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A Short History of American Labor
This
brief history of more than 100 years of the modem trade union movement in
the United States can only touch the high spots of activity and identify
the principal trends of a "century of achievement." In such a
condensation of history, episodes of importance and of great human drama
must necessarily be discussed far too briefly, or in some cases relegated
to a mere mention.
What is
clearly evident, however, is that the working people of America have had to
unite in struggle to achieve the gains that they have accumulated during
this century. Improvements did not come easily. Organizing unions, winning
the right to representation, using the collective bargaining process as the
core of their activities, struggling against bias and discrimination, the
working men and women of America have built a trade union movement of
formidable proportions.
Labor
in America has correctly been described as a stabilizing force in the
national economy and a bulwark of our democratic society. Furthermore, the
gains that unions have been able to achieve have brought benefits, direct
and indirect, to the public as a whole. It was labor, for example, that
spearheaded the drive for public education for every child. The labor
movement, indeed, has served as a force for American progress.
American Labor's Second Century
Now, in
the 1980s, as the American trade union movement looks toward its second
century, it takes pride in its first "century of achievement" as
it recognizes a substantial list of goals yet to be achieved.
In this
past century, American labor has played a central role in the elevation of
the American standard of living. The benefits which unions have negotiated
for their members are, in most cases, widespread in the economy and enjoyed
by millions of our fellow citizens outside the labor movement. It is often
hard to remember that what we take for granted-vacations with pay, pensions,
health and welfare protection, grievance and arbitration procedures,
holidays never existed on any meaningful scale until unions fought and won
them for working people.
Through
these decades, the labor movement has constantly reached out to groups in
the American society striving for their share of opportunity and
rewards..... to the blacks, the Hispanics and other minorities..... to
women striving for jobs and equal or comparable pay . . . to those who work
for better schools, for the freedom of speech, press and assembly
guaranteed by the Bill of Rights ... to those seeking to make our cities
more livable or our rural recreation areas more available . . . to those
seeking better health for infants and more secure status for the elderly.
Through
these decades, in addition, the unions of America have functioned
in an economy and a technology marked by awesome change. When the
Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions gathered in convention in
1881, Edison had two years earlier invented the electric light, and the
first telephone conversation had taken place just five years before. There
were no autos, no airplanes, no radio, no television, no air conditioning,
no computers or calculators, no electronic games. For our modest energy
needs-coal, kerosene and candies-we were independently self-sufficient.
The
labor movement has seen old industries die (horse-shoeing was once a major
occupation) and new industries mature. The American workforce, once
predominantly "blue collar," now finds "white collar"
employees and the "grey collar" people of the service industries
in a substantial majority. The workforce in big mass production industries
has contracted, and the new industries have required employees with
different skills in different locations. Work once performed in the United
States has been moved to other countries, often at wage levels far below
the American standards. Multinational, conglomerate corporations have moved
operations around the globe as if it were a mammoth chessboard. The once
thriving U.S. merchant marine has shriveled.
A
new kind of "growth industry"-consultants to management
skilled in the use of every legal loophole that can frustrate union
organizing, the winning of representation elections, or the negotiation of
a fair and equitable collective bargaining agreement-has mushroomed in
recent years, and threatens the stability of labor-management
relationships. A group of organizations generally described as the
"new right" enlist their followers in retrogressive crusades to
develop an anti-union atmosphere in the nation, and to repeal or mutilate
various social and economic programs that have brought a greater degree of
security and peace of mind to the millions of American wage earners in the
middle and lower economic brackets.
Resistance
to modest proposals like the labor law reform bill of 1977, and the use of
lie detectors and electronic surveillance in probing the attitudes and
actions of employees are a reminder that opposition to unions, while
changing in style from the practices of a few decades ago, is still alive
and flourishing often financed by corporate groups, trade associations and
extremist ideologues.
Yet
through this dizzying process of change, one need remains constant-the need
for individual employees to enjoy their human rights and dignity, and to
have the power to band together to achieve equal collective status in
dealing with multi-million and multi-billion dollar corporations. In other
words, there is no substitute for the labor union.
American
labor's responsibility in its second century is to adjust to the new
conditions, so that it may achieve optimum ability to represent its members
and contribute to the evolutionary progress of the American democratic
society.
AFL-CIO
President Lane Kirkland expressed that concept in his formal statement on
labor's centennial in 1981:
"Labor
has a unique role in strengthening contemporary American society and
dealing adequately and forcefully with the challenge of the future."
"We
shall rededicate ourselves to the sound principle of harnessing democratic
tradition and trade union heritage with the necessity of reaching out for
new and better ways to serve all working people and the entire
nation."
Toward a Federation of Labor
The
roots of our country's trade unions extend deep into the early history of
America. Several of the Pilgrims arriving at Plymouth Rock in 1620 were
working craftsmen. Captain John Smith, who led the ill-fated settlement in
1607 on Virginia's James River, pleaded with his sponsors in London to send
him more craftsmen and working people.
Primitive
unions, or guilds, of carpenters and cordwainers, cabinet makers and
cobblers made their appearance, often temporary, in various cities along
the Atlantic seaboard of colonial America. Workers played a significant
role in the struggle for independence; carpenters disguised as Mohawk
Indians were the "host" group at the Boston Tea Party in 1773.
The Continental Congress met in Carpenters Hall in Philadelphia, and there
the Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776. In "pursuit of
happiness" through shorter hours and higher pay, printers were the
first to go on strike, in New York in 1794; cabinet makers struck in 1796;
carpenters in Philadelphia in 1797; cordwainers in 1799. In the early years
of the 19th century, recorded efforts by unions to improve the workers'
conditions, through either negotiation or strike action, became more frequent.
