LABOR MOVEMENT: LABOR ORGANIZATIONS AND STRIKES

Labor organizations appeared in the half century after the Revolution, responding primarily to the stratification of the artisan trades in eastern seaboard commercial and manufacturing cities. Before then, the trades had been predominantly communities of independent petty producers. On completing their training, apprentices would simply set up as sole traders rather than become journeymen wageworkers. After the mid–eighteenth century, the incidence of wage labor began to increase. In Philadelphia, from 30 percent to 50 percent of the city's shoemakers and tailors can be found hiring themselves out to master craftsmen, the actual numbers fluctuating by decade. In Boston and New York, the preponderance of independent tradesmen was greater. In Boston during the 1790s, there were still eight master carpenters for every journeyman. By 1815, however, the journeymen were in a majority. By then, journeymen also outnumbered masters across all trades in Philadelphia, and decisively in New York.

terms of employment

The turn to wage labor meant friction over terms. How the price and hours of labor should be set and enforced became the object of intense debate from the 1780s onward, accompanied by resort to association on both sides and competing declarations of standards for a trade throughout a given locality. Journeymen enforced their declarations by "turn outs"—refusals to work except on the terms they prescribed or with any person not part of their fraternity. These tactics earned them indictment, and usually conviction, for conspiracy. Between 1806 and 1815 at least half a dozen conspiracy trials took place in Philadelphia, Baltimore, and New York. The depression of 1819 put a halt to journeymen's organizing activities, but another cluster of prosecutions came between 1823 and 1829 as the economy revived. Shoemakers and tailors were the most frequent defendants, but urban textile workers—spinners and weavers—were also indicted. Though concentrated in the artisan trades of the seaboard cities, trials spread to inland centers, such as Pittsburgh (1814) and Buffalo (1824), and as far south as New Orleans (1826). More trials came in the mid-1830s, at the peak of the Jacksonian labor movement, and in the early 1840s, when for the first time indictments were returned against rural factory workers.

Journeymen's associations recapitulated traditions of craft organization with roots deep in the English past and with scattered precursors in the colonies. They were, however, certainly not the new nation's only expression of concerted labor action. Riots and strikes over working and living conditions also occurred among unskilled workers: canal diggers, mostly working in rural areas (particularly as the economy began to improve after 1825); waterfront workers on several occasions in the second half of the 1820s; and New York's building laborers (1816). Strikes also occurred among urban female tailors (New York, 1825) and among rural textile factory workers—the first in Pawtucket, Rhode Island (1824), another at the Slater Mills in Dudley, Massachusetts (1827).

development of a labor movement

More significant than who was organizing and striking was when. It is the coincidence of action among different groups that signifies the beginnings of a full-fledged labor movement.

Before the late 1820s, a labor movement as such did not exist. The journeymen's associations of the previous forty years were not a movement. They were trade-specific combinations organized within a particular locality, asserting quasi-corporate or quasi-municipal rights of regulation, not a nascent collective bargaining mentality. There was little communication among them, far less any explicit attempts at translocal organization. Combinations among unskilled workers, meanwhile, tended to be spontaneous and short-lived.

This situation began to change in the mid-1820s. Economic recovery brought renewed organization across a broad front of trades in all the eastern cities, accompanied by wage conflicts and agitation for the ten-hour day, notably the Boston house carpenters' strike of 1825. Simultaneous stirrings among the new classes of factory workers and strikes among canal workers suggest generalized grievance. Different segments of working people appeared to share a common understanding of the extent of economic transformation that had occurred since the end of the War of 1812: decomposition of the artisan mode of production in the cities, growing concentration of wealth, and the spread of entrepreneurialism and "free market" rhetoric, all accompanied by growing stratification in the employment relationship. The result was the first attempt to create more general forms of organization. Beginning in Philadelphia, journeymen joined with factory hands not only to organize unions but also confederations of unions as well as workingmen's political parties that quickly assumed an active role in local and state politics. Establishment in 1827 of the Mechanics' Union of Trade Associations, the first citywide federation of journeymen trade societies in the country, led to independent organized participation of workingmen in the 1828 city and state elections. In 1829 and 1830 Working Men's parties developed in New York and Massachusetts.

Notwithstanding that this was a movement founded in the first instance on journeymen's associations, the Working Men's parties showed little programmatic commitment to trade unionism. Particularly in Massachusetts, the Working Men's parties transcended a specifically urban base, attracting support from rural artisans and farmers. Eclectically radical, they are best considered representative of a "catchall" popular anxiety about the course of the polity. All articulated broad programs of republican reform, and all were shaped by a diversity of influences—middle-class intellectuals and Jeffersonian agrarians, not just plebeian radicals. Frontiers between the Working Men's parties and factions in the mainstream parties were highly permeable.

In the fifty years after the Revolution, "labor" had emerged amid the expansion and reorganization of the new nation's economy as an increasingly separate and identifiable interest. But its organizational manifestations were eclectic and brief, its politics undefined. Strikes had become commonplace, but periods of agitation were easily snuffed out by economic downturns. The 1830s saw more of the same, but with the crucial addition of a growing emphasis on permanent trade unions as the only basis upon which working people could expect to have any impact upon the polity. Federations of urban craft unions were established in all the eastern seaboard centers during 1833 and 1834 and remained active for several years. Ultimately, they too would prove vulnerable to economic downturn and depression after the Panic of 1837. But their appearance lent real definition to labor activity in the 1830s, proving what had still been uncertain as late as 1829: that the new nation now had a labor movement.

See alsoEconomic Development .

bibliography

Prude, Jonathan. The Coming of Industrial Order: Town and Factory Life in Rural Massachusetts, 1810–1860. New York and Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1983.

Tomlins, Christopher L. Law, Labor, and Ideology in the Early American Republic. New York and Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

Way, Peter. Common Labour: Workers and the Digging of North American Canals, 1780–1860. New York and Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

Wilentz, Sean. Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984.

Christopher L. Tomlins