or all of their pay in the form of housing, food, and goods. The workday and work year reflected the seasons and the weather as much as economic opportunity or organizational discipline. Two hundred years later, farm labor had become insignificant, employees vastly outnumbered the self-employed, bound labor had disappeared, and child and unpaid household labor had greatly declined. Family and other social ties had become less important in finding work or keeping a job, large private and public organizations employed more than a third of all workers and set standards for most of the others, the labor force had become ethnically diverse, labor productivity and real wages were many times higher, wage contracts and negotiated agreements covering large groups were commonplace, and workplace disputes were subject to a web of laws and regulations.

These contrasts were closely associated with revolutionary changes in economic activity and particularly with the growth of modern manufacturing and service industries. After the middle of the nineteenth century, virtually all new jobs were in these sectors, which were also centers of innovation.

Technology

The changing character of work was closely related to the classic technological innovations of the nineteenth century and the beginning of modern economic growth. Innovations in energy use were particularly influential. Thanks to the availability of numerous waterpower sites in New England and the mid-Atlantic states, industry developed rapidly after the American Revolution. By the 1820s, the massive, water-powered Waltham Mills of northern Massachusetts and southern New Hampshire were among the largest factories in the world. By midcentury, however, steam power had become widespread in manufacturing as well as transportation, and steam-powered factories became the basis of the industrial economy. In 1880, the Census Bureau announced that non-factory manufacturing had become insignificant. The advent of electrical power at the turn of the century had an even greater impact. It made possible the giant manufacturing operations of the early twentieth century, the smaller, more specialized plants that became the rule after the 1920s, the great versatility in machine use that characterized the second half of the twentieth century, and the mechanization of stores, offices, and homes.

Steam and electrical power and related innovations in machine technology not only made it feasible to create large organizations but gave them an economic advantage over small plants and shops. Workers in the new organizations were wage earners, usually not family members (unlike most nineteenth-century executives), and often they were not even acquainted outside the plant. They rejected payment in kind or in services (company housing and company stores in isolated mining communities became a persistent source of grievances), started and stopped at specific times (the factory bell remained a powerful symbol of the new era), and became accustomed to a variety of rules defining their responsibilities and behavior. Mechanization also led to specialization of function. Factory workers (except for the common laborers, the least skilled and most poorly paid employees) were almost always specialists. Elaborate hierarchies of pay and status grew out of the new ways of work.

The industrial model soon spread to the service sector. Railroad corporations created hierarchical, bureaucratic structures with even stricter lines of authority and more specialized tasks than the largest factories. Insurance companies, department stores, mail-order houses, and large banks followed this pattern, though they typically used only simple, hand-operated machines. The growth of regional and national markets (a result of technological innovations in transportation and communication as well as the expanding economy) made the hierarchical, bureaucratic organization profitable even when power-driven machines played little role in production.

Immigration

Most workers who filled nonexecutive positions in the new organizations were European immigrants or their children. The rapid growth in the demand for labor (confounded by periodic mass unemployment) forced employers to innovate. In the nineteenth century, they often attracted skilled workers from the British Isles or Germany. By the latter decades of the century, however, they hired immigrants mostly to fill low-skill jobs that veteran workers scorned. Although immigration from Britain, Germany, and Scandinavia never ceased, most immigrants increasingly came from the economic and technological backwaters of Europe. By the early twentieth century, more than a million immigrants were arriving each year, the majority from eastern and southern Europe, where most of them had worked as tenant farmers or farm laborers.

An obvious question is why ill-paid American agricultural workers did not respond to the opportunities of industrial and service employment. Several factors apparently were involved. The regional tensions between North and South, where the majority of poor, underemployed agricultural workers were located, and the post–Civil War isolation of the South discouraged movement to industrial centers. Racial prejudice was also influential, though few white southerners moved north before 1915. Lifestyle decisions were also important. In the midwestern states, where industry and agriculture developed in close proximity and where racial distinctions were less important, farm workers were almost as reluctant to take industrial or urban service jobs. (There was, however, significant intergenerational movement, particularly among children who attended high schools and universities.) Consequently a paradox emerged: American farm workers seemed content to eke out a modest living in the country while European agricultural workers filled new jobs in industry and the services.

Mass immigration was socially disruptive. Immigrants faced many hazards and an uncertain welcome. Apart from the Scandinavians, they became highly concentrated in cities and industrial towns. By the early twentieth century, most large American cities were primarily immigrant enclaves. (Milwaukee, perhaps the most extreme case, was 82 percent immigrant and immigrants' children in 1900.) To visitors from rural areas, they were essentially European communities except that instead of a single culture, a hodgepodge of different languages and mores prevailed. It is hardly surprising that observers and analysts bemoaned the effects of immigration and especially the shift from "old," northern and western European, to "new," southern and eastern European, immigrants.

In the workplace, native-immigrant tensions took various forms. The concentration of immigrants in low-skill jobs created a heightened sense of competition—of newer immigrant groups driving out older ones—and led to various efforts to restrict immigrant mobility. These tensions were exacerbated by ethnic concentrations in particular trades and occupations and the perception of discrimination against outsiders. A concrete expression of these divisions was the difficulty that workers and unions had in maintaining solidarity in industrial disputes. The relatively low level of labor organization and the particular character of the American labor movement have often been explained at least in part as the results of a heterogeneous labor force.

The end of traditional immigration during World War I and the low level of immigration during the inter-war years eased many of these tensions and encouraged the rise of "melting pot" interpretations of the immigrant experience. World War I also saw the first substantial movement of southern workers to the North and West, a process that seemed to promise a less tumultuous future. In reality, the initial phases of this movement increased the level of unrest and conflict. Part of the problem—repeated in the early years of World War II—was the excessive concentration of war-related manufacturing in a few congested urban areas. The more serious and persistent irritant was racial conflict, with the poorest of the "new" immigrants pitted against African American migrants. Although the wartime and postwar wave of race riots waned by 1921, the tensions lingered. In most northern cities, African Americans were much more likely to live in ethnically homogeneous neighborhoods than were any immigrant groups.

By midcentury, most Americans looked back at immigration as a feature of an earlier age and celebrated the ability of American society to absorb millions of outsiders. Yet at the same time, a new cycle of immigration was beginning. It had the same economic origins and many similar effects, though it differed in other respects. Most of the post–World War II immigrants came from Latin America and Asia rather than Europe. They settled over-whelmingly in the comparatively vacant Southwest and West, areas that had grown rapidly during World War II and continued to expand in the postwar years. In contrast, the Northeast and Midwest, traditional centers of industrial activity, attracted comparatively few immigrants. Most of the newcomers were poorly educated and filled low-skill positions in industry and the services, but there were exceptions. Among the Asian immigrants were many well-educated engineers, technicians, and professionals who quickly rose to important positions, a development that had no nineteenth-century parallel.

Employer Initiatives

Managers of large organizations soon realized that they were dependent on their employees. Turnover, absenteeism, indifferent work, or outright sabotage were significant threats to productivity and profits. Conversely, highly motivated employees could enhance the firm's performance. Traditional tactics such as threats of punishment and discharge were less effective in a factory or store with numerous work sites and a hierarchy of specialized jobs. Uncertain about how to respond, nineteenth-century employers experimented widely. A handful introduced elaborate services; others devised new forms of "driving" and coercion. Most simply threw up their hands, figuratively speaking, and delegated the management of employees to first-line supervisors, who became responsible for hiring, firing, and other personnel functions. As a result, there were wide variations in wages, working conditions, and discipline, even within organizations, as well as abuses of authority and high turnover. Friction between supervisors and wage earners became a common cause of labor unrest.

Remedial action came from two sources. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, state governments began to impose restrictions on employers, especially employers of women and children. By 1900, most northern and western states regulated the hiring of children, hours of labor, health and sanitation, and various working conditions. During the first third of the twentieth century, they tightened regulations, extended some rules to male workers, and introduced workers' compensation, the first American social insurance plans. In the late 1930s, the federal social security system added old-age pensions and unemployment insurance, and other legislation set minimum wages, defined the workday and workweek, and restricted child labor. Still, none of these measures directly addressed a variety of shop-floor problems. To remedy this deficiency, as well as to raise wages, the New Deal also promoted collective bargaining, most notably via the National Labor Relations Act of 1935.

