The Labor history of the U.S. involves the history of organized labor, as well as the more general history of the working people. The history of organized labor has been a specialty of scholars since the 1890s, and has produced a large scholarly literature. In the 1960s, as social history gained popularity, a new emphasis emerged on the history of all workers, with special regard to gender and race. This is called "the new labor history." Much scholarship has attempted to bring the social history perspectives into the study of organized labor.
Organized Labor to 1900
Early Unions
Railroad Brotherhoods
Knights of Labor
Eight Hour Day
Violence, 1888-1894
Rise of AFL
The Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions began in 1881 under the leadership of Samuel Gompers. Its members were different unions. its original goals were to encourage the formation of trade unions and to obtain legislation, such as prohibition of child labor, a national eight hour day, and exclusion of foreign contract workers. Samuel Gompers of the Cigar Makers Union was chosen as the chairman of its Committee on Organization and as a member of its Legislative Committee.
The Federation made some efforts to obtain favorable legislation, but had little success in organizing or chartering new unions. It came out in support of the proposal, traditionally attributed to Peter J. McGuire of the Carpenters Union, for a national Labor Day holiday on the first Monday in September, and threw itself behind the eight hour movement, which sought to limit the workday by either legislation or union organizing.
In 1886, as the relations between the trade union movement and the Knights of Labor worsened, McGuire and other union leaders called for a convention to be held at Columbus, Ohio on December 8th. The Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions merged with the new organization, known as the American Federation of Labor or AFL, formed at that convention.
The AFL was formed in large part because of the dissatisfaction of many trade union leaders with the Knights of Labor, an organization that contained many trade unions and which had played a leading role in some of the largest strikes of the era. The new AFL distinguished itself from the Knights by emphasizing the autonomy of each trade union affiliated with it and limiting membership to workers and organizations made up of workers, unlike the Knights.
The AFL grew steadily in the late nineteenth century while the Knights disappeared. Although Gompers at first advocated something like industrial unionism, he retreated from that in the face of opposition from the craft unions that made up most of the AFL. The emphasis made for much stronger locals with which the workers could identify, and derived benefits in terms of insurance, fellowship, and bargaining power.
Organized Labor 1900-1932
Debs, Socialists, IWW and Dual Unionism
Government and Labor
Samuel Gompers
Samuel Gompers (1850–1924) was a founder of the American Federation of Labor, its long-time president, and the dominant leader of the labor from the 1880s to his death.
Railroad Brotherhoods
World War I
World War I
1920s
Restricting Immigration
Norris Laguardia Act
Organized Labor 1932-1955
New Deal Labor Policy
NRA codes
Wagner Act 1935
John L. Lewis and CIO
John L Lewis, leader of the United Mine Workers broke in the mid 1930s from the AFL and formed the rival, Committee for Industrial Organization. The two fedderations were bitter enemies in the late 1930s but re-united in 1955.
Revival of AFL
Upsurge in World War II
Walter Reuther and UAW
PAC and Politics of 1940s
New enemies appeared for the labor unions after 1935. Newspaper columnist Westbrook Pegler was especially outraged by the New Deal's support for powerful labor unions that he considered morally and politically corrupt. Pegler saw himself a populist and muckraker whose mission was to warn the nation that dangerous leaders were in power. In 1941 Pegler became the first columnist ever to win a Pulitzer Prize for reporting, for his work in exposing racketeering in Hollywood labor unions, focusing on the criminal career of William Morris Bioff. As historian David Witwer has concluded, "He depicted a world where a conspiracy of criminals, corrupt union officials, Communists, and their political allies in the New Deal threatened the economic freedom of working Americans." [David Witwer, "Westbrook Pegler and the Anti-union Movement" Journal of American History 92.2 (2005): 551]
Taft-Hartley Act
The Taft-Hartley amendments to the National Labor Relations Act were signed over Truman's veto in 1947. They were designed to equalize the rights of labor and management. They outlaw secondary boycotts and closed shops, allow individual states to outlaw union security clauses by passing “right-to-work” laws, require unions and employers to give sixty days notice before they may undertake strikes, give the President authority to intervene in strikes or potential strikes that create a national emergency, exclude supervisors from coverage under the Act, require special treatment for professional employees and guards, codify the Supreme Court's earlier ruling that employers have a constitutional right to express their opposition to unions, give employers the right to file a petition asking the Board to determine if a union represents a majority of its employees, and allow employees to petition to oust their union or to invalidate the union security provisions of any existing collective bargaining agreement.
