This 2200 word article was published in two parts in the Alamogordo Daily News September 1 and 2, 2005
A Very Brief History of Organized Labor in America
Labor Day is a special holiday, a tribute to the contribution workers have made to the strength and prosperity of our country. It is celebrated in other countries and on other dates, but the first Labor Day, complete with a parade of more than 20,000 workers and picnics afterward, took place in New York City on Tuesday September 5, 1882. The idea spread rapidly, and in 1894 Congress made it a national holiday.
Samuel Gompers, son of a Jewish cigar maker who emigrated from England in 1863, said "All other holidays are in a more or less degree connected with conflicts and battles" and Labor Day is dedicated to the struggles of US labor. Gompers was born in 1850, and like many children then he started working 12-hour days alongside his father at the age of 10. At the age of 29 he became an active trade unionist, and in 1886 he was elected the first president of the American Federation of Labor (AFL).
The struggle of American workers for recognition and fair treatment started in America long before Gompers was born. The first recorded strike took place in 1677 in New York City. The Boston Tea Party was actually organized by carpenters disguised as Mohawk Indians, who wanted freedom from British oppression. But the "pursuit of happiness" did not end with the formation of the new nation.
Early strikers were organized around one craft and one city. In Philadelphia, printers staged a walkout in 1786 for a $6 a week minimum wage, and in 1791 carpenters struck, unsuccessfully, for a 10 hour work day. New York workers staged several strikes.
However, both the factory owners and the young government were hostile to the cause of the workers. When the Philadelphia Cordwainers (shoemakers and leather-workers) struck for higher wages in 1806, they were arrested and convicted of "criminal conspiracy." This decision was used as a precedent by both the federal and state governments for the next one hundred-plus years for violently breaking up strikes and demonstrations.
The prevailing opinion was that a worker's labor was a "commodity" that they had sold to their employers, just like a sack of potatoes. This applied to children too. In 1830 nearly a third of the workforce in New England was children under the age of 16. The work week for children in the silk mills of Paterson, New Jersey was 66 hours-- eleven hours a day, six days a week. Profit was all-important, and "family values" were not an issue.
One of the many brave women who rallied the workers was Mary Harris Jones, better know as Mother Jones, born in Ireland sometime in the 1830s. Her father was himself a political activist who fled Ireland with his family in 1838. Mary grew up to be a schoolteacher, and settled in Memphis Tennessee where she married George Jones, spending six happy years with him and raising four children, until the tragedy of a yellow fever epidemic wiped out her entire family in 1867. In her autobiography she writes, "I sat alone through nights of grief. No one came to me. No one could. Other homes were as stricken as was mine."
She then moved to Chicago and worked as a seamstress. "We worked for the aristocrats of Chicago, and I had ample opportunity to observe the luxury and extravagance of their lives. Often while sewing for the lords and barons who lived in magnificence on the Lake Shore Drive, I would look out of the plate glass windows and see the poor, shivering wretches, jobless and hungry, walking along the frozen lake front. The contrast of their condition with that of the tropical comfort of the people for whom I sewed was painful to me. My employers seemed neither to notice nor to care."
Tragedy struck again when the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 destroyed her home and her business. She then devoted the rest of her life to organizing unions, focusing on helping miners across the nation in their fight for improved working conditions and decent wages, and on putting an end to child labor.
Between 1870 and 1915, while Mother Jones made speeches, recruited unionists and organized soup kitchens to feed hungry families during strikes, the violence against strikers and workers increased. In 1874 a detachment of mounted policemen charged into a crowd of unemployed, unarmed demonstrators in New York's Tompkins Square Park, beating men, women and children with clubs, injuring hundreds. The Commissioner of Police said "it was the most glorious sight I ever saw." In 1877 federal troops killed 30 Chicago workers who were part of a nationwide strike.
In 1886, again in Chicago, police killed four union members who were part of a demonstration for an eight-hour day that turned into a fight between union and non-union workers. Three days later, on May 4, at a much smaller demonstration, someone threw a bomb that killed seven policeman. Although there was no evidence against them, eight anarchists who had advocated armed struggle were arrested, convicted, and sentenced to death-- for their words, not their deeds. The city was outraged by this miscarriage of justice. Three of the men were hanged on November 11, 1887, and 250,000 people lined the streets for the funeral procession of their leader, Albert Parsons.
More killings-- another fifteen people killed in Wisconsin on May 5, 1886 when state militia fired on a crowd chanting for an eight-hour work day. The Milwaukee Journal wrote that the governor was to be commended for his "quick action." Thirty-five unarmed black sugar workers shot to death by the Louisiana militia in 1887, thirty-four American Railway Union members killed by federal troops in Chicago in 1894, nineteen unarmed striking mineworkers killed by a sheriff's posse in Pennsylvania in 1897, the machine gunning and burning of a union tent during the 1914 strike at Colorado's Ludlow Mine Field that killed 19 people, 12 of them children ... the list of killings goes on.
Now the strikers did fight back in some cases, such as the striking miners in Coeur D' Alene, Idaho, who dynamited the Frisco Mill in 1892. When the Pullman Palace Car Company of Chicago drastically reduced wages in 1893, rioters caused much property damage. But no striker or rioter fired on unarmed men, women and children.
The tragedy of the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire in 1911 increased the general public's awareness of the prison-like working conditions endured by many American workers. One hundred forty-seven women were burned to death or died when they leaped from the top three floors of the ten-story building. The stairway exits were locked. This time the government did take action: the company owners were charged with manslaughter, but the jury returned a verdict of not guilty. In a civil suit they paid an average of $75 per life lost.
After this tragic fire, Frances Perkins headed the New York factory inspection committee and collected enough evidence of widespread hazardous working conditions that New York legislators finally passed several much-needed reforms in industrial safety and fire prevention. She later became President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Secretary of Labor (the first woman cabinet member in US history).
