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Apr 18, 2024 · The answer, as I learned during my 25 years working for the AFL-CIO, the nation’s largest federation of unions, is that the story of organized labor in America is really two stories. On the one...
- Michael Podhorzer
- Origins of The Labor Movement
- Early Labor Unions
- American Federation of Labor
- Discrimination in The Labor Movement
- Samuel Gompers
- The Labor Movement and The Great Depression
- Collective Bargaining
- Women and Minorities in The Labor Movement
- Decline in Unions
The origins of the labor movement lay in the formative years of the American nation, when a free wage-labor market emerged in the artisan trades late in the colonial period. The earliest recorded strike occurred in 1768 when New Yorkjourneymen tailors protested a wage reduction. The formation of the Federal Society of Journeymen Cordwainers (shoema...
The early labor movement was, however, inspired by more than the immediate job interest of its craft members. It harbored a conception of the just society, deriving from the Ricardian labor theory of value and from the republican ideals of the American Revolution, which fostered social equality, celebrated honest labor, and relied on an independent...
During the 1880s, that division fatally eroded. Despite its labor reform rhetoric, the Knights of Labor attracted large numbers of workers hoping to improve their immediate conditions. As the Knights carried on strikes and organized along industrial lines, the threatened national trade unions demanded that the group confine itself to its professed ...
As sweeping technological change began to undermine the craft system of production, some national unions did move toward an industrial structure, most notably in coal mining and the garment trades. But most craft unions either refused or, as in iron and steel and in meat-packing, failed to organize the less skilled. And since skill lines tended to ...
Gompers justified the subordination of principle to organizational reality on the constitutional grounds of “trade autonomy,” by which each national union was assured the right to regulate its own internal affairs. But the organizational dynamism of the labor movement was in fact located in the national unions. Only as they experienced inner change...
WATCH: Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal It took the Great Depression to knock the labor movement off dead center. The discontent of industrial workers, combined with New Deal collective bargaining legislation, at last brought the great mass production industries within striking distance. When the craft unions stymied the ALF’s organizing efforts, J...
That this alliance partook of the nonpartisan logic of Gompers’s authorship–too much was at stake for organized labor to waste its political capital on third parties–became clear in the unsettled period of the early cold war. Not only did theCIO oppose the Progressive party of 1948, but it expelled the left-wing unions that broke ranks and supporte...
Nothing better captures the uneasy amalgam of old and new in the postwar labor movement than the treatment of minorities and women who flocked in, initially from the mass production industries, but after 1960 from the public and service sectors as well. Labor’s historic commitment to racial and gender equality was thereby much strengthened, but not...
This was ultimately economic, not political power, however, and as organized labor’s grip on the industrial sector began to weaken, so did its political capability. From the early 1970s onward, new competitive forces swept through the heavily unionized industries, set off by deregulation in communications and transportation, by industrial restructu...
The repression of 1886 led to a rapid decline for the Knights of Labor, but the events of that year also gave rise to a very different kind of union movement, the American Federation of Labor (AFL), which took several lessons away from the failures of the Knights.
Mar 25, 2021 · Fighting for a Place in the System. With a significant economic recovery underway in 1897, American labor leaders began a new organizing push, primarily through the American Federation of Labor (AFL), railroad brotherhoods, and various unaffiliated unions.
The next year Executive Order 11246 created the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP) in the Department of Labor to eliminate discrimination by government contractors. In the hope of opening more jobs for American farmworkers, the Bracero program was terminated.
Dec 8, 2022 · On November 29 th, the Corporations and Society Initiative (CASI) held a panel discussion to examine the evolution of unions, from the origins of the 20th Century labor movement to today's newfound energy amidst a rapidly changing labor market.
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The Communist Party (CP) and its allies played a role in the United States labor movement, particularly in the 1930s and 1940s, but largely wasn't successful either in bringing the labor movement around to its agenda or in converting their influence in any particular union into membership gains for the Party.