The Taft-Hartley amendments also provided for federal court jurisdiction to enforce collective bargaining agreements while imposing a number of procedural and substantive standards that unions and employers must meet before they may use employer funds to provide pensions and other employee benefit to unionized employees.
Congress amended the Act again in 1959, when it enacted new restrictions outlawing hot cargo agreements, which require an employer to cease doing business with other employers in some circumstances, and limiting unions' ability to use recognitional picketing to obtain union recognition without going through an NLRB-conducted election. Congress extended coverage of the Act in 1974 to apply to workers at health care institutions.
Unions made repeated efforts over the past fifty years to amend the Act to eliminate the right to work provisions of the Act, to expand construction unions' right to picket at sites where other building trades employees work, to strengthen the protections for employees fired during organizing campaigns, to require the NLRB to prosecute violations of the Act more aqgressively and to limit employers' power to hire permanent replacements for strikers. None of those efforts have succeeded.
Fighting Communism
Labor History 1955-2005
AFL and CIO merger 1955
===Jimmy Hoffa, Teamsters and issue of Corruption===
Civil Rights Movement
Rise of Public Sector Unions
Reagan and Corporate Attacks on Unions
Decline of Private Sector Unions
The United Auto Workers UAW's numbers are representative of the manufacturing sector: 1,619,000 members in 1970, 1,446,000 in 1980, 952,000 in 1990, 623,000 in 2004.
NAFTA and threat of International Trade
The situation for the automotive industry and UAW members worsened dramatically in 1973. Gasoline prices shot up and, worse, Volkwagen and Honda started flooding the American market. For the first time major American industries had foreign competition for the domestic market. This started years of layoffs and the UAW found itself in the position of giving up some benefits it had won over the decades. This peaked with the near-bankruptcy of Chrysler in 1979 and actual bankruptcy of Delphi in 2005. By 2005 the total labor costs per employee had reached $65 per hour at General Motors, so in November 2005 it announced it would shut down more plants, costing 40,000 unionized jobs.
References
Secondary sources
- David Brody. In Labor's Cause: Main Themes on the History of the American Worker (1993).
- David Brody. Workers in Industrial America: Essays on the Twentieth Century Struggle
- John R. Commons and Associates. History of Labour In The United States. [1896-1932] (4 vol. 1921-1957), highly detailed classic to 1920.
- Melvyn Dubofsky. Labor Leaders in America (1987).
- Melvyn Dubofsky and Foster Rhea Dulles. Labor in America: A History (2004)*
- Melvyn Dubofsky and Warren Van Time. John L. Lewis (1986) best biography of key 20c leader.
- Philip Foner. Women and the American Labor Movement from World War I to the Present (1980).
- Steve Fraser. Labor Will Rule: Sidney Hillman and the rise of American labor. (1993).
- Julie Greene. Pure and Simple Politics: The American Federation of Labor and Political Activism, 1881-1917 (1998)
- John H. M. Laslett. Labor and the Left; a study of socialist and radical influences in the American labor movement, 1881-1924. (1970).
- Nelson Lichtenstein. State of the Union: A Century of American Labor (2003).
- Harold C. Livesay, Samuel Gompers and Organized Labor in America (1993)
- Gwendolyn Mink. Old labor and new immigrants in American political development: union, party, and state, 1875-1920. (1986).
- David Montgomery. The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865-1925 (1987)
- Philip Taft. The A.F. of L. in the Time of Gompers (1957)
- Philip Taft. The A.F. Of L. From the Death of Gompers to the Merger (1959)
- Christopher L. Tomlins. The state and the unions: labor relations, law, and the organized labor movement in America, 1880-1960. (1985)
- Robert H. Zieger. The CIO 1935-1955 (1995).
- Robert H. Zieger and Gilbert J. Gall. American Workers, American Unions: The Twentieth Century (2002).
Primary sources
- Samuel Gompers, Seventy Years of Life and Labor (1925, 1985 reprint)
- The Samuel Gompers Papers (1986- ) definitive multivolume edition of all important letters to and from Gompers. 9 volumes have been completed to 1917. The index is online. For details and more on Gompers see [1]
- Terence Vincent Powderly. Thirty years of labor, 1859-1889 (1890, reprint 1967).
The content of this page is retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_history_of_the_United_States under GFDL