Employers also played an important role in this process. Beginning at the turn of the century, a relatively small number of employers, mostly large, profitable corporations, introduced policies designed to discourage turnover and improve morale. Two innovations were particularly important. The first was the creation of personnel departments that centralized and standardized many of the supervisors' personnel functions. By the 1920s, most large industrial and service corporations had personnel departments whose functions and responsibilities expanded rapidly. The second innovation was the introduction of systematic benefit systems that provided medical, educational, recreational, and other services.

During the 1930s and 1940s, the federal and state governments embraced many features of this "welfare capitalism" in the process of creating a modest welfare state. Government initiatives extended some benefit plans to workers at smaller and less generous firms and encouraged the larger employers to create even more elaborate benefit programs. The spread of collective-bargaining contracts and a more prosperous postwar economy reinforced this trend. The years from the early 1940s to the mid-1970s would be the heyday of corporate benevolence.

Labor Unrest

The growth of industrial and service employment also introduced new forms of unrest and protest. The years from the 1870s to the 1940s witnessed waves of strikes, which were widely viewed as a perplexing and troubling feature of modern society. Yet strikes were only the most visible examples of the many tensions and conflicts characteristic of industrial employment. Dissatisfied wage earners had in fact two basic choices, "exit" and "voice." Unhappy workers could quit, or exit, and search for more satisfying jobs, or they could try to improve their current jobs through the use of their collective "voice," that is, through protests, complaints, and negotiations. Historically, most workers have concluded that quitting is easier than trying to create and maintain a union. Still, the history of organized labor (because it has been carefully documented) is the best available valuable measure of the tensions associated with modern employment and the ability of workers to exercise a "voice" in industry.

Nineteenth-Century Unions

The American labor movement dates from the early nineteenth century, first became an important force during the inflationary prosperity of the 1860s, and flourished during the boom years of the 1880s. During those years a pattern appeared that persisted through the twentieth century. The individuals most likely to organize were so-called autonomous workers, those who had substantial independence in the workplace. Most, but not all, were highly skilled and highly paid. They were not oppressed and with notable exceptions were not the employees of the new institutions most closely associated with American industrialization: the large factories, railroads, and bureaucratic offices. Rather they were the men (with very few exceptions) whose skills made them vital to the production process and who could increase their influence through collective action. Their strategic roles also made employers wary of antagonizing them, another critical factor in union growth. Employers typically countered unions with threats and reprisals. Low-skill employees had to take those threats seriously; autonomous workers could resist employer pressures.

Regardless of their particular jobs, workers were more likely to organize successfully in good times and when they could count on sympathetic public officials. Prosperity and a favorable political climate were important determinants of union growth; recession conditions and state repression often made organization impossible, regardless of other factors.

Two groups dominated the nineteenth-century labor movement. Miners were autonomous workers who were not highly skilled or highly paid. But they worked alone or in small groups and faced extraordinary hazards and dangers. Organization was a way to express their sense of solidarity, increase (or maintain) wages, tame the cutthroat competition that characterized their industries (especially coal mining), and restrict the entrance of even less skilled, lower wage workers. Unions flourished in both anthracite and bituminous coal fields in the 1860s and early 1870s, and they emerged in the western "hard rock" industry in the 1870s. After great turmoil and numerous strikes during the prolonged recession of the mid-1870s, miners' organizations became stronger than ever. Their success was reflected in the emergence of two powerful unions, the United Mine Workers of America, formed in 1890, and the Western Federation of Miners, which followed in 1893. They differed in one important respect: the coal miners were committed to collective bargaining with the goal of regional or even national contracts, while the Western Federation of Miners scorned collective bargaining in favor of workplace activism.

The second group consisted of urban artisans, led by construction workers but including skilled industrial workers such as printers and molders. Some of the unions that emerged in the 1820s and 1830s represented workers in handicraft trades, but in later years, organized workers were concentrated in new jobs and industries, though not usually in the largest firms. Organization was a way to maximize opportunities and simultaneously create buffers against excessive competition. Railroad workers were a notable example. Engineers and other skilled operating employees formed powerful unions in the 1860s and 1870s. Through collective bargaining, they were able to obtain high wages, improved working conditions, and greater security. However, they made no effort to organize the vast majority of railroad workers who lacked their advantages. Most railroad managers reluctantly dealt with the skilled groups as long as there was no effort to recruit other employees.

The limitations of this approach inspired efforts to organize other workers, and the notable exception to this approach was the Knights of Labor, which briefly became the largest American union. The Knights attempted to organize workers regardless of skill or occupation, including those who were members of existing unions. Several successful strikes in the mid-1880s created a wave of optimism that the Knights might actually succeed, and membership rose to a peak of more than 700,000 in 1886. But employer counterattacks, together with the Knights' own organizational shortcomings, brought this activity to an abrupt halt. Thereafter, the Knights of Labor declined as rapidly as it had grown. By 1890, it had lost most of its members and was confined to a handful of strongholds.

Twentieth-Century Unions

After the severe depression of the mid-1890s, which undermined all unions, the labor movement enjoyed a long period of expansion and growing influence. Autonomous worker groups, led by coal miners and construction workers, dominated organized labor for the next third of a century. The debate over tactics was decisively resolved in favor of collective bargaining, though a dissenting group, the Industrial Workers of the World, rallied critics with some success before World War I. Collective bargaining was effectively institutionalized during World War I, when the federal government endorsed it as an antidote for wartime unrest. The other major development of this period was the emergence of an effective union federation, the American Federation of Labor (AFL), which dated from the upheavals of 1886 but only became influential with the membership revival of the early twentieth century. Under its shrewd and articulate president, Samuel Gompers, the AFL promoted the autonomous worker groups while professing to speak for all industrial workers. Gompers and his allies disavowed socialism and efforts to create an independent political party, policies that led to an erroneous perception (encouraged by their many critics) of indifference or hostility to political action. On the contrary, Gompers closely aligned the AFL with the Democratic Party and created aggressive lobbying organizations in the states and in Washington.

Labor's political activism seemed to pay off during World War I, when Gompers was appointed to a high post in the mobilization effort and the federal government directly and indirectly encouraged organization. The greatest gains occurred in the railroad industry, which was nationalized in 1917. Under government control, railroad managers no longer could oppose organization and collective bargaining. By 1920, most railroad employees were union members. Government efforts to reduce unrest and strikes also resulted in inroads in many manufacturing industries. In 1920, union membership totaled 5 million, twice the prewar level.

These gains proved to be short-lived. The end of wartime regulations, the defeat of the Democrats in the 1920 national elections, new employer offensives, and the severe recession of 1920–1922 eliminated the conditions that had encouraged organization. Membership contracted, particularly in industry. The decline of the coal and railroad industries in the 1920s was an additional blow. By the late 1920s, organized labor was no stronger than it had been before the war. The one positive feature of the postwar period was the rapid growth of service sector unionism.

The dramatic recession that began in 1929 and continued with varying severity for a decade set the stage for the greatest increase in union membership in American history. Recessions and unemployment typically reduced the appeal of any activity that was likely to provoke employer reprisals. This was also true of the 1930s. Union membership declined precipitously between 1930 and 1933, as the economy collapsed and unemployment rose. It also plunged in 1937–1938, when a new recession led to sweeping layoffs. Union growth occurred in 1933– 1937, and in the years after 1939, when employment was increasing. Yet the generally unfavorable economic conditions of the 1930s did have two important indirect effects. Harsh economic conditions produced a strong sense of grievance among veteran workers who lost jobs, savings, and status. Because the depression was widely blamed on big-business leaders and Republican officeholders, it also had a substantial political impact. The 1932 election of Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had strong progressive and activist credentials as a Democratic politician and especially as governor of New York, proved to be a turning point in the history of the labor movement.

