This brief history of more than 100 years of the modern 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 Jinds "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 a 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, 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 trades 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 Federations