Caucasian civilization will serve notice that its uplifting process is not to be interfered with in any such way. The black political leader Ida B. Workers and labor reformers also struggled to organize during one the most conservative eras in United States judicial history. In its decision in Lochner v. New York U. Also in , the Court found that labor boycotts of employers had been banned by the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. Even when the Court did support the constitutionality of reform measures, as in the Muller v. The Railway Labor Act required railway industry employers to engage in collective bargaining and banned discrimination against unions in the railway industry this was expanded to airlines in By , then, in the face of much judicial resistance, legislators had responded to growing public alarm by initiating a revolution in labor law that would come to fruition when the Supreme Court upheld the National Labor Relations Act.
The federal government spurred a national mobilization of the workforce and economic resources, while coordinating industrial planning. Although the government went so far as to take over the railroads, the federal intervention in the economy hardly represented wartime socialism. In essence, the federal government forged a larger role in managing the economy with the primary goal of efficient war-related production. This managed economy also facilitated the private accumulation of capital for employers and benefited masses of workers.
Why was this a boon for unions and workers? In the first place, the wartime economy required labor peace. Therefore, the federal government facilitated the formation and growth of unions. At the same time, the wartime economic boom required many new workers. With the end of European immigration and the draft of white men into the military, women and African Americans found new opportunities.
The long-term consequences of the war differed sharply for women and men. The war did help to provide the necessary impetus to pass the Nineteenth Amendment to the U. Constitution, giving women the right to vote.
A Brief History of American Labor
For African Americans, the war sparked a major demographic, economic, and political transition. Between and , nearly , African Americans migrated from the South to northern cities, with another , following in their wake during the s. The Great Migration, as this movement of black southerners to industrial cities has been called, began a process that not only transformed the lives of the migrants but also fundamentally changed the populations and politics of major American cities.
In the s, Harlem was especially fertile ground for black working-class politics. Building on the longstanding activism of Hubert Harrison and others, people like A. Philip Randolph who got their start in the s would help build a nationally powerful, labor-based civil rights movement in the s and s. World War I seemed to offer an opportunity for workers to improve their position in the economy. Workers, in fact, gained a great deal in real wages and political power during the brief period of nearly full employment during the war.
In , alone, more than 4 million workers—approximately one-fifth of the workforce—went on strike. A general strike of 60, in Seattle, Washington, a strike by nearly the entire police force in Boston, Massachusetts, and a national steel strike of , workers in Pittsburgh and beyond Figure 6 are representative of the broad scope of the strikes by workers fearful that they would lose what they had won during the war and facing the prospect of a severe postwar recession. In each case, the workers lost, and they ended up more divided than before, and more desperate for jobs at virtually any wage.
Photo by Bain News Service, The benefits of the business decade were deeply unequal. To many Americans, the s seemed to promise the unending expansion of the American economy. The number of telephones doubled, by about half of Americans had indoor toilets, and Henry Ford refined assembly line production, allowing many working families to own a car. Yet the expansion of the consumer economy depended on an equal expansion of the consumer credit economy; Americans bought their radios and other modern wonders on installment plans. Moreover, even with the greater availability of credit, full participation in the consumer economy remained a dream for most.
As the economic historian W.
Unions declined sharply in the s under pressure from a conservative attack. Perhaps most importantly, some four hundred firms created Employee Representation Plans, or company unions, which sought to promote worker allegiance to the company and to provide a kind of pressure release for workers thinking about organizing in their own interests.
American Labor and Working-Class History, 1900–1945
Welfare capitalists sought to prevent unions from ever rising again, and for a time they succeeded. The number of strikes receded dramatically, and union membership declined. The success of unregulated markets and welfare capitalism, however, was short-lived, and the mass unemployment, poverty, and insecurity of the s would help spark the greatest surge in union members in U.
From a high of on September 3, , the Dow Jones Industrial Average ultimately fell to a low of Approximately five thousand banks failed between and Industrial production declined by over half between the crash and the middle of By that year, unemployment soared to between one-quarter and one-third of the total labor force.
Things were not much better for those who managed to hold onto employment: Economic sectors that had been struggling in the s saw conditions only worsen; farm income declined by 60 percent, and one-third of famers lost their land in the s. The industries that had driven the prosperity of the s were now failing; by , the automobile industry was producing at only 20 percent of its capacity. The stock market crash laid bare the underlying weaknesses in the U. Hoover responded to the crash much more energetically than previous presidents had in similar crises, but his efforts were too limited to meet the depth of this one, in part because he remained steadfastly committed to voluntaristic, optimistic, Progressive-style interventions.