The expansion of union activity after 1933 reflected these factors, particularly in the early years. Roosevelt's New Deal was only intermittently pro-union, but it effectively neutralized employer opposition to worker organization, and with passage of the National Labor Relations Act in 1935 it created a mechanism for peacefully resolving representation conflicts and introducing collective bargaining. Although the ostensible purpose of the legislation was to foster dispute resolution and higher wages, it indirectly promoted union growth by restricting the employer's ability to harass union organizations and members. In the meantime, industrial workers, notably workers in the largest firms such as steel and automobile manufacturing companies, reacted to the new opportunities with unprecedented unity and enthusiasm. The depression

experience and the New Deal appeared to have sparked a new era of militant unionism. An important expression of this change was the emergence of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, a new labor federation created in November 1938 by John L. Lewis, the president of the United Mine Workers, and devoted to aggressive organizing, especially in manufacturing.

Although the National Labor Relations Act (and other related legislation designed for specific industries) most clearly and explicitly addressed the industrial relations issues of the 1930s, other New Deal measures complemented it. The move to regulate prices and production in the transportation, communications, and energy industries, which began with the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933 and continued with a variety of specific measures enacted between 1935 and 1938, created opportunities for unions. Regulated corporations had powerful incentives to avoid strikes and cooperate with unions. As a result, about one-third of union membership growth in the 1930s occurred in those industries. If the United Automobile Workers of America and the United Steel-workers of America were symbols of the new militancy in manufacturing, the equally dramatic growth of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters symbolized the labor upheaval in transportation, communications, and energy.

Government regulations played a more direct role in the equally dramatic union growth that occurred during World War II, when aggregate membership rose from 10 million to 15 million. Most new jobs during the war years were in manufacturing companies that had collective bargaining contracts and in many cases union security provisions that required new hires to join unions. War mobilization thus automatically created millions of additional union members. Government efforts to discourage strikes also emphasized the unions' role in a bureaucratic, intensely regulated economy. By 1945, the labor movement had become a respected part of the American establishment.

Postwar Labor

By the mid-1940s full employment, high wages, and optimism about the future, based on a sense that government now had the ability to manage prosperity (together with awareness of the social safety net that government and business had created since the mid-1930s) replaced the depressed conditions of the 1930s. The experiences of workers in the 1940s and 1950s seemed to confirm the lessons of the New Deal era. With the exception of a few mild recession years, jobs were plentiful, real wages rose, and the federal government continued its activist policies, gradually building on the welfare state foundations of the 1930s. The labor movement also continued to grow, but with less dynamism than in the 1940s. Optimists viewed the merger of the AFL and CIO in 1955, ending the internecine competition that dated from the late 1930s, as a likely stimulus to new gains.

In retrospect, however, those lessons are less compelling. The striking feature of the economy of the 1950s and 1960s was not the affirmation of earlier developments but the degree to which the character of work and the characteristics of the labor force changed. Farming and other natural-resource industries declined at an accelerated rate, and industrial employment also began to decline, but service-industry employment boomed. Formal education became even more important for ambitious workers. Married women entered the labor force in unprecedented numbers. Employers, building on the initiatives of earlier years, extended employee benefit programs, creating a private welfare state that paralleled the more limited public programs. Civil rights laws adopted in the early 1960s banned racial and other forms of discrimination in employment decisions.

One other major development was little noticed at the time. Organized labor stopped growing, partly because it remained too closely wedded to occupations, such as factory work, that were declining, and partly because the employer counterattack that began in the late 1930s at last became effective. A major factor in the union growth of the 1930s and 1940s had been an activist, sympathetic government. Although some postwar employer groups sought to challenge unions directly, others adopted a more subtle and successful approach, attacking union power in the regulatory agencies and the courts and promoting employment policies that reduced the benefits of membership. These attacks gained momentum during the administration of Dwight D. Eisenhower (1953–1961). One additional tactic, locating new plants in southern or western states where there was no tradition of organization, also helped to isolate organized workers.

The impact of these varied trends became inescapable in the 1970s, when the economy experienced the most severe downturns since the 1930s. Manufacturing was devastated. Plant closings in traditional industrial areas were common during the recessions of 1973–1975 and 1979–1982. Well-known industrial corporations such as International Harvester collapsed. Unemployment reached levels that rivaled the 1930s. Productivity declined and real wages stagnated. Exploiting anxiety over the future of the economy, Republican Ronald Reagan ran successfully on a platform that attacked the welfare state and industrial relations policies that emphasized collective bargaining.

The experience of the 1970s accelerated the changes that were only dimly evident in earlier years, creating a labor force that was more diverse in composition and overwhelmingly engaged in service occupations. The return of favorable employment conditions in the 1980s was almost entirely a result of service-sector developments. Formal education, antidiscrimination laws, and affirmative action policies opened high-paying jobs to ethnic and racial minorities, including a growing number of immigrants. At the same time, industry continued its movement into rural areas, especially in the South and West, and unions continued to decline. Indeed, according to the 2000 census, only 14 percent of American workers belonged to unions.

The results of these complex developments are difficult to summarize. On the one hand, by the 1990s many workers enjoyed seemingly limitless opportunities and accumulated unprecedented wealth. Severe labor shortages in many industries attracted a flood of immigrants and made the United States a magnet for upwardly mobile workers everywhere. On the other hand, many other workers, especially those who worked in agriculture or industry and had little formal education, found that the combination of economic and technological change, a less activist government, and union decline depressed their wages and made their prospects bleak. At the turn of the century, the labor force and American society were divided in ways that would have seemed impossible only a few decades before.

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Daniel Nelson

See alsoAmerican Federation of Labor–Congress of Industrial Organizations ; Arbitration ; Business Unionism ; Collective Bargaining ; Strikes ; Work .

Labor Since the late nineteenth century, the U.S. Supreme Court has been the final arbiter of the place of trade unions in American life. During this century of conflict and accommodation, the Court has been an important actor in labor history, but labor, perhaps, has proved an even greater influence on the history of the Court. The relationship between organized labor and the Court has been a tumultuous one. Prior to the New Deal, the labor question came to the Court through two main routes: via judicial regulation of labor relations through injunctions and via Supreme Court scrutiny of reform legislation under the Fourteenth Amendment's Due Process Clause (see Due Process, Substantive). The crisis of the Great Depression as well as the reform coalition of the New Deal (in which labor played a key part) forced the Court to make room for trade unionism in its conception of American political economy. For a moment, it appeared that the Court might give some measure of constitutional protection to peaceful strikes and boycotts, but workers' traditional forms of protest and mutual aid soon lost the constitutional mantle that the Court had seemed about to bestow.

Hostility to Class‐based Reform

From the 1880s through the 1920s, state and federal appellate judges were principal architects of the nation's industrial relations policies. In the 1890s the Supreme Court scrutinized maximum‐hours laws and other protective labor legislation to determine whether such laws infringed on constitutional liberty of contract. In Holden v. Hardy (1898), the Court upheld a Utah law limiting the hours of miners. However, in Lochner v. New York (1905)—the decision that gave the era its name—the Court voided a New York maximum‐hours law for bakers. Muller v. Oregon (1908), in turn, upheld a maximum‐hours law for women. Overall, the Court voided nearly two hundred statutes and upheld roughly half that number during these decades, leaving the exact borders of the states' police power uncertain. But a general point appeared plain: although legislatures might protect “dependent” and “vulnerable” groups within the labor force, broader, class‐based reforms would not pass constitutional muster. In Coppage v. Kansas (1915), the Court held that government could not temper the inequalities that sprang from the “fact that some men are possessed of industrial property and others are not” (p. 17). The Court's hostility toward class‐based reform ambitions helped to shape the political perspective of the nation's labor movement, encouraging a majority of early twentieth‐century trade unionists to embrace the antistatist or “voluntarist” ideology associated with Samuel Gompers. Labor's dominant political outlook came, ironically, to resemble a trade‐union version of the Court's own laissez‐faire constitutionalism. By the same token, the Court's relative hospitality toward hours laws for women and children encouraged and ratified a gender‐based division of the working class. Having once favored universal hours laws, the labor movement increasingly supported hours legislation solely for those “dependent” groups that could not “look after themselves” through collective self‐help.

