LABOR

Labor Movement

The origins of the labor movement lay in the formative years of the American nation, when a free wage-labor market emerged in the artisan trades late in the colonial period. The earliest recorded strike occurred in 1768 when New York journeymen tailors protested a wage reduction. The formation of the Federal Society of Journeymen Cordwainers (shoemakers) in Philadelphia in 1794 marks the beginning of sustained trade union organization among American workers. From that time on, local craft unions proliferated in the cities, publishing lists of "prices" for their work, defending their trades against diluted and cheap labor, and, increasingly, demanding a shorter workday. Thus a job-conscious orientation was quick to emerge, and in its wake there followed the key structural elements characterizing American trade unionism - first, beginning with the formation in 1827 of the Mechanics'' Union of Trade Associations in Philadelphia, central labor bodies uniting craft unions within a single city, and then, with the creation of the International Typographical Union in 1852, national unions bringing together local unions of the same trade from across the United States and Canada (hence the frequent union designation "international"). Although the factory system was springing up during these years, industrial workers played little part in the early trade union development. In the nineteenth century, trade unionism was mainly a movement of skilled workers.

The early labor movement was, however, inspired by more than the immediate job interest of its craft members. It harbored a conception of the just society, deriving from the Ricardian labor theory of value and from the republican ideals of the American Revolution, which fostered social equality, celebrated honest labor, and relied on an independent, virtuous citizenship. The transforming economic changes of industrial capitalism ran counter to labor''s vision. The result, as early labor leaders saw it, was to raise up "two distinct classes, the rich and the poor." Beginning with the workingmen''s parties of the 1830s, the advocates of equal rights mounted a series of reform efforts that spanned the nineteenth century. Most notable were the National Labor Union, launched in 1866, and the Knights of Labor, which reached its zenith in the mid-1880s. On their face, these reform movements might have seemed at odds with trade unionism, aiming as they did at the cooperative commonwealth rather than a higher wage, appealing broadly to all "producers" rather than strictly to wageworkers, and eschewing the trade union reliance on the strike and boycott. But contemporaries saw no contradiction: trade unionism tended to the workers'' immediate needs, labor reform to their higher hopes. The two were held to be strands of a single movement, rooted in a common working-class constituency and to some degree sharing a common leadership. But equally important, they were strands that had to be kept operationally separate and functionally distinct.

During the 1880s, that division fatally eroded. Despite its labor reform rhetoric, the Knights of Labor attracted large numbers of workers hoping to improve their immediate conditions. As the Knights carried on strikes and organized along industrial lines, the threatened national trade unions demanded that the group confine itself to its professed labor reform purposes; when it refused, they joined in December 1886 to form the American Federation of Labor afl. The new federation marked a break with the past, for it denied to labor reform any further role in the struggles of American workers. In part, the assertion of trade union supremacy stemmed from an undeniable reality. As industrialism matured, labor reform lost its meaning - hence the confusion and ultimate failure of the Knights of Labor. Marxism taught Samuel Gompers and his fellow socialists that trade unionism was the indispensable instrument for preparing the working class for revolution. The founders of the afl translated this notion into the principle of "pure and simple" unionism: only by self-organization along occupational lines and by a concentration on job-conscious goals would the worker be "furnished with the weapons which shall secure his industrial emancipation."

