Where would you go to find the dustiest place in your home—the lint filter in the dryer, an unused bookshelf, the blades of a ceiling fan, or behind your television? How much dust would you expect to find there?
Now imagine that you work in a factory with dust floating in the air and covering every surface. How might working under such harsh conditions affect your health or your performance on the job? If you complained to the factory owner, what consequences might you face?
Today, workers in dusty factories wear masks for protection. In noisy work areas, people wear ear protection. Safety glasses and hard hats are required in many factories. Many laws protect the health and safety of people in the workplace.
In this lesson, you will explore a time when these protections were not in place and learn about the steps workers took to secure those protections. To demonstrate your understanding of the concepts, you will complete a quiz at the end of the lesson. Labor Unions
Why Did Workers Need Labor Unions?
At the end of the Civil War, the United States entered a period of enormous change. American industry expanded. Factories cropped up in urban areas with dense populations. Companies needed a continuous supply of workers. They did not have to look far.
Factory work depended on machines, not skilled workers. Many people were willing to work for low pay under harsh conditions. Some workers were soldiers returning from the battlefields of the war. Others were Americans who moved from rural farming communities to cities. Many were immigrants who came to the United States in waves during the last part of the 19th century.
Life in the Factory Workplace
The rise of the factory system greatly altered the workplace for skilled workers. Once, craftsmen had been involved in every phase of production. Mass production in factories changed that because machines created pieces that had previously been handmade. Skilled craftsmen now had to sell their labor to factory owners. Women and children, some as young as five years old, held full-time jobs. And full-time meant 12 hours a day, six days a week.
Often, factory owners cared more about profits than the wellbeing of their workers. Long hours and dangerous working conditions were common. Owners did not have to worry about federal, state, and local laws that protected workers. There were no such laws. And individual workers who objected to hours, pay, or conditions were fired. Workers injured on the job were replaced.
There was no system to help those who were suddenly jobless. Eventually, workers found that they needed to speak up as a group rather than as individuals. So some workers organized labor unions. Doing so, they believed, would give them enough power to demand better hours, pay, and working conditions. Show Text Version
Success of Unions
What Successes Did Labor Unions Have?
Labor unions were not a new idea. Some unions of skilled craftsmen, such as shoemakers, formed in the early 1800s. Women also formed labor unions. In 1845, the Female Labor Reform Association was formed in Lowell, Massachusetts. The women in the union were mill workers. They fought to have their workday decreased from 13 hours to 10 hours.
Unions formed before the Civil War were small compared to those after 1865. In 1866, the National Labor Union became the first organization of smaller labor unions. In 1868, this group succeeded in getting an eight-hour workday for government workers. However, the organization refused to allow African American or Chinese workers and did little to help women workers.
Eugene V. Debs was a labor organizer who founded the American Railway Union. A socialist, his participation in the Pullman Strike led to his arrest.
Library of Congress [LC-USZ62-36583]
In 1869, Uriah Stephens and a group of tailors organized the Noble Order of the Knights of Labor. The organization accepted skilled and unskilled workers, women, and people of any race. The Knights fought for an eight-hour workday for all. They called for equal pay for women who did the same work as men. What began as a group of 10,000 workers grew to more than one million members by the 1880s. The founding of the Knights of Labor marked the beginning of union activism in the era. Unions fell into two categories. Craft unionism included skilled workers from a single or several trades. The American Federation of Labor (AFL) was one such group. Formed in 1881, under the leadership of Samuel Gompers, the AFL focused on improving working conditions for the working class. They used collective bargaining to successfully gain higher wages and shorter workdays.
The other approach to union organization included both skilled and unskilled laborers in one industry. The American Railway Union, led by Eugene V. Debs, organized unskilled, semi-skilled, and highly skilled railway workers.
The rise of unions continued throughout the 1870s. It was a tumultuous time that saw relationships between employers and workers worsen. Strikes and occasional violence occurred in many industries. Courts and politicians often sided with employers in both large and small businesses. However, by the early 1880s, the power of laborers working together for improved conditions could not be denied.
Fighting the Unions
Who Fought the Unions?
An economic depression in 1873 affected business owners, as well as workers. Owners of
businesses both large and small were reluctant to invest money in workers or workplaces. As a result, wages remained low and working conditions remained dangerous. Strikes, some ending in violence, broke out around the country.
In 1877, in the coal-mining region of Pennsylvania, a miners' association of Irish Catholics
known as the Molly Maguires burned mining company buildings and murdered bosses and supervisors to assert their power. Company owners eventually used private detectives to find those among the members who had committed crimes. The association was disbanded when 10 of the "Mollies" were hanged.