As realization of the deepening crisis dawned on him, Hoover also increased federal funds for public works, moved to cut taxes, and requested private agencies, as well as state and local governments, to provide relief to the approximately 7 million unemployed by Thousands of Americans joined in organizing for relief from the federal government. In unemployed organizations, spearheaded by socialist and communist organizers, Americans demanded monetary relief and reinstalled tenants in their apartments when they were evicted.
The most important protests and strikes of the s were still years away, but the unemployed organizing of the early s played an important role in increasing popular militancy. Congress pay them the bonuses they had been promised for their service in the war. For weeks thousands of veterans camped on Anacostia Flats, within sight of the Capitol, while President Hoover and Congress refused to pay the bonuses. Finally, the president sent the U. By , Herbert Hoover had become by all accounts the most unpopular person in the United States. Instead, the New Deal represented a series of experiments which, though they did not pull the nation out of the depression only economic mobilization for World War II would do that , still dramatically transformed the American economy by creating a new welfare state, strengthening unions, and affirming the economic importance of government action as a source of both spending and business regulation.
President Roosevelt immediately took steps to address the national crisis. He initiated important banking reforms, rationalizing and regulating the banking system and providing deposit insurance. Together, these reforms arguably created the conditions for relative financial stability that helped make possible the growth of a mass middle class after World War II. Roosevelt and his allies also ended the alcohol ban of Prohibition, eliminating one cause of suffering and chaos in working-class communities.
He also expanded direct relief to the poor and enlarged public works projects significantly. The NIRA eliminated most antitrust restrictions and, in return, asked businesses to cooperate with the National Recovery Administration NRA , a new federal agency which would oversee a wide range of economic activities, notably wages, the prices of consumer goods, and the cost of transportation.
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The Supreme Court, however, struck down the NIRA because the law amounted to unconstitutional federal intervention in interstate commerce. Yet the NIRA had two longer-lasting and largely unforeseen consequences. First, it reinforced the federal commitment to public works programs as part of the solution to the national crisis. Although NIRA, and its Section 7a, were quickly found unconstitutional, the support of the federal government for labor organizing helped strengthen an already growing surge in rank-and-file labor organizing.
In the wake of the passage of Section 7a, millions of American workers acted on their desire for union representation—more than 1, strikes occurred in alone—while also demonstrating that the AFL would not be able to contain or take full advantage of the aspirations of American industrial workers. Mass strikes broke out in among West Coast dock workers, in auto parts factories in Toledo, Ohio, in the trucking industry in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and in the East Coast textile industry. In each case, the AFL had made initial efforts to act on the rights specified in Section 7a and to organize thousands of new workers.
The AFL, however, either backed down completely or failed to address the grievances of rank-and-file workers. Tens of thousands of workers then acted without the support of the AFL. In Toledo, workers at the Electro Auto Lite Company survived clashes with National Guardsmen to win union recognition, wage increases, and other gains, while creating an important piece of the foundation for what became the United Auto Workers.
In Minneapolis, four workers died in citywide violence, but they also broke through in that previously hardcore anti-union city and set the stage for the national unionization of the trucking industry. In the long term, the strikes helped organize broad sectors of the American working class, but in the short term the strikes also helped polarize domestic politics. Indeed, and were years of greatly increasing political conflict. President Roosevelt found his support from business leaders evaporating after NIRA was struck down and after the strikes demonstrated the threat, as owners saw it, of giving workers the right to unionize.
Radical communists and socialists joined militant organizers for the unemployed to push for greater support for the unemployed. In the long run, both allowed for a major reduction in poverty among young people and the elderly. In addition, the Second New Deal greatly expanded public works programs. The Second New Deal had only limited immediate effects. The first Social Security check did not go out until January 31, The public works agencies were administered by local offices and were, therefore, racially segregated in the South and everywhere tended to benefit white male workers.
New Deal legislation increased the benefits that African Americans derived from the federal government, especially in northern cities, where black voters gradually shifted to the Democratic Party beginning in the late s. Yet New Deal employment benefits did not apply to agricultural workers or domestic workers, which meant that most black and female workers were not covered by unemployment insurance or Social Security.
At the same time, programs such as the Agricultural Adjustment Act and the Tennessee Valley Authority, among others, directly or indirectly displaced significant numbers of black farmers, tenants, and sharecroppers from the land. Moreover, as some of the New Deal measures began to improve economic conditions, President Roosevelt and his advisors moved to scale back federal spending in the belief that the recovery could proceed on its own, and the economy slowed down again.