Antilabor Injunctions

As mainstream unions abandoned broad legislative ambitions in favor of self‐help in the “private” realm of the economy, the nation's courts took an increasingly active role in policing workers' activities in that arena. With each decade, the number of labor injunctions multiplied; between 1880 and 1930, federal and state courts issued roughly 4,300 antistrike decrees. The first appeared during the 1877 railroad strikes, issuing from several federal district courts holding bankrupt railroads in receivership. Irate at the reluctance of local and state officials to suppress the disruptions of the railroads caused by strikes, these federal judges took matters into their own hands, ordering their marshals to deputize volunteers or calling out federal troops to put down strikes. During the next great wave of railway strikes in the 1890s, federal courts enjoined strikes and boycotts against railroads that were not in receivership. For authority, the courts relied chiefly on the new Interstate Commerce Act (1887) and the Sherman Antitrust Act (1890).

In 1895 the Supreme Court appraised this expansion of federal equity powers. The occasion was a far‐flung national boycott of railway cars manufactured and owned by the Pullman corporation. Eugene Debs, president of the American Railway Union, led the boycott, which was condemned by federal courts in almost every large city west of the Alleghenies. Workers dubbed the court orders “Gatling gun injunctions,” after the new weapon used by federal troops to enforce the bans. In In re Debs (1895), a unanimous Court upheld the injunctions and the contempt convictions of Debs and other strike leaders; in bold strokes, it sanctioned the new use of equitable remedies in industrial conflicts.

By the time of the Debs decision, injunctions had been issued against strikes in many other industries besides the railroads. A key reason for this expansion of judicial activism was labor's growing use of the boycott. Arraying national organizations or entire working‐class communities against a single employer, boycotts often lent unions much greater power—and rubbed more abrasively against judges' individualism—than did an ordinary wage strike. Boycotts gave rise to the Court's next important injunction cases. In 1908, Loewe v. Lawlor, the “Danbury Hatters case,” answered a question that Debs left open, holding, with the majority of lower federal courts, that the Sherman Act applied to combinations of workers; the Court also ruled that activities of the defendant hatters' union in publicizing a consumer boycott of the goods of an “unfair” employer was illegal both under the Sherman Act and at common law. Gompers v. Buck's Stove & Range Co. (1911) was a contempt case against Gompers and other national American Federation of Labor (AFL) officials for publicizing another consumer boycott in defiance of a trial‐court injunction. Although it dismissed the contempt proceedings, the Supreme Court rejected Gompers's claim that the First Amendment shielded such protest activities.

Loewe v. Lawlor and Gompers proved crucial in prompting the AFL to turn in earnest to congressional lobbying and campaigning; its goal was statutory abolition of the labor injunction. Years of lobbying bore fruit in the labor provisions of the Clayton Act of 1914, which seemed to bar federal courts from enjoining peaceful picketing or any other communicative activities connected with strikes or boycotts. Gompers greeted the act as labor's “Magna Carta,” but lower federal courts construed the (deliberately) ambiguous language of the act's anti‐injunction provisions in so hostile a fashion that it worked no changes. In 1921 the Supreme Court announced that the key provisions merely codified the common law of the injunction as it already had existed (Duplex Printing Co. v. Deering), and another decade of broad injunctions and broken strikes followed before Congress again considered the matter.

New Deal Reversals

During that decade, organized labor staged massive protests against “government by injunction,” and a growing portion of the nation's political elites became convinced that the repressive, judge‐made rules of the game had to be changed. This conviction, combined with the broader depression‐era decline in business legitimacy and Republican party fortunes, prompted passage of the Norris‐LaGuardia Act in 1932. Compared to the earlier Clayton Act, Norris‐LaGuardia was a less ambiguous, more lawyerly anti‐injunction statute that circumscribed the labor injunction with procedural barriers and safeguards. It perfectly expressed the AFL's attitude toward the role of the courts in labor relations: that it should hardly exist. This time, the courts themselves seemed to agree.

Beginning in the late 1930s, the federal bench affirmed and extended the Norris‐LaGuardia Act's protection of strike and boycott activities to embrace immunity not only from injunctions but also from civil actions for damages. Ironically, though, by the time the Supreme Court upheld the act in Lauf v. E. G. Shinner and Co. (1938) and the lower courts enacted their generous interpretations, Congress and the administration of Franklin D.Roosevelt had rejected voluntarism as the basis for the government's industrial relations policy and put a system of administrative regulation and control in its place.

Labor law in the 1930s was the stage on which the Supreme Court performed the most dramatic about‐face in its history, and a growing trade union movement played a critical role in convincing the Court to abandon its laissez‐faire constitutionalism. At first, the Court seemed determined to defend the old regime. In Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States (1935), the Court struck down the cornerstone of the Roosevelt administration's new federal labor‐relations policy, the National Industrial Recovery Act, deeming it an unconstitutional delegation of legislative power as well as an expansion of federal authority unwarranted under the Commerce Clause because it reached working conditions in intrastate businesses (see Commerce Power). Likewise, in 1936, the Court found a New York State minimum‐wage law for women to be an unconstitutional interference with liberty of contract (Morehead v. New York ex rel. Tipaldo).

In the fall of 1936, however, President Roosevelt was reelected in a campaign conducted in significant part as a referendum on the Court. In early 1937, he introduced his court‐packing plan. In the spring came two landmark cases in which the Court pragmatically reversed course. West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish noted that the “Constitution does not speak of freedom of contract” (p. 391) and upheld the constitutionality of a Washington State law setting a minimum wage for women, a law indistinguishable from the New York statute struck down less than a year earlier. And in National Labor Relations Board v. Jones & Laughlin Steel Corp. the Court upheld the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), which gave workers in private industry the right to organize and imposed on employers a duty to bargain with their employees' representatives. Roosevelt had signed the act into law in 1935, only two months after the Schechter decision, and employers relied on Schechter and earlier rulings to support their contention that the act was unconstitutional. Those precedents enabled employers' attorneys to tie the new National Labor Relations Board in knots in the lower federal courts for almost two years until the Supreme Court upheld the NLRA board's legitimacy.

Jones & Laughlin was the foundation of a new constitutional edifice extending federal power under the Commerce Clause and recognizing broad governmental authority to regulate the economy. The Court explicitly conceded that asymmetries of power rendered single employees helpless in dealing with employers, and it sanctioned state intervention in the interest of equality. But Jones & Laughlin also rested on other grounds with profoundly different implications for the legal status of unions, creating a tension that would haunt later rulings. On the one hand, the Court recognized workers' “fundamental right” to organize unions; on the other, the Court deemed unions and collective bargaining essential to “industrial peace” (pp. 33, 42). If fundamental, labor's new rights were arguably inviolable, but when conceived as promoting industrial peace, they could be trimmed to fit that purpose.

The doctrine that workers had a fundamental right to organize did not, however, simply constitute a platform for federal legislative protection of union activity. The confrontation between state repression and union organizing in the 1930s and early 1940s provoked a signal change in the Supreme Court's First Amendment jurisprudence, as the Court took its first steps toward extending the constitutional right to free expression to encompass union organizing.

Hague v. Congress of Industrial Organizations (1939) was the first case in which the Court endorsed use of the First Amendment as a sword to enjoin government suppression of expressive activity rather than as a shield from criminal prosecution. When organizers from the Congress of Industrial Organizations arrived in Jersey City, New Jersey, in 1937 to urge workers to exercise their rights under the new NLRA, city authorities denied their right to hold meetings or distribute leaflets and had them arrested and run out of town. Alleging a deprivation of First Amendment rights, the CIO's lawyers sought injunctive relief against Mayor Frank Hague. The Court's ruling in the organizers' favor brought labor organizing under the mantle of constitutional protection.

The Court soon extended the Constitution's protection of speech and association to the most traditional expression of labor grievance—the picket line. Striking down an antipicketing ordinance as overbroad in Thornhill v. Alabama (1940), the Court found that free discussion of the labor question was integral to the “processes of popular government” that shaped the “destiny of modern industrial society” (p. 103). In Thornhill, the Court's focus on the public's First Amendment interest in open discussion of strikes emphasized one strain of its earlier reasoning in Jones & Laughlin. Notably, the Court did not dwell on the rights of strikers to communicate their grievances. Instead, it justified federal protection of labor's rights in the name of informed public regulation of industry. Such recognition of public interest in labor organization—as a means to an end—was a two‐edged sword. It implied state authority to regulate and restrain collective action no less than to protect workers' freedoms.