As unions grew in strength and number, politicians and businessmen fought against them. Soon after the execution of the "Mollies," workers on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad went on strike when their wages were cut. Railroad owners complained that the Great Strike of 1877 was interfering with interstate commerce. In response, President Rutherford B. Hayes used federal troops to stop the strike. Soldiers went from town to town along the rail line and forced workers at each stop to resume work. Haymarket Riot
While violence was not unusual during strikes, the Haymarket Riot that occurred in Chicago, Illinois, in 1886, alarmed most Americans. In May of that year, a large crowd gathered in Haymarket Square in Chicago to protest police brutality. Several workers had been injured and one killed the previous day on the strike line at the McCormick Harvester plant.
When the police arrived to break up the crowd at Haymarket Square, someone threw a bomb into the police line. The police fired indiscriminately on the workers. Seven police officers and several strikers were killed in the minutes that followed. Three speakers at the demonstration and five others were charged with creating a riot. After the Haymarket Riot, the union movement lost some public support.
Homestead Strike
Violence returned to Pennsylvania in 1892 with the Homestead Strike. Workers went on strike at the Carnegie Steel Company's Homestead plant near Pittsburgh. Workers protested the decision by company president, Henry Clay Frick, to cut wages. In response, Frick brought in strikebreakers—men to take the place of workers who had walked out. In addition, Frick used armed guards from the Pinkerton Detective Agency to protect the strikebreakers. A gun battle broke out between the strikers and the guards, killing seven guards and nine strikers. The strike continued for months after the battle. But the violence cost the union public support. Eventually strikers gave in to the company. It would be decades before the steelworkers went on strike again.
Other strikes, such as the Pullman Strike, ended violently, as well. When the Pullman Company cut workers' wages without cutting the cost of employee housing, the American Railway Union boycotted Pullman cars. Pullman hired strikebreakers, and the strike turned violent. President Grover Cleveland sent in federal troops to end the strike. As a result, strike leader Eugene V. Debs was jailed, most of the strikers were fired, and many others were blacklisted so that other companies would never hire them.
Show Text Version
Government and Economics
How Does Government Influence Economy?
During the Second Industrial Revolution, many workers became disillusioned with capitalism. That political system had created a Free Market, or market economy, where the prices of goods and services, as well as wages, were the result of natural economic forces—according to believers. For owners of large and small businesses, this system worked to their benefit. However, workers had no way to assert their rights. The negative aspects of the free market were the cause of union organizing. Many workers felt that the economic system was unfair.
During this era, some workers supported different forms of government. Some embraced anarchy. Anarchists opposed capitalism, but the total absence of government was too extreme for many people. Debs and others turned to socialism for the solution to the problems faced by workers. These people believed that economic equality would be realized through a planned economy. They supported a system in which the government determined production and distribution of goods.
Some of the more radical worker groups supported communism. But this extreme form of socialism was more than most labor leaders wanted. They worked within the system to create a mixed economy, rooted in free-market ideas, but still regulated by the government.
However, the attraction of other forms of government remained strong. In 1905, socialists formed the Industrial Workers of the World for miners, lumber workers, cannery workers, and dockworkers. They were nicknamed the Wobblies. The Wobblies provided a voice for unskilled workers.
As the 19th century ended, unions continued to gain members. Government officials, as well as business owners, fought them. Business owners frequently refused to recognize unions. Workers in many factories were prohibited from attending union meetings. In some cases, workers were fired for joining a union. Many workers were forced to sign so-called yellow-dog contracts, in which they promised they would not join the union.
At that time, the biggest obstacle to unions was the state and federal courts. When lawmakers passed laws declaring yellow-dog contracts illegal, the Supreme Court overturned it. When a hatmakers' union went on strike in Connecticut, the state Supreme Court said strikers were interfering with the company's business. The court allowed the owners to sue the union. Despite court decisions, union membership steadily increased. At the end of the 19th century, unions had successfully demonstrated their ability to organize workers. They had won victories for higher wages and shorter workdays.
However, the issue of working conditions remained controversial. This issue became more difficult for the public to ignore as workplace disasters occurred. In 1907, more than 300 miners died in a coal mine collapse. In 1911, a fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist factory in New York City highlighted the dangerous conditions in factories. The fire, fueled by the oil in the machines and many stacks of cloth, raced through the top floors of a building that employed more than 500 young women in sweatshop conditions. To prevent theft by the employees, all doors but one had been locked. There was no sprinkler system in the building. There was only a single fire escape. Terrified workers jumped from the building to their deaths when they realized fire department ladders couldn't reach them in the top stories of the building. The fire killed 146 workers, most of them young Jewish and Italian female immigrants.
As a result of the fire, the state of New York began to study safety in the workplace. However, when the owners of the company went to trial for the deaths, they were found not guilty. Soon after that disaster, the federal government took steps to protect workers. In 1913, the United States Department of Labor was established.
(Routledge Critical Development Studies) James Petras and Henry Veltmeyer (Eds.) - The Class Struggle in Latin America - Making History Today-Routledge (2017)
(Routledge Critical Development Studies) James Petras and Henry Veltmeyer (Eds.) - The Class Struggle in Latin America - Making History Today-Routledge (2017)
