But the national unions that had created the AFL in fact comprised only the skilled trades. The AFL asserted as a formal policy that it represented all workers, irrespective of skill, race, religion, nationality or gender. That class formulation necessarily defined trade unionism as the movement of the entire working class. The founders of the AFL translated this notion into the principle of “pure and simple” unionism: only by self-organization along occupational lines and by a concentration on job-conscious goals would the worker be “furnished with the weapons which shall secure his industrial emancipation.” Marxism taught Samuel Gompers and his fellow socialists that trade unionism was the indispensable instrument for preparing the working class for revolution. As industrialism matured, labor reform lost its meaning–hence the confusion and ultimate failure of the Knights of Labor. In part, the assertion of trade union supremacy stemmed from an undeniable reality. The new federation marked a break with the past, for it denied to labor reform any further role in the struggles of American workers. When it refused, they joined in December 1886 to form the American Federation of Labor (AFL). As the Knights carried on strikes and organized along industrial lines, the threatened national trade unions demanded that the group confine itself to its professed labor reform purposes. Despite its labor reform rhetoric, the Knights of Labor attracted large numbers of workers hoping to improve their immediate conditions. PHOTOS: These Appalling Images Exposed Child Labor in Americaĭuring the 1880s, that division fatally eroded. But equally important, they were strands that had to be kept operationally separate and functionally distinct. The two were held to be strands of a single movement, rooted in a common working-class constituency and to some degree sharing a common leadership. But contemporaries saw no contradiction: trade unionism tended to the workers’ immediate needs, labor reform to their higher hopes. On their face, these reform movements might have seemed at odds with trade unionism, aiming as they did at the cooperative commonwealth rather than a higher wage, appealing broadly to all “producers” rather than strictly to wageworkers, and eschewing the trade union reliance on the strike and boycott. Most notable were the National Labor Union, launched in 1866, and the Knights of Labor, which reached its zenith in the mid-1880s. The result, as early labor leaders saw it, was to raise up “two distinct classes, the rich and the poor.” Beginning with the workingmen’s parties of the 1830s, the advocates of equal rights mounted a series of reform efforts that spanned the nineteenth century. The transforming economic changes of industrial capitalism ran counter to labor’s vision. It harbored a conception of the just society, deriving from the Ricardian labor theory of value and from the republican ideals of the American Revolution, which fostered social equality, celebrated honest labor, and relied on an independent, virtuous citizenship. The early labor movement was, however, inspired by more than the immediate job interest of its craft members. In the 19th century, trade unionism was mainly a movement of skilled workers.ĭid you know? In 2009, 12 percent of American workers belonged to unions. Although the factory system was springing up during these years, industrial workers played little part in the early trade union development. First, with the formation in 1827 of the Mechanics’ Union of Trade Associations in Philadelphia, central labor bodies began uniting craft unions within a single city, and then, with the creation of the International Typographical Union in 1852, national unions began bringing together local unions of the same trade from across the United States and Canada (hence the frequent union designation “international”). Thus a job-conscious orientation was quick to emerge, and in its wake there followed the key structural elements characterizing American trade unionism. From that time on, local craft unions proliferated in the cities, publishing lists of “prices” for their work, defending their trades against diluted and cheap labor and, increasingly, demanding a shorter workday in the face of the Industrial Revolution.
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