That class formulation necessarily defined trade unionism as the movement of the entire working class. The afl asserted as a formal policy that it represented all workers, irrespective of skill, race, religion, nationality, or gender. But the national unions that had created the afl in fact comprised only the skilled trades. Almost at once, therefore, the trade union movement encountered a dilemma: how to square ideological aspirations against contrary institutional realities? As sweeping technological change began to undermine the craft system of production, some national unions did move toward an industrial structure, most notably in coal mining and the garment trades. But most craft unions either refused or, as in iron and steel and in meat packing, failed to organize the less skilled. And since skill lines tended to conform to racial, ethnic, and gender divisions, the trade union movement took on a racist and sexist coloration as well. For a short period, the afl resisted that tendency. But in 1895, unable to launch an interracial machinists'' union of its own, the Federation reversed an earlier principled decision and chartered the whites-only International Association of Machinists. Formally or informally, the color bar thereafter spread throughout the trade union movement. In 1902, blacks made up scarcely 3 percent of total membership, most of them segregated in Jim Crow locals. In the case of women and eastern European immigrants, a similar devolution occurred - welcomed as equals in theory, excluded or segregated in practice. (Only the fate of Asian workers was unproblematic; their rights had never been asserted by the afl in the first place.)

Gompers justified the subordination of principle to organizational reality on the constitutional grounds of "trade autonomy," by which each national union was assured the right to regulate its own internal affairs. But the organizational dynamism of the labor movement was in fact located in the national unions. Only as they experienced inner change might the labor movement expand beyond the narrow limits - roughly 10 percent of the labor force - at which it stabilized before World War I.

In the political realm, the founding doctrine of pure-and-simple unionism meant an arm''s-length relationship to the state and the least possible entanglement in partisan politics. A total separation had, of course, never been seriously contemplated; some objectives, such as immigration restriction, could be achieved only through state action, and the predecessor to the afl the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions (1881), had in fact been created to serve as labor''s lobbying arm in Washington. Partly because of the lure of progressive labor legislation, even more in response to increasingly damaging court attacks on the trade unions, political activity quickened after 1900. With the enunciation of Labor''s Bill of Grievances (1906), the afl laid down a challenge to the major parties. Henceforth it would campaign for its friends and seek the defeat of its enemies.

This nonpartisan entry into electoral politics, paradoxically, undercut the left-wing advocates of an independent working-class politics. That question had been repeatedly debated within the afl first in 1890 over Socialist Labor party representation, then in 1893-1894 over an alliance with the Populist party, and after 1901 over affiliation with the Socialist party of America. Although Gompers prevailed each time, he never found it easy. Now, as labor''s leverage with the major parties began to pay off, Gompers had an effective answer to his critics on the left: the labor movement could not afford to waste its political capital on socialist parties or independent politics. When that nonpartisan strategy failed, as it did in the reaction following World War I, an independent political strategy took hold, first through the robust campaigning of the Conference for Progressive Political Action in 1922, and in 1924 through labor''s endorsement of Robert La Follette on the Progressive ticket. By then, however, the Republican administration was moderating its hard line, evident especially in Herbert Hoover''s efforts to resolve the simmering crises in mining and on the railroads. In response, the trade unions abandoned the Progressive party, retreated to nonpartisanship, and, as their power waned, lapsed into inactivity.

It took the Great Depression to knock the labor movement off dead center. The discontent of industrial workers, combined with New Deal collective bargaining legislation, at last brought the great mass production industries within striking distance. When the craft unions stymied the afl''s organizing efforts, John L. Lewis of the United Mine Workers and his followers broke away in 1935 and formed the Committee for Industrial Organization cio, which crucially aided the emerging unions in auto, rubber, steel, and other basic industries. In 1938 the cio was formally established as the Congress of Industrial Organizations. By the end of World War II, more than 12 million workers belonged to unions, and collective bargaining had taken hold throughout the industrial economy.

In politics, its enhanced power led the union movement not to a new departure but to a variant on the policy of nonpartisanship. As far back as the Progressive Era, organized labor had been drifting toward the Democratic party, partly because of the latter''s greater programmatic appeal, perhaps even more because of its ethnocultural basis of support within an increasingly "new" immigrant working class. With the coming of Roosevelt''s New Deal, this incipient alliance solidified, and from 1936 onward the Democratic party could count on - and came to rely on - the campaigning resources of the labor movement. That this alliance partook of the nonpartisan logic of Gompers''s authorship - too much was at stake for organized labor to waste its political capital on third parties - became clear in the unsettled period of the early cold war. Not only did the cio oppose the Progressive party of 1948, but it expelled the left-wing unions that broke ranks and supported Henry Wallace for the presidency that year.

