Reference
- AMERICAN FEDERATION OF LABORThe American Federation of Labor (afl) was organized as an association of trade unions in 1886, growing out of an earlier Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions founded in 1881. The afl's president, Samuel Gompers (who served nearly every year until 1924), was convinced that unions open to workers of all types of skills within a given industry—called industrial unions—were too diffuse and undisciplined to withstand the repressive tactics that both government and management had used to break American unions in the past. The answer, he believed, was craft unions, each limited to the skilled workers in a single trade. According to Gompers's “pure and simple unionism,” labor should not waste its energies fighting capitalism; its sole task was to hammer out the best arrangement it could under the existing system, using strikes, boycotts, and negotiations to win better work conditions, higher wages, and union recognition.
Applying this philosophy to politics, the afl refused to ally itself with the Socialist party or with independent labor parties. Instead, Gompers argued that labor should “reward its friends and punish its enemies” in both major parties. After 1908, the organization's tie to the Democratic party grew increasingly strong, but the afl continued to concentrate on political protection for unions, rather than seeking social change through legislative action.
By 1904, the afl claimed 1.7 million members. Although the union represented only the more privileged members of the country's work force, it gained increasing influence as the recognized voice of American labor. Its membership declined between 1904 and 1914 in the face of a concerted open-shop drive by management but rose again during World War I, when unions were given considerable government protection. By 1920 the afl had nearly 4 million members. After the war, however, business resumed its union-busting activities, and the afl lost ground throughout the 1920s.
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Perspectives
The Edge of Anarchy
The Edge of Anarchy by Jack Kelly offers a vivid account of the greatest uprising of working people in American history. At the pinnacle of the Gilded Age, a boycott of Pullman sleeping cars by hundreds of thousands of railroad employees brought commerce to a standstill across much of the country. Famine threatened, riots broke out along the rail lines. Soon the U.S. Army was on the march and gunfire rang from the streets of major cities. This epochal tale offers fascinating portraits of two iconic characters of the age. George Pullman, who amassed a fortune by making train travel a pleasure, thought the model town that he built for his workers would erase urban squalor. Eugene Debs, founder of the nation's first industrial union, was determined to wrench power away from the reigning plutocrats. The clash between the two men's conflicting ideals pushed the country to what the U.S. Attorney General called "the ragged edge of anarchy." Many of the themes of The Edge of Anarchy could be taken from today's headlines--upheaval in America's industrial heartland, wage stagnation, breakneck technological change, and festering conflict over race, immigration, and inequality. With the country now in a New Gilded Age, this look back at the violent conflict of an earlier era offers illuminating perspectives along with a breathtaking story of a nation on the edge.
Artisans into Workers
In the only modern study synthesizing nineteenth-century American labor history, Bruce Laurie examines the character of working-class factionalism, plebian expectations of government, and relations between the organized few and the unorganized many. Laurie also examines the republican tradition and the movements that drew on it, from the General Trades Unions in the age of Jackson to the Knights of Labor later in the century.
Law, Labor, and England's Great Transformation
With England's Great Transformation, Marc W. Steinberg throws a wrench into our understanding of the English Industrial Revolution, largely revising the thesis at heart of Karl Polanyi's landmark The Great Transformation. The conventional wisdom has been that in the nineteenth century, England quickly moved toward a modern labor market where workers were free to shift from employer to employer in response to market signals. Expanding on recent historical research, Steinberg finds to the contrary that labor contracts, centered on insidious master-servant laws, allowed employers and legal institutions to work in tandem to keep employees in line. Building his argument on three case studies--the Hanley pottery industry, Hull fisheries, and Redditch needlemakers--Steinberg employs both local and national analyses to emphasize the ways in which these master-servant laws allowed employers to use the criminal prosecutions of workers to maintain control of their labor force. Steinberg provides a fresh perspective on the dynamics of labor control and class power, integrating the complex pathways of Marxism, historical institutionalism, and feminism, and giving readers a subtle yet revelatory new understanding of workplace control and power during England's Industrial Revolution.
Streets, Railroads, and the Great Strike of 1877
For one week in late July of 1877, America shook with anger and fear as a variety of urban residents, mostly working class, attacked railroad property in dozens of towns and cities. The Great Strike of 1877 was one of the largest and most violent urban uprisings in American history. Whereas most historians treat the event solely as a massive labor strike that targeted the railroads, David O. Stowell examines America's predicament more broadly to uncover the roots of this rebellion. He studies the urban origins of the Strike in three upstate New York cities--Buffalo, Albany, and Syracuse. He finds that locomotives rumbled through crowded urban spaces, sending panicked horses and their wagons careening through streets. Hundreds of people were killed and injured with appalling regularity. The trains also disrupted street traffic and obstructed certain forms of commerce. For these reasons, Stowell argues, The Great Strike was not simply an uprising fueled by disgruntled workers. Rather, it was a grave reflection of one of the most direct and damaging ways many people experienced the Industrial Revolution. "Through meticulously crafted case studies . . . the author advances the thesis that the strike had urban roots, that in substantial part it represented a community uprising. . . .A particular strength of the book is Stowell's description of the horrendous accidents, the toll in human life, and the continual disruption of craft, business, and ordinary movement engendered by building railroads into the heart of cities."--Charles N. Glaab, American Historical Review
Pure and Simple Politics
This study explores the political evolution of the U.S. labor movement, focusing on its dominant organization, the American Federation of Labor, during a key period (1881 to 1917) of transformation in U.S. political history. Julie Greene documents the AFL's entrance into electoral politics and the emergence of the important alliance between the AFL and the Democratic party, explaining the causes and impact of these developments.