By the
1820s, various unions involved in the effort to reduce the working day from
12 to 10 hours began to show interest in the idea of federation-of joining
together in pursuit of common objectives for working people.
Puny as
these first efforts to organize may have been, they reflected the need of
working people for economic and legal protection from exploiting employers.
The invention of the steam engine and the growing use of water power to
operate machinery were developing a trend toward a factory system not much
different from that in England which produced misery and slums for decades.
Starting in the 1830s and accelerating rapidly during the Civil War, the
factory system accounted for an ever-growing share of American production.
It also produced great wealth for a few, grinding poverty for many.
With
workers recognizing the power of their employers, the
number of local union organizations increased steadily during the mid-19th
century. In a number of cities, unions in various trades joined together in
city-wide federations. The National Trades' Union, formed in 1834 by
workers in five cities, was an early attempt at countrywide federation-but
the financial panic of 1837 put an end to its efforts. In 1866 several
national associations of unions functioning in one trade-printers,
machinists, stone cutters, to name a few-sent delegates to a Baltimore
meeting that brought forth the National Labor Union. Never very strong, it
was a casualty of the sweeping economic depression of 1873.
Five
years later, the Knights of Labor captured the public imagination. The
Knights were an all-embracing organization committed to a cooperative
society. Membership was not limited to wage earners; it was open to farmers
and small business people-everybody, that is, except lawyers, bankers,
stockbrokers, professional gamblers and anyone involved in the sale of
alcoholic beverages. The Knights achieved a membership of nearly 750,000
during the next few years, but the skilled and unskilled workers who had
joined the Knights in hope of improvement in their hours and wages found
themselves frustrated by the Knights' vague organizational structure, by
its officers' aversion to strikes against employers and by its leaders'
reliance on the promise of future social gains instead of the hard
day-to-day work of building and operating a union organization. So the
stage was set for the creation of a down-to-earth, practical labor
federation which could combine long range objectives of a better society
with the practical activity of day-to-day union functions.
Federation of Organized Trades & Labor Unions
The
first practical step in response to the need for a united labor movement
was a meeting of workers' representatives from a few trades and industries
at Pittsburgh on Nov. 15, 1881. The delegates came from the carpenters, the
cigar makers, the printers, merchant seamen, and the steel workers, as well
as from a few city labor bodies and a sprinkling of delegates from local
units of the Knights of Labor.
The new
Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions which they created had a
constitution inspired by that of the British Trades Union Congress -which
then was about a dozen years old. Its principal activity was legislative,
its most important committee was concerned with legislation. The chairman
of that committee was 31-year-old Samuel Gompers of the Cigar Makers Union,
serving in the earliest phase of a career that was to make him the
principal leader and spokesman for labor in America for the next four
decades.
The
Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions was a good deal less than a
strongly effective organization. In its third year, it collected just $508
in dues, and its 1884 convention brought together merely 18 delegates. Yet
its fingers were clearly on the pulse of America's working class; it passed
a resolution decreeing that "eight hours shall constitute a legal
day's labor from and after May 1, 1886." It recommended to its
affiliated unions that they "so direct their laws as to conform to
this resolution by the time named." In the words of a much later
cliché, the federation's call for the 8-hour day was clearly "an idea
whose time had come." It touched off, or accelerated, a strong and
vociferous national clamor for the shorter work week.
Despite
the popularity of that call for action, Gompers and a number of
his associates-among them, particularly, Peter J. McGuire of the
Brotherhood of Carpenters-felt the time had come for reorganizing the
Federation to make it a more effective center for the trade unions of the
country. So, on Dec. 8, 1886, they and a few other delegates met in
Columbus, Ohio, to create a renovated organization.
It was
at this meeting that the American Federation of Labor evolved from the
earlier Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions. The action was a
giant step forward toward the development of a modern trade union movement
in America. Gompers was elected president, McGuire secretary. Gompers, born
in 1850, came as a boy with his parents to America from the Jewish slums of
London; he entered the cigar-making trade and received much of his
education as a "reader"-a worker who read books, newspaper
stories, poetry and magazine articles to fellow employees to help break the
monotony of their work in the shop-and became a leader of his local union
and of the national Cigar Makers Union.
A
statement by the founders of the AFL expressed their belief in the need for
more effective union organization. "The various trades have been
affected by the introduction of machinery, the subdivision of labor, the
use of women's and children's labor and the lack of an apprentice system-so
that the skilled trades were rapidly sinking to the level of pauper
labor," the AFL declared. "To protect the skilled labor of
America from being reduced to beggary and to sustain the standard of
American workmanship and skill, the trades unions of America have been
established."
The
leadership of the early labor movement showed a keen awareness that the
unions could not succeed with a "men only" philosophy, even
though men were then the clearly dominant element in the labor force. In
1882 the Federation extended to "all women's labor organizations
representation . . . on an equal footing." Even more explicitly-and
rather grandiloquently-the AFL convention in 1894 adopted a resolution that
"women should be organized into trade unions to the end that they may
scientifically and permanently abolish the terrible evils accompanying
their weakened, unorganized state; and we demand that they receive equal
compensation with men for equal services performed."
The
new AFL, with
its 300,000 members in 25 unions, came on the national scene in a time of
discord and struggle. Earlier in 1886, railroad workers in the Southwest
had been involved in a losing strike against the properties of Jay Gould,
one of the more flamboyant of the so-called "robber barons" of
the post-Civil War period. On May 1, 1886, some 200,000 workers had struck
in support of the effort to achieve the 8-hour day.