The formation of the aflcio in 1955 visibly testified to the powerful continuities persisting through the age of industrial unionism. Above all, the central purpose remained what it had always been - to advance the economic and job interests of the union membership. Collective bargaining performed impressively after World War II, more than tripling weekly earnings in manufacturing between 1945 and 1970, gaining for union workers an unprecedented measure of security against old age, illness, and unemployment, and, through contractual protections, greatly strengthening their right to fair treatment at the workplace. But if the benefits were greater and if they went to more people, the basic job-conscious thrust remained intact. Organized labor was still a sectional movement, covering at most only a third of America''s wage earners and inaccessible to those cut off in the low-wage secondary labor market.

Nothing better captures the uneasy amalgam of old and new in the postwar labor movement than the treatment of minorities and women who flocked in, initially from the mass production industries, but after 1960 from the public and service sectors as well. Labor''s historic commitment to racial and gender equality was thereby much strengthened, but not to the point of challenging the status quo within the labor movement itself. Thus the leadership structure remained largely closed to minorities - as did the skilled jobs that were historically the preserve of white male workers - notoriously so in the construction trades but in the industrial unions as well. Yet the aflcio played a crucial role in the battle for civil rights legislation in 1964-1965. That this legislation might be directed against discriminatory trade union practices was anticipated (and quietly welcomed) by the more progressive labor leaders. But more significant was the meaning they found in championing this kind of reform: the chance to act on the broad ideals of the labor movement. And, so motivated, they deployed labor''s power with great effect in the achievement of John F. Kennedy''s and Lyndon B. Johnson''s domestic programs during the 1960s.

This was ultimately economic, not political power, however, and as organized labor''s grip on the industrial sector began to weaken, so did its political capability. From the early 1970s onward, new competitive forces swept through the heavily unionized industries, set off by deregulation in communications and transportation, by industrial restructuring, and by an unprecedented onslaught of foreign goods. As oligopolistic and regulated market structures broke down, nonunion competition spurted, concession bargaining became widespread, and plant closings decimated union memberships. The once-celebrated National Labor Relations Act increasingly hamstrung the labor movement; an all-out reform campaign to get the law amended failed in 1978. And with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, there came to power an anti-union administration the likes of which had not been seen since the Harding era. Between 1975 and 1985, union membership fell by 5 million. In manufacturing, the unionized portion of the labor force dropped below 25 percent, while mining and construction, once labor''s flagship industries, were decimated. Only in the public sector did the unions hold their own. By the end of the 1980s, less than 17 percent of American workers were organized, half the proportion of the early 1950s.

Swift to change the labor movement has never been. But if the new high-tech and service sectors seemed beyond its reach in 1989, so did the mass production industries in 1929. And, as compared to the old afl, organized labor is today much more diverse and broadly based: 40 percent of its members are white-collar workers, 30 percent are women, and the 14.5 percent who are black signify a greater representation than in the general population and a greater rate of participation than by white workers (22.6 percent compared to 16.3 percent). In the meantime, however, the movement''s impotence has been felt. "The collapse of labor''s legislative power facilitated the adoption of a set of economic policies highly beneficial to the corporate sector and to the affluent," wrote analyst Thomas B. Edsall in 1984. And, with collective bargaining in retreat, declining living standards of American wage-earning families set in for the first time since the Great Depression. The union movement became in the 1980s a diminished economic and political force, and, in the Age of Reagan, this made for a less socially just nation.

Foster R. Dulles and Melvyn Dubofsky, Labor in America: A History, 4th ed. (1984); Robert H. Zieger, American Workers, American Unions, 1920-1985 (1986).

