Consolidation of the Craft Unions. 1848–90

2021 ◽  
pp. 107-123
Author(s):  
John Child
Keyword(s):  
1997 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-70 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cliff Brown ◽  
John Brueggemann

We examine working-class race relations during two steel industry unionization efforts: the 1919 AFL drive and the 1937 CIO drive. Racial conflict divided steel workers in 1919 but interracial labor solidarity prevailed in 1937. We contrast the two drives using event-structure analysis (ESA) to highlight the imputed causal connections in our argument. Comparison of the 1919 and 1937 cases suggests that three developments were necessary for interracial solidarity in steel. First, industrial unions had to replace craft unions, which promoted class-oriented organizing strategies. Second, interracial solidarity required an easing of split labor market conditions. Third, unions had to incorporate concrete strategies to recruit black workers. In both cases, state actions and economic conditions mediated the impact of these factors on interracial organizing.


Science ◽  
1974 ◽  
Vol 184 (4132) ◽  
pp. 48-94
Author(s):  
C. Holden
Keyword(s):  

Author(s):  
Matthew E. Stanley

The politics and culture of organized labor during the age of industrial capitalism in the United States was refracted through the semantics, ideas, and personalities of sectional conflict. The experience of war helped forge class consciousness, and the notion of a continued antislavery struggle was central to the identities of newly radicalized workers. This book explores the sweeping variety of Civil War memory within Gilded Age and Progressive Era labor unions, among political radicals, and in third-party movements. That memory evinced revolution and reform, as competing and sometimes coinciding narratives emerged between Reconstruction and World War I. The first worked largely in the service of industrial unionism and depicted the Civil War’s legacy as a precursor to a thorough--even global--liberation of all workers. The second emphasized the preservation of the Union, the imperatives of legalism and social order, and the fundamental loyalty of white workingmen to the reconstituted nation-state, tending to further conciliatory labor strategies, as well as the leadership prerogatives of exclusionary craft unions. The preeminence of reformist memory, which was predicated on compromise with capital and the sanctity of the state, came ultimately to supplement trade union bureaucratization, labor nationalism, and the propagation of antiradicalism on the American scene during and after the Great War.


1985 ◽  
Vol 1 (01) ◽  
pp. 54-63
Author(s):  
Jonathan M. Ross ◽  
John W. Boylston

As the marine industry laments on the noncompetitiveness of our coastwise shipbuilding capability, an efficient inland marine building community remains competitive in this market. Labor rates which are a percentage of coastwise yards' rates and production rates as high as 200 percent of coastwise yards clearly show the effects of craft unions and formalization of work rules built up after many years of operation in coastal yards. Faced with high production costs, the coastal yards find it difficult to modernize not only due to the capital involved but due as well to the difficulty of realizing the full benefits of modern machinery which must be operated through antiquated work rules. This paper theorizes that since it is impossible to upgrade work rules and difficult to upgrade equipment, perhaps shipbuilding should turn inland and start anew.


Author(s):  
Ruth Milkman

This chapter examines the historical link between gender and unionism by focusing on variations among labor unions in policies and practices affecting women from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth century. After reviewing the debate about women's participation, membership, and leadership within unions, the chapter discusses four major waves of unionization that have produced four distinct cohorts of labor organizations, each of which formed in a different era of labor movement growth: the craft unions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; the industrial unions that took shape in the needle trades in the 1910s; the larger wave of industrial unions that emerged in the 1930s, and the public- and service-sector unions of the 1960s and 1970s. Drawing on sociological theories of organization, it then considers the conditions under which unions have been effective political vehicles for women workers. It shows that the political effectiveness of unions for women workers is correlated with the historical conditions under which each wave of unions first developed, as well as their age and maturity as organizations.


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