While
the national 8-hour-day strike movement was generally peaceful,
and frequently successful, it led to an episode of violence in Chicago that
resulted in a setback for the new labor movement. The McCormick Harvester
Company in Chicago, learning in advance of the planned strike, locked out
all its employees who held union cards. Fights erupted and the police
opened fire on the union members, killing four of them. A public rally at
Haymarket Square to protest the killings drew a large and peaceful throng.
As the meeting drew to a close, a bomb exploded near the lines of police
guards, and seven of the uniformed force were killed, with some 50 persons
wounded. The police began to fire into the crowd; several more people were
killed and about 200 were wounded.
Eight
anarchists were arrested and charged with a capital crime. Four were
executed; four others were eventually freed by Gov. John P. Altgeld of
Illinois after he concluded that the trial had been unfairly conducted. No
one knows for certain who planted the bomb. But as Gompers ruefully
commented some time later: "The bomb not only killed the policemen,
but it killed our eight-hour movement for a few years after."
The new
AFL, breaking with the cloudy organizational structure that had hampered
the Knights of Labor and other previous attempts at federation, placed
emphasis on the autonomy of each affiliated union in its jurisdiction, and
encouraged the development of practical collective bargaining to gain
improvements for the membership. But it takes two to make collective
bargaining work - employers and workers - and as American industry moved
into a period of immense growth and power in the latter part of the 19th
century, the lords of industry were little inclined to negotiate with the
unions of their employees. The Sherman Antitrust Act, designed to break up
the power of monopoly corporations, was used very strongly against small
unions, contrary to its intent. And so, the companies grew in strength
while their lawyers fought successful rearguard actions to make the law
inoperative.
Thus
the decade of the 1890s and the early years of the 20th century
witnessed many intense struggles between essentially weak unions seeking to
liberate their members from back-breaking toil under often unsafe and
unhealthy working conditions for very low wages, and powerful corporations
with heavy financial resources, the active or passive support of the
government and its police forces, and the backing of much of the press and
the general public. It was a perfect climate for union-busting and
violence.
In 1891
steel boss Henry C. Frick broke a Pennsylvania strike of coke oven workers
seeking the 8-hour day. But that was just a warm-up event for Frick, who as
head of the Carnegie Steel Company in 1892 ordered a pay cut ranging from
18 to 26 percent. The Amalgamated Association of Iron & Steel Worker
some of the stronger unions of the period-called a strike at the Carnegie
plant at Homestead, Pa., to seek a rescinding of the cut in wages. Pitched
battles followed between the strikers and a boatload of 300 armed Pinkerton
detectives. The strikers won the battle and the Pinkertons retreated, with
a death toll of seven workers, three strikebreakers and scores of wounded.
The state militia then took over the town. Indictments poured out, but no
one was convicted; and Frick had succeeded in breaking the strike.
The
next big confrontation, in 1894, was at the Pullman plant near Chicago. The
American Railroad Union-not affiliated with the AFL and led by Eugene V.
Debs, a leading American socialist-struck the company's manufacturing
plant, and called for a boycott of the handling of Pullman's sleeping and
parlor cars on the nation's railroads. Within a week, 125,000 railroad
workers were engaged in a sympathy protest strike. The government swore in
3,400 special deputies; later, at the request of the railroad association,
President Cleveland moved in federal troops to break the strike-despite a
plea by Gov. Aitgeld of Illinois that their presence was unnecessary.
Finally a sweeping federal court injunction forced an end to the sympathy
strike, and many railroad workers were blacklisted. The Pullman strikers
were essentially starved into submissive defeat.
The
strike illustrated the increasing tendency of the government to offer moral
support and military force to break strikes. The injunction, issued usually
and almost automatically by compliant judges on the request of government
officials or corporations, became a prime legal weapon against union
organizing and action.
A Testing Period and Growth
A
better method of federal intervention occurred during a 1902 strike of
anthracite coal miners, under the banner of the United Mine Workers. More
than 100,000 miners in northeastern Pennsylvania called a strike on May 12,
and kept the mines closed all that summer. When the mine owners refused an
UMW proposal for arbitration, President Theodore Roosevelt intervened on
Oct. 3, and on Oct. 16 appointed a commission of mediation and arbitration.
Five days later the miners returned to their jobs, and five months later
the Presidential Commission awarded them a 10 percent wage increase and
shorter work days-but not the formal union recognition they had sought.
The
difficulties that unions experienced in fashioning their strategies for
bringing workers into membership and fighting low-wage non-union
competition could best be observed in a long court fight which became
nationally known as the Danbury Hatters case. In 1902, the AFL hatters
union instituted a national boycott of a non-union company in Danbury,
Conn. The company, charging a conspiracy in restraint of trade, under the
provisions of the antitrust law, filed a damage suit in the state court but
lost.
The
case worked its way through the federal courts over the next few years, and
in 1908 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in a 5-4 decision against the union.
It held that the Hatters Union had participated in an illegal secondary
boycott, which was subject to federal injunctive restraint. The decision
was a clear signal to the federal judiciary and to the corporations that
injunctions could be used to stop various kinds of labor strikes and
strike-support actions. In addition, the individual strikers were fined a
total of nearly $250,000. In 1915, the AFL proclaimed a Hatters' Day, in
which workers voluntarily contributed an hours pay to help pay off the
fines. The money thus collected kept 184 individual Danbury hat workers
from having their homes seized in order to pay the court-ordered levy. [It
is important to differentiate between direct consumer boycotts or
"unfair to labor" or "don't buy" activities, which are
recognized as perfectly legal when conducted in connection with or in
support of labor union disputes with employers-and, on the other hand,
secondary boycotts, which were the issue in the Danbury Hatters case and
which were made illegal under the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act. A secondary
boycott is one directed at companies or stores to try to force them not to
use, or to offer for sale, products which have been made by a company
involved in a strike or otherwise deemed "unfair" by the
legitimate union. The secondary boycott has all but disappeared since
Taft-Hartley was passed. It should be noted, however, that the courts have
ruled that the Constitution's free speech provisions legally permit a union
to place "informational pickets" outside a store selling
"unfair" goods and calling attention to labor's "don't
buy" campaign-so long as they do not call the store itself
"unfair" or ask the public not to patronize the establishment.]