David Brody

See Also

labor: Strikes

Strikes have played a significant role in the economic, political, and social life of the United States throughout its history. From strikes by shoemakers, printers, bakers, and other artisans in the era of the Revolution through the bitter airline strikes two centuries later, workers repeatedly tried to defend or improve their living and working conditions by collectively refusing to work until specific demands were met.

Since the early 1880s, when reliable statistics were first compiled, American workers have struck with a frequency roughly equal to that of their peers in Europe. Strikes in the United States, however, have tended to last longer than elsewhere, with a mean duration between 1881 and 1974 of twenty days. Accordingly, the total number of workdays lost in strikes proportionate to the size of the work force has been higher in the United States than almost anywhere else in the world.

The United States also has had the bloodiest labor history of any industrial nation. The first strike fatalities were two New York tailors, killed in 1850 by police dispersing a crowd of strikers. Since then, according to one estimate, well over seven hundred people - mostly strikers - have died in strike-related violence, and the total may be much higher. Some died in famous incidents, such as the 1913 Ludlow Massacre, when National Guardsmen attacked a tent colony of striking Colorado miners, or the 1937 Memorial Day Massacre, when ten supporters of a steel strike were killed by Chicago police. Most, however, died in little-noted confrontations with company guards, private detectives, scabs, or police.

Although wage disputes have been the single most common cause of strikes, workers have walked off their jobs for many reasons, including efforts to win union recognition, shorten the workday, gain or defend control over the work process, improve working conditions, and protest the disciplining of unionists. Strikes have been called to exclude nonwhites or women from jobs and, more rarely, to protest racial discrimination. Unlike elsewhere, political strikes over non-work-related issues have been uncommon.

Strikes have played a major role in both the rise and fall of unions (though many have occurred without union involvement). Often strikes have stimulated the formation of new unions or union federations. The first citywide labor federations, formed in the 1820s and 1830s, grew out of strikes by artisans seeking to shorten their workday. Over a century later, the Congress of Industrial Organizations cio was indirectly an outgrowth of a wave of strikes by industrial workers. Conversely, failed strikes have destroyed many unions. The American Railway Union, for example, was unable to survive the defeat of its 1894 strike against the Pullman Car Company. More recently, the mass firing of striking air traffic controllers by the Reagan administration led to the demise of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization.

American strikes have tended to come in waves, usually linked to the business cycle. Their frequency usually has risen whenever unemployment has been low. Unions have been strongest during such periods and workers less fearful about losing their jobs. Many of the bitterest strikes, though, occurred at the beginning of economic downturns, when companies slashed wages. Political and legal developments also have influenced the pattern of work stoppages. For instance, the passage of the National Industrial Recovery Act in 1933 stimulated a wave of strikes, as workers sensed a new sympathy for unionism on the part of the federal government.

The first American strikes, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, were conducted by journeymen artisans, such as shoemakers, printers, and carpenters, often acting through local trade societies. Typically these "turn-outs" or "stand-outs" began when a group of workers decided on a scale of "prices" for their labor, pledging not to work for any employer paying less. Walkouts were almost always peaceful, since strikers simply stayed home until they could find a job paying the agreed-upon wages. Usually if within a few days employers did not meet the proposed prices, the strike collapsed.

Strikes by the early trade societies were effective because the supply of skilled workers within local labor markets was limited. Employers tried to counteract these stoppages through the courts. Starting in 1806 a series of criminal conspiracy cases was brought against workers for combining to raise wages and injure others (by refusing to work with nonunionists). These successful prosecutions inhibited the spread of strikes and trade societies, which were then dealt a devastating blow by the depression of 1819.

An economic upturn in the 1820s revived strike activity. Male artisans, and less commonly laborers, conducted most of the walkouts, but, unlike the earlier period, female craft workers and factory operatives of both sexes also struck. Most strikes were about wages or working hours. Out of them arose local federations of craft unions, and ultimately the Working Men''s parties that for a while shifted the focus of the labor movement from strike action to electoral politics.

