Rise of Labor

1. Rise of Labor

2. Work in the Late 1800s • In the late 1800s, businesses used mechanization to speed up the process of producing goods. • Mechanization is the use of machines to do work. • Machine-made goods could be sold at lower prices than handmade goods. • Consumers bought large quantities of these inexpensive machine-made products. • Businesses made more goods and hired more workers to run the machines. • Factories and businesses grew bigger. • Some had thousands of workers. • Workers in factories did the same thing for ten or twelve hours a day, six days a week. • Few factories had safe working conditions and many workers were injured or killed in accidents.

3. Reasons for Worker Insecurity • The daily grind of the job was bad enough, but fear of unemployment was a nightmare. • Employers had no trouble finding replacements for unsatisfied workers. • Every year thousands of immigrants eager for work arrived from Europe. • Also competing for jobs were (1) women and children, (2) farm youths leaving the land for the cities, and (3) African Americans leaving the South in hopes of a better life in the North. • There were other sources of worker insecurity. • First, jobs could be eliminated as employers substituted the tireless work of machines for the more costly labor of human beings. Second, business booms would come to a crashing halt in sudden depressions and panics. At such times hundreds of thousands of jobless people faced the awful prospect of many months of no wages and no income. Government aid in the form of unemployment insurance did not then exist.

4. The Labor Movement • The growth of industry and big business created problems for industrial workers. • Overworked and poorly paid, they found that they could do nothing as individuals to persuade corporate giants to treat them better. • Therefore, in response to the organization of large corporations, workers organized large labor unions. • Factory workers were poorly paid. Many families struggled to pay for a place to live and food to eat. • Children as young as 10 to 15 years old worked because their families needed the money they earned. • Anyone who complained about poor pay or bad working conditions could be fired. • Workers formed labor unions so they could act as a group and have more power. • A labor union is an organization of workers that tries to improve pay and working conditions for its members.

5. THE KNIGHTS OF LABOR • In spite of workers' fears, two national unions managed to recruit many thousands of members. The first union to become a major economic force was the Knights of Labor, organized in 1869. • Membership Open to All Unlike earlier unions the Knights of Labor invited craft and industrial workers of all kinds to join it. Nobody was excluded. Skilled and unskilled workers were equally welcome. So were African-American workers and white workers, women and men, foreign-born and native-born. • Goals and Methods the Knights of Labor avoided strikes for many years. Until 1885 it tried to settle labor disputes through arbitration (the judging of a dispute by an impartial person). It established cooperatives, in which workers owned and operated their own businesses. Most important to the Knights of Labor was the goal of winning employers' consent to an eight-hour workday.

6. Knights of Labor Sudden Rise and Equally Sudden Fall Abandoning its antistrike policy, the Knights of Labor surprised the nation by winning a major strike against a railroad company in 1885. Following the strike, membership in the union shot up to 700,000 members. But its triumph was short-lived. In 1886, in the Haymarket section of Chicago, someone threw a bomb into a crowd, killing several police officers and civilians, The Knights of Labor was wrongly blamed for the incident because one of the bomb throwers belonged to the union. After the Haymarket Riot, workers left the Knights of Labor in droves. By the 1890s membership had dwindled to an insignificant number.

7. AFL • Some workers thought the Knights of Labor was not doing enough. • In 1886, these workers formed the American Federation of Labor (AFL). • They elected Samuel Gompers as the AFL's president. The AFL was a large group of trade unions. • A trade union is an organization of workers who do the same type of job, such as plumbing, or are in the same industry, such as steelworking. • Trade unions in the AFL wanted better wages, safer conditions in the workplace, and shorter workdays. • The first labor unions did not have much success. • Strikes failed when businesses fired the strikers. • People were hurt or killed in fights between police or soldiers and striking workers. • Powerful monopolies often blocked progress for workers. • Labor unions, however, continued to bring workers together.

8. CIO (Congress of Industrial Organization) • Founding of the C.I.O. • As unions grew more powerful, they started to compete among themselves. • In 1935 the most powerful single union within the A.F. of L. was the United Mine Workers. • Its aggressive leader, John L. Lewis, became impatient with the A.F. of L.'s policy of favoring unions of skilled crafts workers over the less skilled workers employed in automobile plants, steel mills, coal mines, and other industries. • Lewis favored the organization of industrial unions, to which all workers in an industry—the unskilled and the skilled, African Americans and whites—could belong. • Toward this end, he organized the Congress of Industrial Organizations (C.I.O.), which included his own miners' union, an auto workers' union, and others. • In 1938 Lewis broke with the A.F. of L. completely, and the C.I.O. became a separate and rival organization.

9. UAW • The UAW (United Autoworkers Union) was founded in May 1935 in Detroit, Michigan under the auspices of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) • Within one year, the AFL suspended the unions in the CIO, and these, including the UAW, formed the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). • The UAW was one of the first major unions that was willing to organize African-American workers, which increased its ability to garner enough support to win recognition through election. The UAW rapidly found success in organizing with the sit-down strike — first in a General Motors plant in Atlanta, Georgia in 1936, and in the Flint sit-down strike that began on December 29, 1936. That strike ended in February 1937 after Michigan's governor Frank Murphy played the role of mediator, negotiating recognition of the UAW by General Motors. The next month, auto workers at Chrysler won recognition of the UAW as their representative in a sit-down strike.

10. Teamsters • The International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT), formerly known by the name International Brotherhood of Teamsters, Chauffeurs, Warehousemen and Helpers of America, is one of the largest labor unions in the United States. • The name and logo of the union reflect the origin of the union as a craft union when founded in 1903. • A teamster was originally a person who drove a team of oxen, a horse-drawn, a mule-drawn wagon or a mule train, but the word currently refers to professional truck drivers. • A member of the Teamsters Union, including truck drivers, chauffeurs, and warehouse workers.