Labor Unions

Azvar,Azra Period 4

Late 19th century America was a time of both prosperity and poverty. Although it is often remembered by people like Carnegie and Rockefeller, the majority of the population was a struggling working class. Entire families worked for 10 hours 7 days a week in hazardous work conditions just to have enough money for dinner. As conditions worsened, reforms were formed by rising Labor Unions. The movement towards organized labor was unsuccessful in improving position of the working class due to the failure of strikes, the inherent feeling of employee inferiority and the lack of government support. The labor unions drew attention to the status of the American worker and made an issue of what had been mostly ignored such as the use of child labor and the general plight of workers whose wages stagnated or fell while prices for the most basic goods continued to climb. Not soon after labor unions began to strike and cause havoc. In the 1860's, the National Labor Union was formed to unify workers in fighting for higher wages, an 8 hour work day and various social causes and it set the stage for many failing unions to come. In 1877, railroad workers in this union from across the country took part in an enormous strike that resulted in mass violence and very few reforms. Afterward, a editorial in The New York Times stated: the strike is apparently hopeless, and must be regarded as nothing more that a rash and spiteful demonstration of resentment by men too ignorant or too reckless to understand their own interests (Doc B). A failure of this immense magnitude should have been enough to put it to a permanent halt, however, year after year, labor unions striked incessantly and failed miserably. In 1892, workers at the Homestead Steel Plant near Pittsburgh walked out on strike and caused the deaths of at least two Pinkerton detectives and one civilian, among many other labor deaths (Doc G). The violent acts at Homestead not only failed to gain rights but also managed to shed negative light on their cause since non-strikers were harmed. After all these strikes were defeated, it was evident that organized labor was not successful and the workers had to find other means to improve their work conditions. The industrial gave more power to employers than the employees. It was believed that even strikes were evidence that employees were inferior to the much wiser and powerful employers. In 1883, in a testimony before the Senate Committee on Labor and Capital, a machinist said that "100 men are able to do now what it took 300 or 400 men to do fifteen years ago" in trying to explain his insignificance to the company he worked for (Document D). Since this was such an accepted way of thinking, when workers united and formed strikes, the Senate chose show no sympathy towards the workers. The ineffectiveness of unions shows that the unions did not have a fundamental leadership to even achieve success in the first step of changing the public's attitudes towards the workers positions. In Albert Hirschman's book Exit,Voice and Loyalty, he shed's a new point of view on the workers' strikes. People too often believe that workers have only one choice in the competitive job market: you don't like your job, get another. However, there is another choice. You can go to your employer, individually or as a group, and say 'let's change what's not working'. That's voice. That's what the unions did. Of course, not all employers took the employee's grievance serious, in fact, many only too this as a sign of employee inferiority. Most importantly, the failure of organized labor can be attributed to the negligence of the United States government in helping out workers. If the attitude of Americans was ever going to be changed, the government needed to take a roll in advocating free will and enforcing the importance of the laborers in society. Since the government didn't support unions, they unions were demonized into "antiAmerican", "anti-capitalist" groups of people. Even Thomas Nast, a man who was certainly concerned

with improving working conditions, illustrated the notion that laborers were destroying capitalism and moving towards communism (Document C). This feeling, shown in Nast's illustration after the railroad strikes of 1877, that unions simply lead to more "communistic values" and general uniformity made it very difficult to actually get anything done. Samuel Gompers, the founder of the American Federation of Labor (in 1886), argued before a commission established by the House of Representatives on the Relations and Conditions of Capital and Labor in 1899, that the right to strike was absolutely necessary if any reforms were going to be made and not even this right had been officially granted to the people by the government (Document I). In stating this, Gompers was making it clear that not even the very basis of organized labor had been established and so up until this point the advances that had been made, were virtually insignificant. The fact that the government had not addressed this issue and hadn't clearly stated that unions were permitted and that they had the right to strike seriously hindered the success of labor reforms.