The failure of the Working Men''s parties and a drop in the standard of living led to a larger wave of strikes during the 1830s. In Philadelphia sixteen trade societies simultaneously struck, demanding the ten-hour day. In New York strikes brought on another round of conspiracy prosecutions. An economic downturn in 1837, however, led to a near-total collapse of the union movement, and it did not reemerge until the 1850s, when there was a brief but intense renewal of strike activity. In 1853 and 1854 alone there were some four hundred strikes. In 1860 came the largest to date, a six-week walkout of over ten thousand shoe workers on the North Shore of Massachusetts.

After the Civil War the labor movement grew rapidly, as did the volume of strikes. But with improvements in transportation and the growing size of cities, unions found it difficult to prevent employers from recruiting scabs, leading to both strike defeats and violence. To avoid strikes many unions abandoned the system of unilaterally establishing wage scales and working hours, embracing instead "arbitration," the negotiation with employers of wages, work rules, and grievances. Written contracts became more common, and many unions transferred the power to call strikes from the rank and file to elected officers. The Knights of Labor, the most important nineteenth-century labor organization, generally disapproved of strikes, and some unions rejected them altogether.

In spite of the union retreat from the strike weapon, the 1870s saw a series of strikes of unprecedented size, violence, and national impact. Amid a severe depression that began in 1873, workers waged long, bitter strikes to resist wage cuts in the New England textile industry, the anthracite coal mines, and on the Pennsylvania Railroad. In 1877 the first nationwide strike paralyzed railroads throughout the East and Midwest, idled some 100,000 workers, led to over a hundred deaths, and terrified the propertied classes. The strike began in West Virginia as a spontaneous protest by Baltimore and Ohio trainmen against a series of pay cuts. As it spread to Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Chicago, and St. Louis, it became a vast demonstration against the railroads and their allies; the railroad men were joined by farmers, coal miners, craft workers, and the unemployed in efforts to stop rail traffic. When local militiamen refused to attack strikers, state and federal troops from other regions were brought in, leading to massive clashes. The strike was defeated, but it had been, in the eyes of many, the American equivalent of the Paris Commune.

In the mid-1880s, as the economy underwent a modest recovery, the number of strikes soared, tripling from under five hundred a year in the early 1880s to some fifteen hundred in 1886. Well over half a million workers struck that year, and the volume of strikes remained high for the next decade. During this period over half of all strikers were in the coal, construction, or garment industries. Wages, working hours, union recognition, and work rules were the most important issues, and many strikes - over a third in the 1880s - were not initiated by unions. In the early 1890s sympathy strikes accounted for about 10 percent of all walkouts.

Employers unreconciled to unionism increasingly sought and received government assistance in defeating strikes. Between 1875 and 1910 state troops were called out nearly five hundred times to deal with labor unrest. In 1892, for example, after armed strikers at Andrew Carnegie''s Homestead, Pennsylvania, steel mill repulsed an attack by Pinkerton guards, eight thousand state troops were sent to the town, leading to the defeat of the strike. When state authorities were unable or unwilling to provide troops, the U.S. Army was used, as occurred during the 1894 Pullman strike and a series of metal mining strikes in the Rocky Mountain region. State and federal court injunctions were also used frequently and effectively against strikers.

Although workers won roughly half of all strikes in the 1880s and 1890s, many leaders of craft unions affiliated with the American Federation of Labor afl questioned their efficacy. In the early twentieth century, to avoid or settle strikes, many unions turned to private mediation groups or, after 1914, the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service. Nonetheless, after a brief respite the volume of strikes rose sharply in the years just before World War I. Notable during this period was the increased number of female, unskilled, and immigrant strikers, evident in the Lawrence, Massachusetts, textile strike, several exceptionally bloody transit strikes, and a series of large garment strikes. In these and other contests, unions introduced new tactics, including mass picket lines, multilingual strike committees, and sophisticated public relations.