There were some signs of enlightenment among employers, such as Ford Motor company, which raised its basic wage from $2.40 for a nine-hour day to $5 for an eight-hour day in 1914, but the major breakthrough came in 1915, when Congress passed the Clayton Act. Section 6 of this act is headed: "Antitrust laws not applicable to labor organizations" and states that “The labor of a human being is not a commodity or article of commerce. Nothing contained in the antitrust laws shall be construed to forbid
the existence and operation of labor, agricultural, or horticultural organizations, instituted for the purposes of mutual help, and not having capital stock or conducted for profit, or to forbid or restrain individual members of such organizations from lawfully carrying out the legitimate objects thereof; nor shall such organizations, or the members thereof, be held or construed to be illegal combinations or conspiracies in restraint of trade, under the antitrust laws.”
By the time of the Clayton Act legalizing labor organization, Mary Harris ("Mother") Jones was about 80 years old and less able to work for her cherished dream of banning child labor. She did publish her autobiography in 1925 [online at http://womenshistory.about.com/library/etext/mj/bl_mj01.htm]. In Chapter 14 she writes about the conditions in the mills: "A father of two little girls worked a loom next to the one assigned to me. 'How old are the little girls?' I asked him. 'One is six years and ten days,' he said, pointing to a little girl, stoop shouldered and thin chested who was threading warp, 'and that one,' he pointed to a pair of thin legs like twigs, sticking out from under a rack of spindles, 'that one is seven and three months.' 'How long do they work?' 'From six in the evening till six come morning.' 'How much do they get?' 'Ten cents a night.' 'And you?' 'I get forty.' .... I did not stay long in one place. As soon as one showed interest in or sympathy for the children, she was suspected, and laid off. Then, too, the jobs went to grown-ups that could bring children."
In 1935 another major improvement was made in worker protection when the Wagner Act was passed, but it was not until 1938 that the horror of child labor ended in the United States, at least officially. The Fair Labor Standards Act, a product of Roosevelt's New Deal and one of the most humane laws ever passed, halted this injustice against America's young. This law also established the 40-hour work week.
Mary Harris Jones did not live to see this realization of her cherished dream-- she died in 1930. After a funeral attended by over 20,000 people, she was buried in the United Mine Workers Union Cemetery in Mount Olive, Illinois.
The violence against strikers and union organizers did not completely stop after the passage of the Clayton Act. Lynchings of union organizers were common, and strikers were still being killed by vigilantes, police, and occasionally the National Guard or army troops. On the other hand, one contractor was killed by labor racketeers in 1930.
In 1942, after the United States entered World War II, the AFL pledged that there would be no strikes in defense-related factories for the duration of the war. This act of patriotism was given a slap in the face in 1947 when the Taft-Hartley Act was passed. It is fair enough that "coercion of an employer in his choice of persons to represent him in discussions with unions" should be banned. There were several less benign clauses, however. Supervisory employees and independent contractors were excluded from the protection of the Wagner Act. Secondary boycotts of unions in sympathy with other strikers were banned.
The worst part of the Taft-Hartley Act is Section 14b: "Nothing in this Act shall be construed as authorizing the execution or application of agreements requiring membership in a labor organization as a condition of employment in any State or Territory in which such execution or application is prohibited by State or Territorial law." This legalese means that individual states can pass "Right to Work (for less)" laws. Labor union officials charge that their union security and solidarity is jeopardized when individual workers can enjoy the higher wages and improved benefits negotiated by their fellow union workers but opt out of any union membership or financial responsibilities. The tend has been an increase in businesses where there is no union representation for workers.
New Mexico is not a "right-to-work-for-less" state. Many southern and midwestern states are. North Carolina is the least unionized state, with only 3.8% of the workforce represented by unions. Small wonder that in 1991 a fire in the Imperial Foods chicken processing plant in the village of Hamlet, NC killed 25 workers, most of them single mothers, and injured another 54. The reason for the deaths, as in the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire, was blocked exits-- doors chained shut "to prevent theft." In this case, the owner negotiated a guilty plea of manslaughter for the 25 deaths and served four years in prison (less than two months per death) and the company paid an $800,000 fine.
The Federal Emergency Management team that investigated the fire learned that there had not been one inspection of the factory by OSHA in its eleven years of operation. Perhaps this was because of President Ronald Reagan's appointment of an OSHA director who discouraged aggressive enforcement of industry standards and instead encouraged a "volunteerism" approach. Perhaps it was because of the budget cut in FY 1982 that led to a 22% reduction in the number of OSHA inspectors.
State investigators called the Imperial Foods Chicken Plant a "death trap." Eighty safety law violations were found, including no
sprinklers, no fire alarm or fire safety plan. This would not have happened in a union shop.
The Taft-Hartley law made it possible for American companies to move to non-union states where they can cut workers' wages and benefits. NAFTA and CAFTA allow them to move their plants to other countries where they can profit from even lower standards for workers' wages and safety in the workplace.
Union membership has declined in the last twenty years, and in 2004 unions represented only 12.5% of the American workforce (15.5 million members). For 2004 the average union member's weekly salary was $781. For non-union workers it was $612.
In comparison, the average CEO weekly salary in 2004 was $189,000, representing a pay increase of 12% between 2003 and 2004. The average worker's salary increased by only 2.2% (2.7% for union workers) in that year.
In these uncertain times, when it seems like the American working family is under attack, let us listen again to the words of Mother Jones: "In spite of oppressors, in spite of false leaders, the cause of the workers continues onward. Slowly his hours are shortened, slowly his standards of living rise to include some of the good and beautiful things in life. Slowly, those who create the wealth of the world are permitted to share it. The future is in labor's strong, rough hands."