Labor Loses Ground

Even as the Court upheld the NLRA, it moved to narrow its central provision protecting concerted activity. In a landmark 1939 ruling, National Labor Relations Board v. Fansteel Metallurgical Corp., the Court refused to uphold a board order requiring reinstatement of workers fired after a sit‐down strike. The ruling initiated a process, later adopted by the board, of denying protection where collective activity is considered either too potent a weapon in collective bargaining or an obstacle to the bargaining process. Thirty years after stripping sit‐down strikes of protection, the Court, in Boys Market, Inc. v. Retail Clerks' Local 770 (1970), also put federal courts back in the business of enjoining peaceful strikes and picketing when a strike violates a contractual no‐strike pledge—despite the clear command of the Norris‐LaGuardia Act. As the Court bluntly stated, federal policy had shifted from the “protection of the nascent labor movement to the encouragement of collective bargaining” (p. 251)—that is, from a theory of fundamental rights to a theory of functional rights.

As the Court increasingly gave primacy to the public purpose furthered by endowing labor with rights rather than to workers' fundamental rights themselves, it allowed workers' statutory rights to be refashioned while also upholding state intervention into internal union affairs. These rulings undercut the principles established by Hague and Thornhill. With the passage of the Taft‐Hartley Act in 1947, the Court confronted an array of measures curbing the labor movement's new legal freedoms. Taft‐Hartley sharply restricted workers' right to select their own representatives, requiring union officers to swear they were not members of the Communist party on pain of disqualifying their unions from federal protection (see Communism and Cold War). The Supreme Court upheld that requirement in American Communications Association v. Douds (1950). The Court acknowledged that Taft‐Hartley inhibited lawful exercise of political freedoms, but, pushing the reasoning of Jones & Laughlin to its logical conclusion, the Court ruled that precisely because the NLRA rested on public interest in “the free flow of commerce,” Congress could legislate against the threat to “that public interest” posed by Communists in positions of union leadership (pp. 387, 400).

In an equally significant line of rulings, the Court upheld Taft‐Hartley restrictions on union picketing that urged consumers or fellow workers to pressure employers to cease doing business with an employer involved in a labor dispute. This ban on “secondary activity” aimed to check the spread of labor unrest. In Electrical Workers v. National Labor Relations Board (1951), the Court ruled that such restrictions did not unconstitutionally abridge free speech, a decision flowing from a body of precedent that had gradually eroded the expansive protection of labor expression promised in Thornhill. Just a few years later, in Teamsters, Local 695 v. Vogt, Inc. (1957), the Court declared that this line of cases gave the states the broad prerogative to enforce public policy by “constitutionally enjoin[ing] peaceful picketing” (p. 293). By the late 1950s the Court thus had affirmed that the public's interest in labor peace could override even the rights that workers derived from the First Amendment. It again routinely upheld labor injunctions, much as it did in Samuel Gompers's day.

In the 1960s, legal advocates for African‐American citizens stood on the precedents won by organized labor in urging the Supreme Court to expand First Amendment protections and federal legislative power to protect civil rights. By then, however, the legal ground had shifted under the feet of the trade union movement. In 1982, three decades after the Supreme Court made clear that labor picketing was subject to close regulation, it held in National Association for the Advancement of Colored People v. Clairborne Hardware Co. that the First Amendment shielded peaceful picketing by civil rights groups in support of a boycott of white merchants. Citing Thornhill as support, the Court nevertheless carefully distinguished secondary labor picketing from the protected civil rights advocacy. And, ironically, twenty years after the Court upheld the authority of Congress to guarantee civil rights in employment, public accommodations, and other areas, the union movement began to call for repeal of the NLRA—the very act that had precipitated the legal revolution of the New Deal, paving the constitutional way for the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The Supreme Court's jurisprudence bears the indelible imprint of workers' collective activity. Nevertheless, while labor's legal legacy has advanced the rights of other citizens, it has left organized workers with scant protection.

See also Capitalism; Contract, Freedom of.

Bibliography

James B. Atleson , Values and Assumptions in American Labor Law (1983).
John R. Commons , Legal Foundations of Capitalism (1924).
William E. Forbath , Law and the Shaping of the American Labor Movement (1991).
Christopher L. Tomlins , The State and the Unions (1985).

William E. Forbath and and Craig Becker

Labor

ANCIENT LABOR TO INDUSTRIALIZATION

LABOR ORGANIZATION

NEW MODES OF PRODUCTION, LABOR SAVINGS, AND GLOBALIZATION

U.S. FEDERAL LABOR LAW

LABOR INSTITUTIONS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Labor is one of the three primary factors of production, next to capital and land. However, different from the other two, labor deals with the work of humans rather than money or the property it can rent or buy. Being part of labor requires thus that one is paid for one’s labor services.

The provision of labor was seen by the French sociologist Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) as part of the identification of a worker with society or part of the struggle of the personality with society. The laborer as the member of a class—the working class—is also a recurring theme in sociology. Two classical expositions come from the political philosopher Karl Marx (1818–1883), who offers a historical analysis of class struggle, and the sociologist Max Weber (1864–1920), who uses class more as a classification of stratification. The reward of wages in the context of labor, especially its share of the entire production process encompassing all factors of production, also mirrors the importance and power of the class within society.

ANCIENT LABOR TO INDUSTRIALIZATION

Ancient labor markets, especially in ancient Greece and Rome, were based on agriculture and manufacturing. Both relied heavily on slave labor, which provided both skilled and unskilled labor.

In medieval times, the common agricultural laborer, or peasant, produced for self-sufficiency, and there was little exchange economy. Labor was dependent on the aristocrats, who were the landowners. The feudal landlords granted protection and the right to use the land in exchange for taxes that included labor services, which is commonly called bondage. This hierarchy from lord to serf was common from higher to lower aristocracy and from aristocrats to peasants. Extortion of both goods and labor services were enforced not only by the aristocracy’s ownership of the land, but also by their executive and judicial power.

Manufacturing, which was usually strong in the free cities (i.e., those not under the rule of an aristocrat), was in the hands of guilds whose members organized themselves to protect their interests. Workers had to learn a craft by going through the apprenticeship as journeyman, and they depended on their guild master both financially and also professionally as the guild masters decided upon elevation to the master level. While labor was in this sense not free, moving to the free cities to become a craftsman allowed one to free oneself from aristocratic rule.

Factory work forms the core process of industrialization, moving away from small-scale production at home and toward large-scale, specialized production. This specialization process is described with the example of the pin factory by the Scottish economist Adam Smith (1723–1790):

[I]n the way in which this business is now carried on, not only the whole work is a peculiar trade, but it is divided into a number of branches, of which the greater part are likewise peculiar trades. One man draws out the wire, another straights it, a third cuts it, a fourth points it, a fifth grinds it at the top for receiving the head; to make the head requires two or three distinct operations; to put it on, is a peculiar business, to whiten the pins is another; it is even a trade by itself to put them into the paper; and the important business of making a pin is, in this manner, divided into about eighteen distinct operations, which, in some manufactures, are all performed by distinct hands. (Smith 1776, p. 15)

While Smith understood the importance of specialization, in his time the impact of machines was probably still underestimated. Mechanization using the steam engine in the eighteenth century led to a higher productivity of factory work, which is commonly seen as the breakthrough in the process of industrialization.

Smith did provide the intellectual underpinning of the capitalist model in which the pursuit of self-interest under free competition leads to higher wealth for society. His influential work was even used in English courts to prohibit union activities, as the unionization of labor was seen as a hindrance to free competition.

Together, mechanization and specialization led to a certain alienation of the laborer toward the production process. Labor became, next to capital, a true factor of modern production. During the period of industrialization, peasant workers moved away from agricultural work and toward that of unskilled labor in the newly established manufacturing plants. These laborers were no longer dependent on landowners but became wage workers, forming the working class. The process of industrialization was a long one. Exploitation of the workers was the norm rather than the exception as sufficient labor arrived from the ranks of agricultural workers. Edward P. Thompson, in “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century” (1971), writes of the formative years from 1780 to 1832 in England. He describes in detail the life and the movements of the English working class of that time. It was through the struggle of the workers that the notion of a working class evolved, which was necessary to develop labor organization.