For all its limitations, the Second New Deal helped energize the U. With federal recognition of their right to organize, American workers in previously non-union industries created another surge in organizing activity. This new movement to organize the unorganized differed from the strikes because it was a coordinated and concerted drive for industrial unionism. Led by John L. In and , the CIO broke through in the notoriously anti-union auto industry by deploying sit-in strikes at General Motors plants in Flint, Michigan Figure 8.
Occupying the GM factories, workers won community support and, after bitter battles in the streets with many women on the front lines , they forced the company to recognize the CIO union. The stunning success at GM persuaded U. As the CIO succeeded in organizing industrial workers, the differences between the AFL and the new unions became increasingly apparent. CPUSA members became perhaps the most energetic and persistent of union organizers. Finally, in November , the CIO held a national convention and created an independent confederation of industrial unions, now known as the Congress of Industrial Organizations.
During the first years of the decade, the CPUSA emerged as an ally for black workers and for the cause of civil rights. Communist Party organizers, for example, led many of the unemployed organizations, fighting to bring government resources to black neighborhoods and to prevent the eviction of black tenants. Black Americans pragmatically took advantage of such alliances.
They were never members of the Communist Party in large numbers, but some black organizers and radicals joined the party at least for a short time, and many were generally willing to work with it to fight racial inequality through the labor movement. CIO leaders, including the important group of left-wing organizers, understood that for practical or idealistic reasons, or both, the new industrial unions could challenge the AFL and their employers only if they built a culture of interracialism.
For all the interracial organizing of radical activists and the CIO, black workers forged their own paths into the labor movement. They acted as the servants of white customers on Pullman trains, providing first-class service in return for tips. They earned meager wages, which meant that they needed to play to the racist stereotype of the subservient black man.
Some historians have argued that the access to jobs as Pullman porters helped create the foundation for the black middle class, but for many workers at the time the work was degrading, required long hours, and paid far too little. The porters called on New York socialist A. Philip Randolph Figure 9 to lead their union drive. For twelve years, Randolph and the men and women organizing for the BSCP struggled to overcome resistance from the Pullman Company and skepticism toward unions in the black community. The Pullman Company bought support from black leaders, especially in its home city of Chicago, by donating money to local black organizations.
The support worked, and the BSCP found that African Americans in Chicago not only distrusted unions because of their history of racial exclusions, but also saw labor protests as disreputable and perceived the Pullman Company to be the friend of the black community.
Information Agency, August 28, The BSCP found the s a much more productive period. At the same time, Randolph grew in stature as the foremost black labor leader and became the first head of the National Negro Congress NNC , a characteristic Popular Front organization that sought to forge alliances among communists, socialists, and liberals organizing against racial and economic inequality.
While the BSCP reached out to black leaders and community members, the union also took advantage of the Railway Labor Act to hold successful union elections among black porters. Two long years later, the Brotherhood finally signed its first contract with the Pullman Company, the first union contract for black workers with a major corporation. President Roosevelt also helped create a fundamentally new national political alignment; success for the Democratic Party outside the South, where the Democrats remained a conservative party until the rise of the southern wing of the Republican Party in the last third of the 20th century would depend upon winning the votes of ethnic urban voters, unionized workers, and African Americans.
When Japan attacked the U. Rather than seeking to survive in what seemed to be an economic crisis without end, American workers entered the postwar world still deeply divided by race, geography, and social class, but expecting to share in a new era of prosperity. As white men were drafted into the military by the tens of thousands, industries began to recruit white women to fill their spots. The war did not usher in a rapid change in gender norms, at least not in majority public opinion. First, although many women were ushered out of sectors of the workforce, women actually stayed in the labor force at higher numbers than ever before; married women, especially, worked in greater numbers than in any previous era of American history.
Moreover, many women never forgot their experiences in the workforce, and their expectations for opportunities that the next generation of women should have were forever changed. Women in the labor movement who joined unions during the war also became leaders for a new labor-based feminism.
Black men and women were also hired into industrial work by the tens or hundreds of thousands, but only after employers found they could not fill the jobs with white women. Although opportunity came for black workers and women later than it did for white male workers, the war brought a radical improvement in economic conditions and raised expectations for all Americans.
That the raised expectations of women and racial minorities were not fulfilled after the war meant that the increased opportunity of wartime actually helped sow the seeds for the civil rights movement and other social movements to follow.
Labor Movement - HISTORY
From to , American workers enjoyed higher wages, greater job security, and a steadily improving standard of living. Workers in unions made even greater gains, including not only substantially higher wages but also health insurance and pensions. Even Americans on the margins of the workforce benefited from the expansion of unemployment compensation, welfare, and job training and placement programs. Workers made remarkable gains between and To be sure, this was no linear narrative of inevitable upward mobility and progress.
