“What does labor want? We want more schoolhouses and less jails; more books and less arsenals; more learning and less vice; more leisure and less greed; more justice and less revenge; in fact, more of the opportunities to cultivate our better natures.”
Samuel Gompers
At the beginning of the industrial revolution, popular and elite opinion was divided over the issue of labor’s right to organize to achieve social justice.
Shortly after America’s first textile mill opened in Pawtucket, Rhode Island its workers, men and women, struck in 1824 to protest wage cuts and attempts to impose a longer work day. Workers formed America’s first trade unions and Workingmen’s Parties shortly thereafter. Courts rejected claims that unions were illegal conspiracies soon states passed laws setting 10 hour work daysand upholding the right of workers to organize even in times of national crisis. “Thank God,” declared Abraham Lincoln after a strike by 20,000 shoemakers at the height of the Civil War, “that we have a system of labor where there can be a strike.” Even Pope Leo XIII supported labor’s right to organizein his encyclical RerumNovarum.
As the industrial revolution transformed the mode of production, workers realized that unions based on individual trades—typographers, iron workers, shoemakers, locomotive engineers—were limited in their ability to protect their interests. As a result, organizations representing broad-based constituencies arose which Big Business immediately identified as a threat—the Noble Order of the Knights of Labor, the Knights of St Crispins, the Daughters of St. Crispin, the Black National Labor Union, and America Federation of Labor led by Samuel Gompers.
Simultaneously, Federal and State politicians, increasingly corrupted by Big Business money,took anti-union positions and looked the other way when employers used thugs to break strikes.In 1877, for instance, when workers struck to protest wage cuts by the B&O and Pennsylvania Railways, governors called out the state militias. In the pitched battles that followed 57 were killed. In addition to being able to mobilize state power to break strikes, employers now easily replaced strikers with new immigrants then flooding into America—Irish, Slavs, Germans, Italians, Greeks, Russians, Chinese and Japanese. Soon labor’s campaign for the 8-hour work day (which had seemed so close) faltered and some workers felt more radical measures were needed.
On 1 May 1886 some 350,000 union members took part in a nation-wide 8-hour work stoppage which was met with repression in many places. In Chicago, police fired on strikers. The next a bomb was thrown by persons unknown in Chicago’s Haymarket Square. Four workers (three German-born anarchists and a worker with ancestors in the American Revolution) were arrested, given show trials, and hanged. The resulting popular reaction was a setback for unions that were now associated with anarchy in the popular mind. Once-powerful groups like the Knights of Labor fell apart, management got the upper-hand and the Supreme Court declared all laws limiting works hours unconstitutional. Setbacks spawned even more radical labor organizations notably the Industrial Workers of the World.
Outline begins
1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire in New York City 146 workers die
1913 US Department of Labor was established
1917 IWW strike at Bisbee, Arizona copper mines ended by city sheriff who sends 1200 miners into the desert to die
1919 At the end of WWI pent-up labor conflict erupted. American workers stuck for the right of collective bargaining while business, grown fat on war profits, fought to preserve the status quo. Some 365,000 workers struck US Steel, which still had a 12 hour work day. The Federation of churches back the workers declaring US Steel policies “inhuman.” But US Steel, which has reported 2 billion in war profits, broke the strike using the military as did Big Business across the nation. In West VA Weirton Steel’s private police forced 118 strikers to kneel at gunpoint and kiss the American flag. Boston Police Strike- the first strike by public safety workers in US history. FBI raids rounded up and deported all suspected socialists and communists while legally elected socialists were barred from Congress and state legislatures while publishes of socialist newspapers were lynched and castrated by hired business goons. Yet even as state and local governments repressed unions, a presidential commission granted United Mine Workers a 27% wage increase during arbitration clearly demonstrating the schizophrenic nature of government – labor relations.
The economic crisis of the Great Depression (blamed largely on the influence exerted on Congress by America’s capitalist plutocracy (as exemplified by the Teapot Dome scandal )help elect FDR and gave rise to the New Deal .
1934 500,000 Southern millworkers walked off the job in the Great Uprising
1935 The Wagner Act (National Labor Relations Act) protects the right of workers to organize and to elect representatives for collective bargaining.
1943 FDR’s executive order creates Committee on Fair Employment Practices to eliminate employment discrimination in war industries based on race, creed, color or national origin.
1946 Largest strike wave in history reaction to wartime wage restriction
1947 Congress passed the Taft-Hartley Act which restricts union activities and permits the states to pass “right-to-work” laws.
1948 Yet as before, repression was coupled with minimal reform , and child labor was prohibited
1955-2011: “What’s good for General Motors is good for the USA.” Union influence began a steady declined from about 34% of the American workforce in 1955 to about 11% this year as Big Business recognized it was more efficient to bust unions by granting just enough to keep workers in their place—a process enabled by a modern form of debt peonage—the extension of easy credit to keep workers in debt and working.
Conclusion:
The stability of the capitalist world system doesn’t rest on the amassing of financial profits by banks, investment groups and derivative traders but rather on the ability of workers to buy the goods they produce. When workers are well paid, markets are deep. When they are not, markets are shallow and hence the system is unstable.
In short, worker wages are the foundation of a capitalist system which, for better or worse, is built on the ability of the masses (you and I) to consume. Thus, taken to its logical conclusion, labor unions are good for the economy and ultimately for capitalist for profits. The question to be addressed is to what ends should those profits be put? To achieve Samuel Gompers’ dream