Forging America
Stacks of stone preside over many bucolic and wooded landscapes in the mid-Atlantic states. Initially constructed more than two hundred years ago, they housed blast furnaces that converted rock and wood into the iron that enabled the United States to secure its national independence. By the eve of the Revolutionary War, furnaces and forges in the American colonies turned out one-seventh of the world's iron.Forging America illuminates the fate of labor in an era when industry, manhood, and independence began to take on new and highly charged meanings. John Bezís-Selfa argues that the iron industry, with its early concentrations of capital and labor, reveals the close links between industrial and political revolution. Through means ranging from religious exhortation to force, ironmasters encouraged or compelled workers--free, indentured, and enslaved--to adopt new work styles and standards of personal industry. Eighteenth-century revolutionary rhetoric hastened the demise of indentured servitude, however, and national independence reinforced the legal status of slavery and increasingly defined manual labor as "dependent" and racially coded. Bezís-Selfa highlights the importance of slave labor to early American industrial development. Research in documents from the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries led Bezís-Selfa to accounts of the labor of African-Americans, indentured servants, new immigrants, and others. Their stories inform his highly readable narrative of more than two hundred years of American history.
Classical Liberalism and the Industrial Working Class
Thomas Hodgskin (1787-1869) is today a largely unknown figure, sometimes considered to be a forerunner of Karl Marx. Yet a closer look at Hodgskin's works reveals that he was actually a committed advocate of laissez-faire economics and enthusiastic about labor-saving machinery and the Industrial Revolution, with a genuine interest in the well-being of the working classes. This book places him in the tradition of classical liberalism, where he belongs--as a disciple of Adam Smith, but even less tolerant of government power than Smith was. The Economic Thought of Thomas Hodgskin will be of interest to advanced students and scholars in the history of economic thought, economic history and the history of political thought.
Labor and Capital
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The great railroad strike of 1877 showed that strikes could succeed if they enjoyed community support but would fail if business owners used their political influence and court injunctions against the unions. Bitter union-management confrontations punctuated the 1890s. Railroad leader Eugene Debs and others created the American Socialist Party in 1900.
The 1911 Triangle Fire and Reform
- Kanopy This link opens in a new windowLearn about reformers' efforts to address the miserable living and working conditions of industrial workers, and new labor laws that followed the galvanizing events of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire and the Bread and Roses Strike. Also study the movements to eradicate child labor and to federally regulate food and medicines.
Unions, Strikes, and the Haymarket Affair
- Kanopy This link opens in a new windowThe Haymarket Affair in Chicago perfectly illustrates the social tensions industrialization generated-and which have yet to be solved. First, learn what we mean by class" and "class consciousness." Then, explore the unique goals of trade unions. Lastly, examine the growing politicization of labor, including the use of labor strikes and the philosophies of Marx and Engels."
The 1892 Homestead Strike
- Kanopy This link opens in a new windowTravel into the world of American workers, and view the poignant social problems that accompanied industrialization. Learn how technological changes in industry affected living conditions for workers, and follow the rise of labor movements, violent strikes, and intense conflict between labor unions and management.
Online Articles
- Circulating Race and Empire: Transnational Labor Activism and the Politics of Anti-Asian Agitation in the Anglo-American Pacific World, 1880–1910the Pacific Northwest became one of the sites in a global pattern of anti-Asian racism and riotous working-class politics, local dynamics shaped nationally specific results. According to the historical geographer Cole Harris, the polyglot assemblage of Euro-Americans, Canadians, and Anglos, united by a shared sense of dislocation and uncertainty regarding their new environment, responded to die dizzying heterogeneity and flux by "reconceptualizing themselves; fixing on their whiteness, intensifying their racism," and "abstracting their ethnicity.
- The Making of Public Labour Intermediation: Job Search, Job Placement, and the State in Europe, 1880–1940Since the late nineteenth century, job seeking has become increasingly linked to organizations and facilities that offer information on vacancies, offer placement services, or undertake recruiting. The present article focuses on how job placement became a concern for the emerging European welfare states, and how state-run systems of labour intermediation were established between 1880 and 1940. Even more important was the state's regulation of existing job placement practices, which resulted in a slow process of specialization, codification, and homogenization – in short, a slow process of normalization of practices at national levels. State labour exchanges thereby became the dominant reference point for seeking and finding work.
- More Menial than Housemaids? Racialized and Gendered Labour in the Fruit and Vegetable Industry of Canada's Niagara Region, 1880–1945During the period of the expansion and consolidation of the fruit and vegetable industry between about 1880 and 1945, seasonal work in the fields, orchards, packing houses and canneries of the Niagara Peninsula was performed by two main groups of marginalized workers: immigrant women and adolescents of eastern and southern European origin, and indigenous families. Contemporaries believed that these groups were inherently suited for the long hours, physical demands and low wages that characterized such work that those with greater options avoided. Such racial classification restricted their access to year-round, better-paid and cleaner work. That it was largely performed by minority groups, in turn, derogated such seasonal labour.
Labor Wars of the Northwest
- Kanopy This link opens in a new windowLABOR WARS OF THE NORTHWEST chronicles the cauldron of discontent, radicalism and violence that permeated the region in the early decades of the twentieth century. Following the arrival of the railroads in the 1880s, tens of thousands of workers migrated to the Northwest for jobs in logging, mining and fishing. But instead of steady work, they found poverty-level wages, crushing hours and dreadful conditions. By examining this conflict in the context of a decades-long struggle, LABOR WARS OF THE NORTHWEST shines new light on tragedies like the Everett Massacre (1916), the Seattle General Strike (1919) and the Centralia Massacre (1919).
The Masses and the Millionaires
- Kanopy This link opens in a new windowFrom the stark portrayals of the workers' living and working conditions to their final dramatic stand against overwhelming odds at Andrew Carnegie's Homestead plant, the film relates a chapter in the history of organized labor.