This
was not to be the first or last example of the way in which employers have
sought to redirect the thrust of laws designed to regulate corporations and
instead aimed them toward labor unions and their members. Indeed, even at
the current time, efforts are still being made to include labor under the
antitrust and other laws originally aimed at corporations.
Not
all the strikes and struggles of the period were conducted by the
"sons of toil" in the nation's heavy industries. Long before the
rise of the contemporary feminist movement, large numbers of women were at
work-particularly in the big cities and in the men's and women's garment
industry. Their grievances were real and tangible in both the textile and
garment industries. Their pay was often at sweatshop levels, their hours
too long, the speed-up rampant, and the working conditions dreadful.
Conditions such as these led in 1909 to a strike known widely as "The
Uprising of the Twenty Thousand." The strikers, mostly women, almost
all of them recent immigrants from Eastern Europe, conducted the first big
protest in the needle trades under the banner of the Ladies' Garment
Workers against shirtwaist and dress manufacturers. Their plight brought
widespread public support, and they gained the 52-hour work week and wage
increases.
In
1910, some 50,000 cloakmakers called a strike in New York. Thanks to the
efforts of Louis D. Brandeis, a lawyer later named to the U.S. Supreme
Court, the dispute ended on a constructive note. A "protocol of
peace" designed by Brandeis established procedures for conciliation
and arbitration of future grievance disputes, as well as such important
advances as the abolition of homework, the free use of electricity, 10 paid
holidays a year, and piece work at rates fixed by joint union-management
committees.
But
a reminder that the garment industry was a good deal this side of
paradise occurred in 191 1, when a fire broke out at the Triangle
Shirtwaist Co. on New York's lower east side. About 150 employees almost
all of them young women-perished when the fire swept through the upper floors
of the loft building in which they worked. Many burned to death; others
jumped and died. Why so large a casualty list? The safety exits on the
burning floors had been securely locked, allegedly to prevent "loss of
goods." New York and the country were aroused by the tragedy. A state
factory investigation committee headed by Frances Perkins (she was to
become Franklin Roosevelt's secretary of labor in 1933, the first woman
cabinet member in history) paved the way for many long needed reforms in
industrial safety and fire prevention measures.
Another
of the historic industrial conflicts prior to World War I occurred in 1912
in the textile mills of Lawrence, Mass. It was led not by an AFL union but
by the radical Industrial Workers of the World-the IWW, or the Wobblies, as
they were generally known -an organization in frequent verbal and physical
conflict with the AFL and its affiliates. The strike in Lawrence
started when the mill owners, responding to a state legislature action
reducing the work week
from 54 to 52, coldly and without prior notice cut the pay rates by
a 31/2 percent.
The move produced predictable
results: a strike of 50,000 textile workers; arrests; fiery statements by
the IWW leaders; police
and militia attacks on peaceful meetings; and broad public
support for the strikers. Some 400 children of strikers were
"adopted" by sympathizers. When women strikers and their children
were attacked at the railroad station by the police after authorities had
decided no more youngsters could leave town, an enraged public protest
finally forced the mill owners not only to restore the pay cuts but to
increase the workers' wages to more realistic levels.
Perhaps
the temper of the times in which working men and women sought to build
their unions was epitomized by the attitude of George Baehr, head of the
Philadelphia and Reading Railway Company, at the time of the 1902 coal
strike. In Mr. Baehr's publicly expressed view, "the rights and
interests of the labor man will be protected and cared for not by the labor
agitators but by the Christian men to whom God in His infinite wisdom has
given the control of the property interests of the country and upon the
successful management on which so much depends." Such an attitude did
not leave much room for flexibility in developing more equitable
labor-management relationships.
Yet
not all of the news was of strike and struggle. By 1904,
the AFL could claim a membership in its affiliated unions of nearly
1,700,000 members. Ten years later, at the eve of World War 1, it had
climbed to about 2 million.
There
were, furthermore, important legislative accomplishments. Congress, at the
urging of the AFL, created a separate U.S. Department of Labor with a
legislative mandate to protect and extend the rights of wage earners. A
Children's Bureau, with a major concern to protect the victims of job
exploitation, was created. The LaFollette Seaman's Act required urgently
needed improvements in the working conditions on ships of the U.S. merchant
marine. Of crucial importance, the Clayton Act of 1914 made explicit the
legal concept that "the labor of a human being is not a commodity or
article of commerce" and hence not subject to the kind of Sherman Act
provisions which had been the issue in the Danbury Hatters case. The act
gave a legal basis in the federal jurisdiction to strikes and boycotts and
peaceful picketing, and dramatically limited the use of injunctions in
labor disputes. Little wonder that AFL President Gompers hailed the Clayton
Act as a "magna carta," probably not foreseeing that future court
decisions and interpretations would seriously undermine the power of the
language of the law.
The
Adamson Act passed by Congress in 1916 concerning work hours on the
railroads was an important milestone in the decades-long effort to achieve
the 8 hour day, an objective of the Federation of Organized Trades and
Labor Unions in 1884 and of many subsequent strikes. The 10-hour day-an
improvement in its era-was introduced for federal government employees in
1840, but it took until the early years of the 20th century before the
8-hour work day became broadly accepted in the private sector, particularly
in the printing and building trades. The mass production industries and the
railroads continued their refusal to grant it.