They had won access to a limited but growing public welfare state and a burgeoning private welfare system. With these newly won rights, protections, and status, the once marginalized and much-maligned American worker had secured a place within the consumerist industrial society and as one interest group among many in the political system. The historiography of labor and working-class life and struggles in the United States originated in the labor economics movement of Progressive Era intellectuals. This was the stuff of big institutions. Commons at the University of Wisconsin built on the work of earlier labor economists, including Richard T.
Together, Commons and students like Selig Perlman developed a new field of institutional labor history. The new labor history also gave rise to scholars, perhaps inspired by the black freedom struggle and other social movements of the s and s, who sought to recover the history of women, slaves and free blacks, Asians, Latinos, and Native Americans.
Since the s, there has been a persistent sense that the field of labor history has been in a crisis, even as the production of labor and working-class scholarship has hardly slowed. With the cast of characters growing and local case studies multiplying every year, some observers wondered if a synthesis of the literature was possible. Was there ever such a thing that could be defined as the American labor and working-class history?
As Joan Wallach Scott would explain, it was not enough just to add women or black workers, or immigrant workers, etc. Historians had to give up the notion that any social category—race, class, gender, sexuality—had any content outside of its historical context in that moment. They had to focus on the ways that people constantly create and re-create their identities; it was argued that it may be all one can do to explain that process of conscious and unconscious creation of self in a world that cannot be known as a whole.
To make matters more difficult for labor historians, as poststructuralism questioned the very categories historians had used to make sense of the past, beginning in the s the political world around them was destroying the very institutions—labor unions—that had given the field coherence. Given the near decimation of organized labor, the decline of manufacturing jobs, and the diversification of the politics and social positions of working-class people, historians have had to rethink the assumptions of the field.
- Jeffrey Helgeson.
- Labor Movement.
- Sweet Treats! Recipes from an Irish Childhood! A Bill and Sarah Giles Lifestyle Book. (Bill and Sarah Giles Lifestyle Books. Book 4).
This latter work, which had been initiated earlier by feminist and black historians, reshaped the investigations of all workers, bringing questions of whiteness, gender identity, and sexuality to the fore. To be sure, with the ripples of mass militancy in the early 21st century there has been some effort to recover lost traditions of radicalism. The historian Leon Fink, for instance, has joined a growing group of scholars in arguing that the history of American workers must be understood in light of transnational economic and political dynamics, and the evolution of global capitalism.
Workers and their allies built significant, if highly problematic, reformist and radical movements that broke from the social Darwinism and laissez-faire ethos of the late 19th century, but most American workers did not directly share the more romantic experiences of such labor activism. Labor and working-class history, therefore, does not necessarily promise to offer a usable past for those seeking to build contemporary movements, but it does open the door to greater understanding and empathy with the complex lives and struggles of working people in previous eras of globalizing inequality.
The main research problems for students of labor and working-class history are, first, to sift through the nearly limitless supply of relevant sources and, second, to find ways to include the voices of working people themselves. Because the state plays such a key role in shaping law and society, labor historians regularly consult municipal, county, state, and federal records, as well as court cases.
Presented by James S. Perkins in Collaboration with Dr. Workers in Industrial America: Essays on the 20th Century Struggle. Oxford University Press, Marxism taught Samuel Gompers and his fellow socialists that trade unionism was the indispensable instrument for preparing the working class for revolution.
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: 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. Formally or informally, the color bar thereafter spread throughout the trade union movement.
In , 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. 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. 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 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 over Socialist Labor party representation, then in over an alliance with the Populist party, and after over affiliation with the Socialist party of America. Although Gompers prevailed each time, he never found it easy. 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. Lewis of the United Mine Workers and his followers broke away in and formed the Committee for Industrial Organization cio , which crucially aided the emerging unions in auto, rubber, steel, and other basic industries.
In 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. Not only did the cio oppose the Progressive party of , but it expelled the left-wing unions that broke ranks and supported Henry Wallace for the presidency that year. The formation of the afl — cio in 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 and , 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. 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 from the public and service sectors as well.
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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 afl — cio played a crucial role in the battle for civil rights legislation in 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: From the early s 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 And with the election of Ronald Reagan in , there came to power an anti-union administration the likes of which had not been seen since the Harding era.
Between and , union membership fell by 5 million. Only in the public sector did the unions hold their own. By the end of the s, less than 17 percent of American workers were organized, half the proportion of the early s.