During World War I the afl pledged to avoid strikes, but their volume nonetheless continued to rise as workers took advantage of a labor shortage to seek higher wages, union recognition, and control over the work process. The strike wave peaked in 1919, when workers sought to consolidate and extend their wartime gains and employers sought to reverse them. That year 4 million workers, one-fifth of the work force, went on strike, a higher proportion of workers than in any other year in the nation''s history. In Boston policemen struck; in New York, garment workers and actors; in New England, textile workers and telephone operators; and in Seattle a general strike paralyzed the city for five days. Late in the year 400,000 coal miners walked off their jobs in defiance of a federal court injunction, winning a large wage increase. In the steel industry a strike by over 300,000 workers was defeated, dooming organizing efforts in the oligarchic basic industries for another fifteen years. Although the volume of strikes remained high through 1922, labor''s postwar offensive was checked by government repression, a red scare that equated labor militancy with foreign radicalism, and a short but sharp economic downturn in 1921. By 1923 the number of strikers had declined dramatically, as had the number of unionists. Strike volume remained low for the rest of the decade and fell further during the early years of the Great Depression.

The revival and vast expansion of the union movement in the 1930s was closely linked to a new burst of strikes. The beginning of the New Deal, coming after four years of depression, sparked rising worker militancy. In 1934 striking Toledo auto workers, Minneapolis truckers, and West Coast longshoremen won important concessions after surviving police and vigilante attacks, although massive violence crushed a walkout of East Coast textile workers. These strikes helped stimulate in 1935 the passage of the National Labor Relations Act nlra and the formation of the Committee for Industrial Organization (which became the Congress of Industrial Organizations in 1938). The key test for the cio came in 1937, a six-week strike against General Motors. During the conflict thousands of strikers remained inside the company''s plants. The success of the strike gave an enormous impetus to industrial unionism and spawned a wave of more sit-down strikes. Half a million workers took part in sit-downs before they were declared illegal by the Supreme Court in 1939. The overall volume of strikes remained very high until the United States entered World War II, as unions penetrated such previously unorganized industries as auto, steel, rubber, electrical equipment manufacturing, meat packing, and over-the-road trucking.

During World War II virtually all unions pledged not to strike, but despite this and government sanctions against striking, walkouts were frequent. Typically, they were small, short, and not union-initiated. Exceptional was a series of very large, union-led coal strikes. When the war ended, unions and employers jockeyed to maximize their power in postwar collective bargaining. As a result, in 1946 more workers went on strike and more workdays were lost than in any other year. Some strikes were very long, but in sharp contrast to the prewar years, most were peaceful. The nlra was in part responsible: employers were now legally obligated to bargain with unions that could demonstrate majority worker support, and strikers were given legal protection. As labor relations became routinized during the 1950s, the volume of strikes dropped sharply, with unions almost always involved in those that did occur.

A large number of public employee strikes - previously very unusual - contributed to an increase in strike activity during the 1960s. Most public-sector strikes involved local government employees, such as teachers or transit workers, but the largest public employee walkout in the nation''s history was a 1970 wildcat strike of 180,000 postal workers.

Strike volume decreased during the 1970s and remained low during the 1980s. A severe recession, a conservative political climate, and declining union membership all contributed to this development. For the first time since World War II, it became not unusual for struck companies to attempt to resume operations using scab workers. The defeat of hard-fought strikes in the intercity bus, copper-mining, meat-packing, and airline industries convinced some observers that strikes were a thing of the past. Given their historically cyclical pattern and the lack of well-developed alternatives, however, it seemed unlikely that strikes would lose their central role in American labor relations in the future.

P. K. Edwards, Strikes in the United States, 1881-1974 (1981); Richard B. Morris, ed., The U.S. Department of Labor Bicentennial History of the American Worker (1976).

Joshua B. Freeman

See Also