The
Adamson Act brought the shorter work day to railroad employees. It came in
other industries through the impact of strikes, collective bargaining,
state laws and two federal statutes: the Public Contracts Act in 1936,
requiring contractors on government jobs to observe the 8-hour day, and the
Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 which provided a maximum work week for
employers in interstate commerce -first a maximum of 44 hours and, after
two years, 40 hours a week.
Women in the Unions
A
noteworthy event in the labor movement of the early 1900s was the creation
of the Women's Trade Union League, to help educate women workers about the
advantages of union membership, to support their demands for better working
conditions, and to acquaint the public with the serious exploitation of the
rising number of women workers, many of them in "home industries"
or industrial sweatshops.
It was
founded by Mary O'Sullivan, a bindery worker who became the first woman
organizer employed by the AFL; Jane Addams, the noted social worker and
founder of Chicago's Hull House; Mary Kehew, a Boston philanthropist, and
women who were officials in the unions of the garment and textile
industries.
For
much of its first century, the labor movement was-in huge majority composed
of men. Except in a few occupations clerical work and the garment, textile,
retail and hotel industries-the labor force was essentially male.
Since
World War 11, however, women have moved increasingly into new occupations
and larger numbers of women have become full-time wage earners. As more and
more women went to work, their union membership climbed, passing 7 million
in 1980.
In
1984, two women were serving on the AFL-CIO Executive Council as federation
vice presidents. Women also head a major AFL-CIO staff department and a
national affiliate, while others hold offices of increasing responsibility
in their unions.
Wartime Gains and Post-War Challenges
When
the United States entered World War I in April 1917, the AFL under
President Gompers' leadership worked in close cooperation with President
Wilson to ensure industrial peace and a steady flow of military equipment
and armaments for the American Expeditionary Force in Europe. As head of
the War Committee on Labor and member of the Council for National Defense,
Gompers and the unions be represented played an increasingly important role
in national affairs. A wartime disputes board helped avoid strikes and
maintain production; it had the support and cooperation of the labor
movement. With the vast expansion of production for military and civilian
needs, unions grew rapidly during the wartime years.
A
symbolic recognition of labor's new status was President Wilson's visit to
Buffalo in 1917 to address the annual AFL convention-the first time a
President had made such an appearance. In succeeding Administrations most
Presidents, Republican and Democratic alike, spoke to the labor
conventions.
One
effort in which Gompers worked hard and successfully was for the creation
of the International Labor Organization, an inter-governmental body
headquartered in Geneva, with government, labor and employer delegates and
advisers, to discuss intentional problems directly affecting workers and to
seek the elevation of work standards and the rights of workers in every
country. The ILO was established under the Treaty of Versailles that
followed World War 1. Although the U.S. Senate finally refused to ratify
the treaty, the American labor movement played an important role in ILO
affairs beginning in 1934, and more intensely after World War II when the
ILO became a specialized international agency of the United Nations.
During
the years following World War 1, however, the labor
movement suffered setbacks and difficulties.
While
AFL membership had reached almost 4 million by 1919, the postwar reaction
from employers and their allies was swift and predictable. Elbert Gary,
head of U.S. Steel (the company bestowed his name on the Indiana city),
refused to meet with striking workers. The AFL endorsed and supported a
strike of steel workers committed to such objectives as the end of the
12-hour day, the dismantlement of company-dominated "unions,"
collective bargaining and wage increases. Using massive propaganda which
sought to depict the strike as "unpatriotic," plus such
time-tested favorites as strikebreakers, spies, armed guards and
cooperative police departments, "Big Steel" finally wore down the
strikers, and they were forced to return to work early in 1920 under the
old conditions.
Both
the steel strike and an early post-war meat packing strike found
employers-not for the first time nor the last-importing blacks from
southern rural areas and Mexican peasants in order to serve as
strikebreakers, usually without advance knowledge of that fact until they
had to face the ordeal of being escorted through hostile picket lines.
These random events, however, did not prevent the labor movement from
playing a role of support for future civil rights activities and
legislation.
The
"Roaring Twenties," nostalgically depicted in some movies and
musical comedies as an era of unbounded prosperity and champagne-induced
gaiety, fell a good deal short of those marks for most American working
people. Throughout the decade, unemployment rose, quietly, almost
anonymously. It was a time of considerable hardship for many of the
unemployed, long before the days of unemployment insurance or supplementary
benefits.
The
postwar depression brought wages down sharply and caused major erosion
of union membership-a loss of about a million members in the years from
1920 to 1923. The difficulties were multiplied by the decision of the
National Association of Manufacturers and other anti-union "open
shop" groups to wipe out or seriously diminish the status of American,
can unions. The fear of "Bolsheviks," often hysterical, that was
nurtured by the Russian communist revolution was used gleefully by the
anti-union forces. As early as 1913, President John Kirby of the NAM had
decided the trade union movement was "an un-American, illegal and
infamous conspiracy." As the Senate Civil Liberties Committee, headed
by Sen. Robert LaFollette Jr., reported years later, such demands as
"union recognition, shorter hours, higher wages, regulation of child
labor and the hours and wages of women and children in industry" came
to be seen-under the influence of the NAM-sponsored 'American Plan' -as
aspects of the alleged communist revolution from which the anti-labor
employers wanted to save the nation. Strikebreaking, blacklisting and vigilanteeism
became, for a time, acceptable aspects of this new and spurious brand of
patriotism.
The
"yellow dog contract," which workers had to sign in order to get
a job, bound them never to join a union; at the same time, the corporations
promoted employee representation plans or company unions-pale and generally
useless imitations of the real thing.
In 1
924, faced with continual attacks and decisions by the Republican and
Democratic parties to present the voters with the very limited choice
between President Coolidge, a laissez faire conservative, and John W.