It took about a century for wage labor to become the norm in the nineteenth century as increasingly more workers were employed, replacing work on the land with work in the newly established factories. The movement from larger workshops to mechanized industries took two centuries, from the late eighteenth century into the early twentieth century. Industrialization commenced in England and was started in continental Europe several decades later, starting with Flanders, France, and later in Germany, Switzerland, and some southern European countries.

LABOR ORGANIZATION

Labor organization commenced in Europe in the eighteenth century, first within an urban setting or within factories, solely to perform the social functions of exchange and insurance against illness. National organization arose in Europe in the late nineteenth century. It was the skilled worker, at a level between owner and unskilled labor, who participated in the organization of labor in unions. Labor organization was not at first a reaction to hardship. In fact, the living standards of workers, unionized or not, were steadily rising throughout Europe from 1850 to 1900.

The history of unions in the United States started in the nineteenth century. In the turbulent decades from 1870 to 1890 the groundwork for organized labor was laid. The National Labor Union (NLU), founded in 1866, was the first federation of unions, followed by the Knights of Labor in 1869. The latter disintegrated after the Haymarket Riot on May 1, 1886, in Chicago in which unions unsuccessfully demanded the eight-hour working day.

The American Federation of Labor (AFL), founded in 1886, organized mainly skilled workers, while the more radical Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), founded in 1905, provided a federation for unskilled labor. The membership in the IWW declined with the Palmer Raids (1918–1921), named for Alexander Mitchell Palmer, the U.S. attorney general after World War I who led the government attack on the radical left during the “Red Scare” period.

Unions in the United States did not become a political factor in those years. This has been attributed to several reasons: The U.S. political system was fragmented between states and the federal level, and it discouraged worker movements. Furthermore, employers’ associations reacted very strongly against the labor organizations. Janet Currie and Joseph Ferrie argue in the Journal of Economic History (2000) that despite some legislative changes in favor of the laborer, unions refrained from a national political influence and instead sought to negotiate on a company level.

This changed after the Great Depression and especially under the New Deal programs of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The labor movement was strengthened, and the government found its role in brokering agreements between businesses and labor unions. The government’s aims were to provide some assistance to poor and unemployed workers and to establish the rights of labor unions, which culminated in the Wagner Act.

During the 1930s, the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) organized industrial workers who were part of the emerging large-scale corporations. This represented a movement from crafts-based unionism toward industry unions. The CIO argued that crafts-based unionism was no longer suitable to many industries in which several crafts were undertaken, thus artificially dividing the unionized workers within a firm. One union organized within the CIO was the United Auto Workers (UAW). The CIO split off from the AFL to form its own entity in 1938. After World War II (1939–1945), as most differences were settled, the two combined into the AFLCIO, under which most unions are aligned.

NEW MODES OF PRODUCTION, LABOR SAVINGS, AND GLOBALIZATION

The 1960s marked the beginning of steady decline in union membership. After the economically strong years following World War II, workers faced increasingly more plant shutdowns. During the 1970s the fear of mechanization and the displacement of men by machines was a recurring theme. In the 1980s cheaper foreign labor began replacing domestic labor. This was most explicit within the automobile industry, in which European and especially Japanese manufacturers provided fierce competition against the American car manufacturers. Under this pressure, union power eroded over time. The fear of globalization was amplified during the negotiations about the North American Free Trade Agreement, which opened up the markets of Mexico, Canada, and the United States in 1994. The opponents feared U.S. workplaces being moved to Mexico, with cheaper labor and lower working standards. In consecutive years, intensifying trade and the outsourcing of labor-intensive industries, especially to Asian countries, weakened the union even more.

This increasing globalization was anticipated in Robert Reich’s book The Work of Nations (1991). His main theme is that the division of workers into skilled and unskilled occupations is extended to a threefold partition into routine producers, in-person service providers (services that have to be provided person to person), and knowledge workers. The last type is rather broad as it includes some people who are usually not considered part of labor, such as entrepreneurs. It is this last type of worker for whom Reich foresees the best prospects, while the routine producers in particular will be replaced either by foreign competition or machines. The in-person service workers are somewhat protected from foreign competition as they require the physical availability of labor.

While the traditional struggle between the capitalist class (the providers of capital) and the labor class seems outdated, Stanley Aronowitz argues in How Class Works (2003) that labor still struggles over institutional arrangements such as working hours, overtime pay, and working conditions. These social movements are in essence class struggles over the division of power between capital and labor. In the United States capital is still the decisive element, argues Aronowitz, as the workers did not unite the aims of the different groups (immigrants versus native, black versus white, male versus female), but Aronowitz argues labor should still strive to unite as a force in order to strongly support its common goals.

U.S. FEDERAL LABOR LAW

Labor law reflects the struggle and achievement of labor in a nation. In the United States, the following legal developments show the evolution of current laws. While not intended to forbid the labor unions, the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 was used for many years to hinder union work. Its unspecific nature prohibiting “combinations in restraint of trade” allowed its use against combined, unionized demands from workers. The Clayton Antitrust Act, Section 6 (1914), remedies this shortcoming as it explicitly exempts labor unions. The National Labor Relations Act, or the Wagner Act (1935), allowed union representation and established the National Labor Relations Board. It allowed for collective bargaining and strikes to enforce demands. However, the Wagner Act does not encompass all workers; agricultural workers, for example, are excluded.

The Fair Labor Standards Act (1938) enacts minimum wages and overtime pay, and it abolishes oppressive child labor. While it originally included many exemptions, over time several of those have been eliminated so the act covers all blue-collar workers while excluding supervisory functions.

During World War II, the Fair Employment Act (1941) was introduced, prohibiting racial discrimination. Initially it was intended only for the national defense industry, but it was later extended to encompass all labor relations and to prohibit many forms of discrimination in the workplace.

The Taft-Hartley Act (1947), or Labor-Management Relations Act, and the Labor Management Reporting and Disclosure Act (1959) amended the National Labor Relations Act to restrict union power. The acts prohibit unfair labor practices by unions, which were previously only prohibited for employers. Unions were no longer allowed to influence the employers in their allocation of work to different plants. Secondary boycotts—for example, the refusal to handle the goods of non-unionized companies—were also prohibited. Closed-shop agree-ments—that only union labor could be hired by employers—were also outlawed.

LABOR INSTITUTIONS

The International Labor Organization (ILO) was created in 1919. There were several reasons for the establishment of such an organization. Its primary concern, a humanitarian one, was for the welfare of the worker. Numerous workers in many different countries had to work under exploitative circumstances, threatening their life, health, and family life. A second purpose was to integrate the growing working class into the political process and thereby to avoid social unrest or revolutions that could impede international peace. This aim is also found in the constitution of the ILO, as peace can only be achieved along with social justice. An economic motivation for the establishment of the ILO was concern over the cost of upholding humanitarian working standards. It was generally agreed that international standards for working conditions would avoid a race to the bottom—that is, a competition among nations over low labor costs, to the detriment of the workers. The organization of the ILO is tripartite. Each member country has two representatives of the government, one of the employers’ associations, and one of the labor unions.

In 1926 the ILO introduced a supervisory system to control the implementation and enforcement of its standards. This was an important step toward a more functional organization that went beyond discussing pressing issues. The United States, which was involved in several aspects of the founding and establishment of the ILO, became a member in 1934. One of the main steps forward was the Declaration of Philadelphia, adopted in 1944, which introduced freedom of association for workers. In 1969, the ILO was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

The U.S. Department of Labor is the governmental organization responsible for labor in relation to occupational safety, wage and hour standards, unemployment insurance benefits, reemployment services, and labor statistics. On the national level, the Bureau of Labor Statistics is the principal organization within the United States to provide statistical information and research for the government. While it is part of the Department of Labor, it serves as an independent statistical agency and provides labor market statistics as well as occupational forecasts. Other countries have organizations that have similar goals, albeit often less extensive ones.

