Grand Army of Labor

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.

Contesting the Great Compression: The National Labor Relations Board and Skilled Workers’ Struggle to Control Wage Differentials, 1935–1955

This article argues that federal labor policy was a factor in causing the Great Compression, the dramatic compression of skill-based wage differentials that occurred in the 1940s, and in bringing it to an end. By giving the National Labor Relations Board the power to determine the appropriate collective-bargaining unit, New Dealers gave industrial unions the means with which to build a more egalitarian wage structure. Unskilled and semiskilled workers seized the opportunity and voted themselves big pay raises. Skilled craftsmen responded by petitioning the NLRB for permission to form their own craft bargaining units, a process known as “craft severance.” As conservatives gained influence in Washington in the 1940s, the board adopted a bargaining-unit policy more favorable to craft unions. By the early 1950s, skilled craftsmen had regained control of their wage demands and thereby helped bring the Great Compression to a halt.

The Knights of Labor and the British trade unions, 1880–1900

This chapter charts the conflicts that erupted between those unions and British branches of the Knights of Labor. Between 1884 and 1894, an American working-class movement named the Knights of Labor set up more than thirty branches across Britain and Ireland. In that time the Knights organised more than ten thousand members, and contributed to epochal changes in the British trade union movement and in British labour politics. They also faced serious opposition from British unions that resented the Knights’ incursion into their trades and industries. Knights suffered first from battles with craft unions, and then, after the so-called “new unionism” brought large numbers of hitherto unorganised workers into the British union movement, from battles with many of the “new” unions. This chapter argues that the Knights lost these battles because their organisational model, and their reliance on help from an ailing movement in the United States, cut against the sweeping changes that transformed the British labour movement in the late nineteenth century – the growth of national unions and local labour federations in particular. In some cases, the Knights were undone by the very organisations that they had inspired or helped to create.

Gender and Trade Unionism in Historical Perspective

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.

Spartengewerkschaften, Statuskonflikte und Gemeinwohl: Gesetzlicher Ordnungsrahmen statt Laissez-faire

In December 2014, the German Federal Government adopted a draft law on the exclusive applicability of collective agreements - the so-called Tarifeinheitsgesetz. Critics see this as an unacceptable interference to the freedom of association. They point out, that despite multi-unionism you can neither observe a substantial increase in new trade unions being set up nor an increase in labor disputes. Proponents of the legal regulation argue that the industrial peace obligation would be jeopardized by competing unions. Craft unions negotiated twice as intense as industrial unions. In industries with union competition, risk of conflicts would accumulate. In addition, the public interest would be harmed if unions battled out their rivalries during collective bargaining negotiations. The proposed law tackled these problems by providing stronger incentives for cooperation between competing unions.

Mobilizing Interracial Solidarity: A Comparison of The 1919 and 1937 Steel Industry Labor Organizing Drives

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.