The Rise Of Skilled Labor

A Brief Story of the United States Trade Unions In the United States, such as in most of other countries, agriculture played a very important role in the beginning of the enrichment decades. Native, African and White Americans were not the only ethnicities in the country by that time. Immigrants - mostly from Asia and Europe - started to arrive in the US seeking for job and the dream of wealth. Thanks for this population growth, the labor force was duplicated and the landlords realized it was time to spread their goods all over the country.

Nationality, race, and gender. Unlike the Knights, the AFL were more conservative. They were also business-oriented pragmatism in dealing with employers. They served as an institutional outpost of racist and nativist within the labor movement itself. The Wobblies was a movement that struggle to gain memberships because it had no system for collecting membership.

The IWW should be studied more for its innovations than its failures, because many of the innovations set out by the IWW would set the tone for freedoms and rights to come in the labor movement. Two extremely important innovations that the IWW set into motion was the freedom speech fights in order to bring attention to the neglected rights of the labor movement. As well as the groundbreaking strategies of the Lawrence textile strike of 1912. That would shine a light on the horrible conditions that many immigrants would have to withstand in the United States during the Industrial Revolution. These innovations use tactics that show the injustices the working class had to endure.

The Labor movement in the United States grew out of control and lost the need to protect the common interest of most workers. For those in the industrial sector, organized labor unions fought for better wages, easier hours and safer working conditions. 20th-century labor improved because of American Federation of Labor, the Knights of Labor and Amalgamated Association all helped change America and give people proper working conditions The Amalgamated Association of Iron, Steel, and Tin Workers (AAISTW) was an early steelworkers labor organization, which represented primarily English-speaking, white skilled workers. The Amalgamated Association had a little over 24,000 people making it one of the largest unions in the American Federation of Labor.

In the Taft-Hartley Act, the US Congress demonstrated this by demolishing the rights of worker unions and strikes, giving the employers overwhelming control over the lives of employees. The National Labor Relations Act, or Wagner Act, passed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, previously protected the strikes and collective bargaining of employees and labor unions. However, with the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act, labor unions were much weaker than before, and many even branded this act as the “slave-labor act.” “To pass the Taft-hartley Act that lifted many of the protections organized labor had enjoyed since the passage of the Wagner Act in the 1930s” (Fraser 754). With the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act, many of the rights that protected the rights of workers to collectively bargain with their employers without any risk of losing their jobs and union strikes, were significantly weakened.

These fixes came in way of individual and group actions, as the economy changed in America, the progressives were hard at work responding to the change in political system. A book titled “The Jungle” led to President Roosevelt’s creation of the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act of 1906. It wasn’t enough to have words that described the conditions in which people worked in, so a photographer name Louis Hines, began taking pictures. The photographs that Hines took, led to American being face to face with over two million children under 15 working in mines for wages. Workers began organizing unions to get corporations to raise their wages, ultimately leading to employers opening their eyes to the fact that a great way to mitigate the problems associated with industrialism is to pay their workers more (Mayhew, 1998).

In the early 1900s, The U.S. had faced a lot of problem. The overcrowded cities as a result of too much immigration was one of the major problem. There were too much competition to find a job for most of those who weren’t wealthy, so most of them have to work even in the worst condition with the least wages. The working condition was terrible there were too many workers, and business owners who were interested to pay the least wages to get the most profit. Workers had to work hard to keep their job and be able to pay their bills.

Other examples of this include the ILGWU. “The ILGWU was also known for its progressive approach to issues such as education and the securing of extended health benefits for its membership. By 1940, the ILGWU was one of the most powerful American unions, with more than 300,000 members” (Source E). With the rise and growth of these unions, employed and unemployed were able to create social movements that pushed the government to give them fair pay and support them as workers. Not only are these unions and their movements still active in the 20th century, so are the laws that they helped create.

In the 1910s and 1920s, the Philadelphia Waterfront was the home of one of the most enduring, multiethnic unions in the United States at the time. Most unions during this period segregated and rejected blacks; the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) wanted racial equality. In particular, Local 8 had a majority of African Americans, Eastern Europeans, and Irish Americans. Local 8 was an interracial, multiethnic labor union. When the United States entered the war, the longshoremen in Philadelphia helped to serve the nation, yet they used the war as an opportunity to improve their wages.

Seen in the cartoon, “The I.W.W. And the Other Features That Go with It”, the IWW, a major radical labor union, is depicted as Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany. As the US entered WW1, opinion against Germany was highly negative, and the comparison between the IWW and the Kaiser shows the adverse social opinion of the labor movement. Additionally, The Bolshevik party overthrew the weak provisional government in October of 1917, replacing the leadership with Vladimir Lenin and the Soviet Socialist Republic. Fear that a similar revolution would occur and disrupt democracy spread throughout the United States in an era called the First Red Scare. Opponents of the government were arrested in the Palmer Raids, and individual rights of free speech were surrendered for the stability of the war cause and government with the passage of the Espionage and Sedition Acts.

It is a difficult task to challenge the social and economic policies of a country, especially one as patriotic as the United States during the post wartime Red scare era of the 1920 's. labor unions could account for this as they saw their membership fall from a high of 5 million in the 1920s to a mere 3.6 million by 1923(Rosenzweig 353). A combination of Supreme court decisions, Employer pressures and in many cases a lack of a strong leadership seen in previous individuals like Samuel Gompers contributed to this. Yet this trend surprisingly didn’t remain consistent as the great depression emerged around the 1930s. In fact they tripled there membership during the 1930s(Rosenzweig 429).They opened up, recruiting millions of women in their causes

The organized labor of 1875-1900 was unsuccessful in proving the position of workers because of the future strikes, and the intrinsical feeling of preponderation of employers over employees and the lack of regime support. In 1877, railroad work across the country took part in a cyclopean strike that resulted in mass violence and very few reforms. An editorial, from the Incipient York Time verbalized: "the strike is ostensibly hopeless, and must be regarded as nothing more than a rash and splenetic demonstration of resentment by men too incognizant or too temerarious to understand their own interest" (Document B). In 1892, workers at the Homestead steel plant near Pittsburg ambulated out on strike and mass chaos the lives of at least two Pinkerton detectives and one civilian, among many other laborers death (Document G).

In America, many workers in the “Progressive Era” were experiencing more challenges than opportunities and were labor leaders came in with corresponding rights and wages. The wealthy elite having control of basically everything flourished during this time with their efficient modes of performance. Workers under the control of the wealthy elite were defeated with the lost of actual intelligence and unethical conditions. For labor leaders they persuade prosperous Americans by distrusting employers and to negotiate with them - the politicians - to pass their dominant values. With the workers ' frustration of their jobs, it only seems logical that labor unions would have been born.

However, the economic crises in 1837 collapsed the labor unions because of economic hard times, and with immigrants coming in surplus willing to work for cheap, regular people could not compete and thus had to work at the beckon of the factories. Labor unions worked when the economy was resilient, but when the economy was shocked, everyone was too afraid of demanding more when there were those willing to work for

Problems like these angered the workers and caused labor unions to form. Some labor unions included the American Federation of Labor (AFL), or the Knights of Labor (KoL), which were the first two industrial labor unions. The industrial unions did more physical rebellion such as strikes or walk-outs, but both the industrial unions and the farmer unions were formed due to the people’s