AMERICAN LABOR MOVEMENT

American Labor Movement

American Labor Movement

Introduction

In the early times of Republic the tradesman did a lot of effort to create better conditions trying to save others form injustice. In 1806, in Philadelphia boot men and shoe makers were put on trial as they were convicted for criminal conspiracy. The work was disrupted till 1842 after that the criminal conspiracy was rejected by the Supreme Court in Massachusetts. The labor movement grew importance in order to protect the interest of workers. The labors fought for better wages and rights which were being provided to them. These include providing health benefits and aid for the injured and retired (www.history.com).

Emergence of American Labor Movement

The interplay between trade unions and strikes was evident from the beginning. The last decades of the eighteenth century saw the first true workers' organizations, journeymen's societies, undertake the first true strikes. In New York tailors struck in 1768 and shoemakers in 1785, and in Philadelphia printers struck in 1786 and carpenters in 1791. Each group sought higher wages from its masters.

A combination of factors constrained these early unions. Recurrent depressions undermined efforts to elevate wages, the courts frequently declared collective actions illegal, and factory production gradually undermined the craft basis upon which journeymen organized.

For most of the nineteenth century the law proved a great impediment to unionism. In a series of disputes early in the century, employers successfully contended in the courts that journeymen's organizations amounted to monopolistic criminal conspiracies (Bernard, 1993). This argument was first sustained in 1806, when Philadelphia's master shoemakers won a decision against their journeymen. In 1810 New York's journeymen shoemakers suffered a similar legal defeat. In 1815 Pittsburgh cordwainers were convicted of criminal conspiracy, as were New York tailors in 1836. In 1842 Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court drafted a significant decision acknowledging the legality of unions. Yet the courts continued to raise obstacles to successful strikes in the following decades. In the late nineteenth century employers regularly secured judicial injunctions against strikes, a tactic made all the more effective when the courts subjected interstate strikes to regulation under the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890. Like skilled journeymen, unskilled workers also waged strikes in the early nineteenth century, though their actions were usually spontaneous and resulted in no durable union organizations. The women textile-mill operatives of Lowell, Massachusetts, “turned out” against wage cuts in 1834 and 1836. New York stevedores struck in 1828 against wage cuts, while many of that city's coal heavers walked out in 1834, demanding a shorter workday. Discontented canal diggers staged fourteen strikes and twenty-five riots across the country in the 1830s, provoking military intervention on a dozen occasions.

Unions and Strikes

During the nineteenth century the American labor movement assumed the characteristics that influenced its subsequent development and distinguished it from the labor movements of other nations. Unions arose with the industrial order that transformed the United States from an agrarian, slaveholding republic in 1800 to an industrial giant that boasted the world's most fluid ...