SEE ALSO Agricultural Industry; Capitalism; Class Conflict; Division of Labor; Factories; Factory System; Industrialization; Industry; Labor Force Participation; Labor Market; Labor Supply; Labor Union; Management; Productivity; Smith, Adam; Thompson, Edward P.; Unions; Work; Work Day; Work Week

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aronowitz, Stanley. 2003. How Class Works: Power and Social Movement. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Berger, Stefan, and David Broughton, eds. 1995. The Force of Labour: The Western European Labour Movement and the Working Class in the Twentieth Century. Oxford: Berg Publishers.

Commons, John R., David J. Saposs, Helen L. Sumner, et al. 1918–1936. History of Labour in the United States. New York: Macmillan.

Currie, Janet, and Joseph P. Ferrie. 2000. The Law and Labor Strife in the U.S., 1881–1894. Journal of Economic History 60: 42–66.

Durkheim, Émile. 1984. The Division of Labor in Society. Trans. W. D. Halls. New York: Free Press.

Geary, Dick. 1981. European Labour Protest, 1848–1939. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

Henderson, W. O. 1954. Britain and Industrial Europe, 1750–1870: Studies in British Influence on the Industrial Revolution in Western Europe. Liverpool, U.K.: Liverpool University Press.

Marx, Karl. [1867–1894] 1971. Das Kapital. Vols. 1–3. London: Lawrence & Wishart.

Reich, Robert B. 1991. The Work of Nations: Preparing Ourselves for 21st-Century Capitalism. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Smith, Adam. [1776] 1904. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. 5th ed. London: Methuen and Co.

Thompson, Edward P. 1971. The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century. Past and Present 50 (1): 76–136.

Weber, Max. [1922] 1978. Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Ben Kriechel

Labor

Source

Big Labor? As businesses expanded and Consolidated to secure advantages in the marketplace, workers tried to organize, and often succeeded, to exert leverage in the labor market. Changes in the workplace set imposing challenges for workers, who found themselves contending with increasingly large, concentrated, and distant employers. Periodic economic downturns also cut deeply into efforts to organize, as workers competed to survive. However, workers did organize and did take on management in often bitter efforts to secure or retain decent working conditions amid the dizzying process of industrial transformation.

Knights of Labor. The first organization to attempt to unite workers of all industries and occupations, the Knights of Labor grew from small beginnings: when it

was founded in 1869 it was envisioned as a secret organization, something like a labor equivalent to freemasonry. It eventually shed its trappings of secrecy, and under the leadership of Terence V. Powderly, who was named “Grand Master Workman” in 1883, the Knights rapidly grew to become a major force in American business. The movement opened its ranks to skilled and unskilled workers alike, transcending earlier, single-craft-oriented trade unions. In addition it accepted women and African Americans, although the latter had to join segregated assemblies. Powderly set lofty goals for the Knights, envisioning ultimately the abolition of the wage system and its replacement with more-cooperative business structures. However, the Knights’ more immediate goals reflected a concrete labor agenda: an eight-hour workday, the prohibition of child labor, and the improvement of workplace safety and conditions.

Triumph and Setbacks. After the Knights successfully organized a strike against one of Jay Gould’s railroads in 1885, membership soared to more than seven hundred thousand by 1886, nearly 10 percent of the total industrial workforce, organized in some fifteen thousand local assemblies. However, momentum began to slip when a subsequent railroad strike collapsed the next year. Meanwhile, the Knights threw themselves into a national campaign to institute an eight-hour workday, calling for a mass strike on 1 May 1886. More than three hundred thousand workers participated in the “Great Upheaval.” Nonetheless the Knights lost a good deal of public support in the aftermath of these strikes, especially in the wake of events in Chicago, where the May Day strike led to a bombing in Haymarket Square in which seven policemen were killed. The city’s civic leaders decried the radical ideas they detected at the root of the violence, tainting principles such as Powderly’s critique of wage labor. Still, the Knights’ biggest obstacle probably came from within the ranks, as skilled workers, disillusioned with the idea of joining forces with unskilled workers, peeled off to form craft unions. Membership dropped to one hundred thousand in 1890 and continued to fall off in the ensuing years. However, many of the goals of the Knights became central principles of other labor organizations that took up the struggle for better wages and working conditions.

American Federation of Labor. Meanwhile, efforts were under way to organize skilled labor within craft unions sustained by a national umbrella alliance. In 1881 a group of trade unionists convened to lay the foundation for a national federation of labor leaders. While the influence of the Knights of Labor remained strong, the federation languished, but in 1886, as the Knights’ fortunes began to ebb, a second effort

established the American Federation of Labor (AFL) at a convention held in Columbus, Ohio. Samuel Gompers of the Cigar Makers’ Union became the federation’s first president and held the office almost continuously up to his death in 1924. Unlike the Knights, the AFL was rooted in the craft union movement, and participating local unions retained complete autonomy. The federation thus gathered skilled workers, but not unskilled or semiskilled laborers. And unlike the Knights of Labor or the twentieth-century Industrial Workers of the World (Wobblies), the AFL eschewed radical or socialist politics, concentrating on improving labor conditions in individual crafts through union organization and contract negotiations.

Federation Fortunes. Like the Knights, the federation met with both setbacks and advances in its first few decades. AFL growth, which depended on the growth of participating trade unions, remained fitful into the late 1890s. Sporadic early victories on the issue of the eight-hour day were offset by more prominent setbacks in the Homestead Strike of 1892 and the Pullman Strike two years later. As of 1898 fewer than three hundred thousand workers were affiliated. However, after the 1893-1897 depression membership began to rise more rapidly. By the early twentieth century the federation had securely established itself as a national power.

Source

Joshua Freeman and others, Who Built America? Working People and the Nation’s Economy, Politics, Culture and Society, 2 volumes (New-York: Pantheon, 1989-1992).

labor term used both for the effort of performing a task and for the workers engaged in the activity. In ancient times much of the work was done by slaves (see slavery ). In the feudal period agricultural labor was in the main performed by the serf . In medieval towns, however, the skilled artisans of the craft guilds became influential citizens. Many manual labor jobs were eliminated with the introduction of machinery (mid-18th cent.), thus creating a labor surplus (see Industrial Revolution ). With increased competition for jobs and consequent decreasing wages, a form of labor contract came into use in Great Britain and its colonies, called indenture, by which people could hire themselves out for a certain number of years either for a lump sum of money or to pay off a debt. This practice disappeared by the end of the 19th cent. From the last quarter of the 19th cent. the condition of most manual labor has improved slowly in industrial countries through organization (see union, labor ), permitting collective bargaining with employers and successful pressure on governments for protective legislation. In fact, the term labor is today most frequently used to signify organized labor. For labor disputes, see strike . See also child labor ; migrant labor ; peonage .

Bibliography: See J. R. Commons et al., History of Labour in the United States (4 vol., 1918–35, repr. 1966); G. D. H. Cole, A Short History of the British Working-Class Movement (new ed. 1960); N. J. Ware, Labor in Modern Industrial Society (1935, repr. 1968); A. Kuhn, Labor: Institutions and Economics (rev. ed. 1967); A. A. Paradis, The Labor Reference Book (1972); R. Fantasia, Cultures of Solidarity: Consciousness, Action, and Contemporary American Workers (1989); T. Roof, American Labor, Congress and the Welfare State, 1935–2010 (2011).

la·bor / ˈlābər/ (Brit. la·bour) • n. 1. work, esp. hard physical work: manual labor. ∎  workers, esp. manual workers, considered collectively: nonunion casual labor. ∎  such workers considered as a social class or political force: [as adj.] the labor movement. ∎  (Labor) a department of government concerned with a nation's workforce: Secretary of Labor. 2. the process of childbirth, esp. the period from the start of uterine contractions to delivery: his wife is in labor. • v. [intr.] work hard; make great effort: they labored from dawn to dusk ∎  work at an unskilled manual occupation: he was eking out an existence by laboring. ∎  have difficulty in doing something despite working hard: Coley labored against confident opponents. ∎  (of an engine) work noisily and with difficulty: the wheels churned, the engine laboring. ∎  move or proceed with trouble or difficulty: they labored up a steep, tortuous track. ∎  (of a ship) roll or pitch heavily. PHRASES: a labor of love a task done for pleasure, not reward. labor the point explain or discuss something at excessive or unnecessary length.PHRASAL VERBS: labor under 1. carry (a heavy load or object) with difficulty. 2. be deceived or misled by (a mistaken belief): you've been laboring under a misapprehension. ORIGIN: Middle English labo(u)r, from Old French labour (noun), labourer (verb), both from Latin labor ‘toil, trouble.’