Davis, a corporation lawyer, the AFL voted to support "neither of the
above" but to make an endorsement for the first time in a presidential
election. Senator LaFollette of Wisconsin, an old line friend of labor and the
farmers, ran on the Progress Party ticket with strong AFL backing. He drew
an impressive 1 7 percent of the total vote.
That
same year, Samuel Gompers died, leaving a heritage of admiration
and respect and a philosophy of trade unionism that still today underlies
much of labor's thinking. His successor was William Green, who guided the
destinies of the Federation until his death in 1952. Green, born in
Coshocton, Ohio, in 1873, left school to become a coal miner, joined the
union, and served as Mine Workers secretary-treasurer for a dozen years
before being elected AFL president. An earnest and dedicated trade
unionist, Green presided over the AFL with calm dignity during a difficult
period-the depression years and the years of the division of the labor
movement.
The
decade of the 1920s drifted on a downhill course for the labor movement.
Virulent anti-unionism, the steady, creeping ascent of unemployment, and
the complacent political climate engendered by the Hoover Administration had
a decidedly negative effect on the fortunes of the AFL, its unions and
America's working men and women in every part of the country, in every
sector of the economy.
From Murdered Miners to Shiny Dimes
One
chapter of the history of early-century industrial conflicts involved John
D. Rockefeller, the first tycoon of the age of energy and the creator of
the Standard Oil complex of corporations.
Rockefeller
controlled the Colorado Fuel & Iron Corporation, whose coal miners went
on strike in 1914. With their families, they were promptly evicted from
company-owned homes in Ludlow, Colo.
They
moved into a cluster of tents, around which National Guard soldiers took
positions and at night occasionally fired their rifles into the colony. To
protect the children, the miners dug a cave under the largest tent. But on
Easter night 1914, company-hired gunmen and some of the National Guard
poured oil over the strikers' tents and set them on fire.
As the
frantic miners and their families ran for safety in the night, they were
machine-gunned. Some escaped, some were wounded and 13 children and a
pregnant woman in the recently dug cave all died-some with gun wounds, some
from suffocation.
The
nationwide protest against the killings on Rockefeller property were
immediate and long sustained. Eventually, it led Rockefeller, the nation's
first billionaire, to hire Ivy Lee, an early public relations man, to
repair John D.'s sullied reputation.
Even as
an old man, Rockefeller continued to hand out shiny new dimes to little children
in the effort to erase the Ludlow image-but among the miners and workers in
many other unions, the memory of Ludlow persists like an endless bad
(]team.
Depression, War and A Labor Schism Healed
December
1931-the 50th anniversary of the creation of the modern labor
movement-found America and much of the world sliding down the much steeper
slope of a cataclysmic economic depression. Business enterprises failed by
the thousands, production plummeted, unemployment went through the roof. By
1932, when Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected President, the American
economy was in chaos-and the American trade union movement was but a ghost
of its former strength and numbers.
Roosevelt,
taking the leadership of the all but paralyzed nation on March 4, 1933,
undertook a number of programs designed to recharge the economy, feed the
unemployed and restore confidence. At his urging, Congress passed the
National Recovery Administration; the NRA's Section 7a specifically placed
on the statute books the right of unions to exist and to negotiate with
employers. Although it had no real enforcement powers, Section 7a was seen
by millions of workers as a green light-if not a government invitation-to
join a union.
Many
AFL unions took quick advantage of the new atmosphere and soon began to
register spectacular gains in membership. Some issued leaflets suggesting
that "President Roosevelt wants you to join the union."
The
Supreme Court soon declared NRA unconstitutional, and Section 7a was no
more. Under the leadership of Senator Robert F. Wagner of New York,
Congress in 1936 enacted the National Labor Relations Act-known as the
Wagner Act. It went beyond "7a" to establish a legal basis for
unions; set collective bargaining as a matter of national policy required
by the law; provided for secret ballot elections for the choosing of
unions; and protected union members from employer intimidation and
coercion. That law, as amended in 1947 by the Taft-Hartley Act and in 1959
by the Landrum Griffin Act, is still in force.
The
surge in union membership in the early years of the New Deal, and the
potential for organizing the important non-union mass production industries
like steel, automobile, rubber, textile and others, led directly to the most
serious schism in the history of the modern labor movement. Heads of a
number of the industrial unions in the AFL, led by John L. Lewis of the
Mine Workers, called upon the AFL to finance and support big organizing
campaigns in the nonunion industries on a basis that all the workers in
each industry would belong to one industrial, or ,'vertical," union.
Most of the leaders of the AFL unions presided over craft, or
"horizontal" unions, and they maintained that employees of the
same skills or crafts in the unorganized industries should sooner or later
belong to their organizations.
In
November 1935, Lewis announced the creation of the CIO-the
Committee for Industrial Organization-composed of about a dozen leaders of
AFL unions, to carry on the effort for industrial unionism. Lewis, born in
Iowa in 1880 of Welsh immigrant parents, went to work in the coal mines and
became president of the Mine Workers in 1920. An orator of remarkable
virtuosity, Lewis voiced increasingly bitter attacks on his colleagues on
the AFL Executive Council; his words helped speed the break. In 1936, the
various CIO unions were expelled from the Federation-because, said Lewis,
they favored industrial unionism; because, said AFL President Green, they
had flouted procedures and rules of the AFL. In 1938 the CIO held its first
constitutional convention and became the Congress of Industrial
Organizations.