399. Labor

1. A.F.L.-C.I.O. (American Federation of Labor—Congress of Industrial Organizations) federation of autonomous labor unions in North America. [Am. Hist.: NCE, 84]
2. Gompers, Samuel (1850–1924) labor leader; organizer of American Federation of Labor. [Am. Hist.: Jameson, 203]
3. I.W.W. Industrial Workers of the World [Am. Hist.: Hart, 400]
4. International Labor Organization (I.L.O. ) agency of the United Nations; aim is to improve labor and living conditions. [World Hist.: EB, V: 389–390]
5. Meany, George (1894–1980) former president of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. [Am. Hist.: NCE, 1733]
6. Marx, Karl (1818–1883) chief theorist of modem socialism stimulated working class’s consciousness. [Ger. Hist.: NCE, 1708]
7. National Labor Relations Board independent agency of U.S. government, supporting labor’s right to organize. [Am. Hist.: NCE, 1887]
8. Solidarity (Solidarnosc ) Polish labor union movement of the 1980s. [Pol. Hist.: WB, P:541]
9. Teamsters large, powerful union of U. S. truckers. [Am. Hist.: NCE, 2703]
10. U.A.W. large American auto workers union. [Am. Hist.: WB, U:21]
11. Wobblies nickname for I.W.W. members. [Am. Hist.: Hart, 400]

labour labour of love work undertaken either from fondness for the work itself, or from desire to benefit persons whom one loves. The term was originally used (in the late 17th century) as a direct quotation from St Paul's Epistle to the Thessalonians.
labours of the month in the Middle Ages, seasonal occupations associated with particular months, and often represented in sculpture and illumination. The traditional representations are: January, Janus (sometimes also sitting at a table feasting); February, a man warming himself by a fire; March, pruning (usually vines); sometimes also digging; April, a man in foliage; May, a knight on horseback; June, mowing (haymaking); July, harvesting (reaping); August, threshing grain (occasionally fruit-picking); September, treading grapes (occasionally picking grapes); October, beating acorns from trees (sometimes filling casks); November, slaughtering hogs (sometimes animals feeding from a manger); December, feasting.

See also Labours of Hercules, mountain in labour.

labour Human labour is regarded in the OT as sharing in the divine purpose (Exod. 20: 8; 34: 21) because God's work was described in Gen. 1 as creative. Jesus ‘worked’ (John 5: 17) by healing on a Sabbath, which he justifies on the ground that God continued to maintain the universe even during the prescribed Sabbath day of rest: the obligation to rest can be set aside to enable Jesus to do God's work. Paul worked for his living (Acts 18: 3), and exhorted his converts not to be idle (1 Thess. 4: 11).

On the other hand, work is part of the penalty for sin (Gen. 3: 17), and much labour described in the Bible was arduous and unrewarding. For some of it the Hebrews used slaves (Exod. 21: 2–6) and captured foreigners (Josh. 9: 3–27); and slaves are frequently mentioned in the Roman period by the NT, e.g. the epistle to Philemon. Women had heavy manual work such as fetching water (Gen. 24: 15; John 4: 7) but could also aspire to be entrepreneurs (Acts 16: 14).

labour (lay-ber) n. the sequence of actions by which a baby and the afterbirth (placenta) are expelled from the uterus at childbirth (see illustration). Labour usually starts spontaneously about 280 days after conception, but it may be started by artificial means (see induction). In the first stage the muscular wall of the uterus begins contracting while the cervix expands. The amnion ruptures releasing amniotic fluid to the exterior. In the second stage the baby passes through the vagina, assisted by contractions of the abdominal muscles and conscious pushing by the mother. When the whole infant has been eased clear of the vagina, the umbilical cord is cut. In the final stage the placenta and membranes are pushed out by the continuing contraction of the uterus. See also Caesarean section.

labour In most sociological contexts this term is synonymous with wage-labour. However, in Marxism attention is often drawn to the conflicting interests of ‘Labour’ and ‘Capital’. The former is here a reference to the proletariat, and alludes to the theory of the exploitation of labour-power by the capitalist class, or bourgeoisie. Occasionally, as for example in anthropological discussion of ‘labouring’ or sociological analyses of domestic labour, the term may be equated with work rather than the more restricted category of paid employment.

labour In childbirth, stage in the delivery of the fetus at the end of pregnancy. In the first stage, contractions of the uterus begin and the cervix dilates in readiness; the sac containing the amniotic fluid ruptures. In the second stage, the contractions strengthen and the baby is propelled through the birth canal. The third stage is the expulsion of the placenta and fetal membranes, together known as the afterbirth.

labour, U.S. labor toil, work XIII; travail of childbirth XVI. —OF. labo(u)r (mod. labeur ploughing)— L. labor, -ōr- exertion, trouble, suffering, perh. orig. burden under which one staggers, rel. to labāre slip.
So labour vb. XIV. —(O)F. labourer (now chiefly, plough). labourer XIV. —(O)F. laboureur; see -ER1, -ER2. laborious XIV. —(O)F. laborieux.

Labour

of moles: a company of moles—Bk. of St. Albans, 1486.

labor v. (of a ship) roll or pitch heavily.

labor see birth .

labor •abba, blabber, dabber, grabber, jabber, stabber, yabber •Alba, Galba •amber, camber, caramba, clamber, Cochabamba, gamba, mamba, Maramba, samba, timbre •Annaba, arbor, arbour, barber, Barbour, harbour (US harbor), indaba, Kaaba, Lualaba, Pearl Harbor, Saba, Sabah, Shaba •sambar, sambhar •rebbe, Weber •Elba •Bemba, December, ember, member, November, Pemba, September •belabour (US belabor), caber, labour (US labor), neighbour (US neighbor), sabre (US saber), tabor •chamber • bedchamber •antechamber •amoeba (US ameba), Bathsheba, Bourguiba, Geber, Sheba, zariba •cribber, dibber, fibber, gibber, jibba, jibber, libber, ribber •Wilbur •limber, marimba, timber •winebibber •calibre (US caliber), Excalibur •briber, fibre (US fiber), scriber, subscriber, Tiber, transcriber •clobber, cobber, jobber, mobber, robber, slobber •ombre, sombre (US somber) •carnauba, catawba, dauber, Micawber •jojoba, Manitoba, October, sober •Aruba, Cuba, Nuba, scuba, tuba, tuber •Drouzhba • Toowoomba • Yoruba •Hecuba

labour •abba, blabber, dabber, grabber, jabber, stabber, yabber •Alba, Galba •amber, camber, caramba, clamber, Cochabamba, gamba, mamba, Maramba, samba, timbre •Annaba, arbor, arbour, barber, Barbour, harbour (US harbor), indaba, Kaaba, Lualaba, Pearl Harbor, Saba, Sabah, Shaba •sambar, sambhar •rebbe, Weber •Elba •Bemba, December, ember, member, November, Pemba, September •belabour (US belabor), caber, labour (US labor), neighbour (US neighbor), sabre (US saber), tabor •chamber • bedchamber •antechamber •amoeba (US ameba), Bathsheba, Bourguiba, Geber, Sheba, zariba •cribber, dibber, fibber, gibber, jibba, jibber, libber, ribber •Wilbur •limber, marimba, timber •winebibber •calibre (US caliber), Excalibur •briber, fibre (US fiber), scriber, subscriber, Tiber, transcriber •clobber, cobber, jobber, mobber, robber, slobber •ombre, sombre (US somber) •carnauba, catawba, dauber, Micawber •jojoba, Manitoba, October, sober •Aruba, Cuba, Nuba, scuba, tuba, tuber •Drouzhba • Toowoomba • Yoruba •Hecuba