In
any event, the
CIO began a remarkably successful series of organizing campaigns-and in
rapid succession, over the next few years, brought industrial unionism to
large sectors of basic American industry. After U.S. Steel signed with the
CIO Steel Workers in the spring of 1937, major organizing efforts brought,
during the next few years, first signed agreements most frequently after strike
action-with major corporations in the steel, auto, rubber, glass, maritime,
meat packing and other mass production industries. At the same time the
unions remaining in the AFL registered even more substantial gains in
membership.
The
growth in union strength of both the AFL and CIO throughout the period,
coupled with Roosevelt's domestic program, led to passage of a number of
national social programs long advocated by the labor movement: among them,
the national social security program, unemployment compensation, workers'
compensation, and a federal minimum wage-hour law (the original minimum
hourly pay set by the 1938 statute was 25 cents an hour).
During
World War 11, the AFL and CIO, while preserving areas of disagreement,
began to find more substantial bases for working together on problems
affecting all workers. Philip Murray, who succeeded Lewis as president of
the CIO, and AFL President Green served jointly and cooperatively on a
number of government commissions involved in the war effort. MLirrav, born
in Scotland in 1886, came as a boy to the corn fields of western
Pennsylvania, and through his negotiating talents and oratorical ability
rose through the Mine Workers ranks to vice president. Murray headed the
CIO's Steel Workers Organizing Committee in 1936, and in 1942 he was
elected president of the new United Steelworkers, a position he retained
while serving as head of the CIO.
In
1952, Murray died, and was succeeded by Walter P. Reuther of the United
Automobile Workers. Reuther, born in 1907 as one of four sons of a
socialist brewery worker in Wheeling, W.Va., moved to Detroit during the
depression and became a skilled worker in the auto industry. He was one of
the prime organizers of the Auto Workers and after World War 11 won a
closely contested battle for the UAW presidency, a post he held until his
death in an airplane crash in 1970. Just a few weeks after Murray's death,
William Green died, and was succeeded by George Meany, the AFL
secretary-treasurer. Many of the old antagonisms had died out, many of the
old issues had been resolved, and the stage was set for merger of the two
labor groups. They were reunited into the AFL-CIO at a convention in New
York opening on Dec. 5, 1955.
George
Meany was unanimously elected president of the merged labor federation, and
a new chapter opened for the American labor movement. Meany, born in the
Bronx, N.Y., in 1894, followed his father's footsteps as a plumber, became
active in his local union, and was elected president of the New York State
Federation of Labor in 1934. On the basis of a brilliant record of helping
win enactment of state labor and social legislation, he was elected AFL
secretary-treasurer, to fill a vacancy, in 1939.
The AFL-CIO Years
George
Meany's commitment to "the traditional objectives of the labor
movement" was expanded in his role as AFL-CIO president, to include
labor's "full contribution to the welfare of our neighbors, to the
communities in which we live, and to the nation as a whole." In the 25
years after the merger, a number of important issues and trends emerged;
they embrace both the tradition or improving working conditions and a new
emphasis on issues involved in local, state, national and international
affairs.
While
labor's interest in politics was by no means new, the development of
COPE-the AFL-CIO's Committee on Political Education-brought to labor a more
efficient and practical means of achieving these three goals: ( I ) To make
workers aware of the records and promises of the candidates running for
public office. (2) To encourage workers to register and to vote. (3) To
endorse candidates at local, state and national levels.
The
AFL-CIO merger and its accompanying agreements brought about the virtual
elimination of jurisdictional disputes between unions that had plagued the
labor movement and alienated public sympathy in earlier years. The unions
placed a new priority on organizing workers in areas, industries and plants
where no effective system of labor representation yet existed. In many
cases, it meant crossing the barriers of old thinking and tired methods to
reach the employees of companies which for years had resisted unions.
A
major phenomenon of this period was the rapid growth of unions of
government employees-federal, state and local. For many decades, postal
employees, teachers, the fire fighters, and building and metal trade's
workers in some federal installations represented about the only
substantially unionized part of public sector employment. With increasing
economic pressures, more public employees turned to unions trend spurred on
by such developments as an Executive Order by President Kennedy in 1962
underscoring the right of federal employees to join unions and negotiate on
many issues, and by various statutes in the states and cities providing for
various forms of collective bargaining with their personnel.
Throughout
the years after World War 11, women entered the workforce in ever
increasing numbers, and especially significant was their entry into "nontraditional"
occupations. A long sought objective, equal pay for equal work-was passed
by Congress in 1963, prohibiting economic discrimination on the basis of
sex.
Five
years later, the Age Discrimination Act was passed to assist persons in the
older brackets of the workforce.
The
Civil Rights Act of 1964, strongly supported by the AFL-CIO, was a
significant forward step toward equal rights for blacks and other
minorities, at the workplace and in the community. President Johnson, in
signing the act into law, acknowledged that it could not have happened
without the affirmative support of the AFL-CIO.
The
Civil Rights Act could trace its legislative history back to the days of
World War 11, when A. Philip Randolph, president of the AFL Sleeping Car
Porters, persuaded President Roosevelt to issue an Executive Order
establishing a Fair Employment
Practices
Commission. Randolph, a brilliant union officer and civil rights champion,
managed to convince FDR that governmental action to stop discrimination in
hiring and promotion was essential to the wartime production effort.
The
words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. illustrate the common bonds among
labor, blacks, Hispanics and other minority groups: "Our needs are
identical with labor's needs-decent wages, fair working conditions, livable
housing, old age security, health and welfare measures, conditions in which
families can grow, have education for their children and respect in the
community."
Throughout
these years, the AFL-CIO was forced to resist various efforts to limit the
rights of unions. The so-called "right-to-work" bills, which in
fact were aimed at outlawing contract language providing union security,
arose in many states. In Congress there were continued efforts to expand
the Hobbs Act to make every picket-line scuffle or act of violence a
federal case, even though they are currently covered by state and local
laws.
The
increasing interest in safety on the job, heightened by the introduction of
new and potentially dangerous materials used in a wide variety of
industries, gave rise to labor's intensive support for a federal
Occupational Safety and Health Act, which became law in 1970. Specifically,
the act authorized the Secretary of Labor to establish health and safety
standards, to enforce them, and to listen to employees' legitimate
complaints about conditions at the workplace.
Full
employment was and continues to be a first rank concern of the
AFL-CIO, with its vivid recollection of past unemployment. The unions have
kept insisting that whoever is able and willing to work should not be
denied this opportunity. The full employment concept was endorsed by labor
in its successful drive for passage of the Employment Act of 1946, which
had the support of President Truman. The Humphrey-Hawkins Act of 1978
re-expressed the need to direct full attention to the problem of
unemployment in the United States.
Recognition
that workers have interests as consumers as well as producers has been
apparent in the labor movement for many decades. Unions have played an
active role in the formation of consumer cooperatives, and at both national
and local levels have worked with other citizen groups for the enactment of
various forms of consumer protection legislation. At the same time unions
have voiced concern that apparent "bargains" of goods imported
from low-wage countries may in fact be of inferior quality or workmanship
and thus, in the long run, more expensive for the consumer. In recent
years, there has been a vast increase in imported manufactured goods-often
produced by corporations directly or indirectly related to American
conglomerate companies-and the AFL-CIO has called for a revitalization of
American manufacturing industries.
The
strengthening of free unions throughout the world is another ongoing
objective of the AFL-CIO. Special agencies functioning within the framework
of the AFL-CIO carry out many of labor's efforts to move toward this goal,
which was constantly expressed by George Meany: to build strong, free,
noncommunist unions in the democratic societies of the free world and to
resist all forms of tyranny and political repression. In fact, resistance
to domination of workers and their organizations by governments or by
political parties, or the control of unions by right-wing or left-wing
extremist groups, has been a constant theme of American labor during the
entire post-war period.
As the
federal government broadened its range of social and economic programs from
the 1930s onward, trade
Union
interests also expanded. To meet its responsibilities to its members and as
"the people's lobby," the AFL-CIO maintains a staff of
experienced professionals in the fields of law, education, legislation,
research, social and community services, civil rights and allied
disciplines.
In
addition groups of unions have developed autonomous departments
of the AFL-CIO to meet specialized needs. The first of these, the Building
and Construction Trades, was set up back in 1916. The Industrial Union
Department was created in the AFL-CIO merger agreement. Other departments
include the Union Label & Service Trades, Maritime Trades, Metal
Trades, Food & Beverage, Professional Employees and Public Employees.
The
George Meany Center for Labor Studies, established in 1969, plays an
increasingly important role in training labor union staff and officials
through a range of courses from techniques of collective bargaining to
labor law institutes.
Meany
retired at the AFL-CIO convention in 1979, at the age of 85; he nominated
Lane Kirkland as his successor, and Thomas R. Donahue was elected
secretary-treasurer. Kirkland, born in South Carolina in 1922, had been a
merchant marine officer during World War II, and became a member of the
Master, Mates & Pilots Union. He joined the staff of the AFL in the
post-war years; filled a number of increasingly responsible positions,
including that of executive assistant to Meany; and was elected
secretary-treasurer of the Federation in 1969. Donahue, born in New York in
1928, served in many capacities for the Service Employees Union, both with
its Local 32B in New York and as vice president of the international union.
He was named in 1973 as executive assistant to Meany.
Under
their leadership, the base of organized labor's effectiveness has remained
firmly cemented in the unity and enthusiasm of its members. Grassroots
strength and commitment were highlighted by an unprecedented 'Solidarity
Day" demonstration that drew more than 400,000 union members to
Washington, D.C., in 1981.
The
AFL-CIO also is confronting the challenges posed by revolutionary changes
in the nature of work and the composition of the workforce. In 1985 the
federation issued a landmark report, "The Changing Situation of
Workers and Their Unions," with specific recommendations aimed at
bringing about a "resurgence" of the labor movement.
Among
the early products of these recommendations is an office of Comprehensive
Organizing Strategies and Tactics to help affiliates develop innovative
approaches to organizing. Also being explored are new concepts of benefits
and services to members beyond those traditionally achieved through
collective bargaining, such as a low-interest-rate credit card and
supplementary health and life insurance.
Thus,
the AFL-CIO continues to demonstrate the resiliency and the ability to
adapt to change that have marked the American labor movement for more than
100 years.
On the Farm: Workers Seek Equality
The
generally unenviable plight of agricultural workers has for many decades
been a thorn in the American social conscience. Large numbers of migrant farm
workers-most of them blacks or Hispanics from the South and the Southwest,
as well as workers who have entered the country either on temporary work
passes or illegally from the Caribbean and Mexico-have been excluded from
the legal protections afforded to most workers in industry and commerce.
Suffering
from low pay, abominable temporary housing, lack of access to decent
schools for their children, and often deprived of adequate medical care or
safety protection measures, the migrant farm workers have been too often
the "forgotten people" of the American economy.
In
recent years, the Farm Workers union-in the face of great difficulties-has
been able to organize some of them, principally in California, and bring
them the benefits of collective bargaining.
Public
response, in the form of consumer boycotts of grapes and lettuce at various
times, has helped their cause. The beginnings of legislation, both federal
and state, and attention to their plight in the press and on television,
have brought some relief to the farm workers. But much remains to be done.
Adapted from March 1981, AFL-CIO American Federationist
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Election Day
June 3, 2008
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Saturday 9:00 am
Sunday 11:00 am
gloria@atwork.org
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