chapter 3

PURE AND SIMPLE CRAFT UNIONISM

In response to the perceived failure of the Knights of Labor's leadership to address everyday working issues, representatives from 25 national unions created a new labor federation in December 1886 called the American Federation of Labor (AFL). The first president of the AFL was Samuel Gompers, an official from the Cigar Makers' International Union, who would eventually be president with only a one-year interruption until his death nearly 40 years later in 1924. The AFL and Gompers are central figures in the development of U.S. labor relations (see Figure 3.2). The AFL and Its Unions: Objectives and Strategies - It is important to understand that the AFL was a union federation, not a labor union per se. The member unions, not the AFL, pursued the primary labor relations functions of bargaining with employers, leading strikes, and resolving grievances. The AFL was a support organization for the independent unions. The AFL sometimes coordinated bargaining and strikes when multiple unions were involved, and it provided financial assistance to striking unions. The AFL also resolved jurisdictional disputes when more than one union wanted to represent the same group of workers and, to a lesser extent, provided education and political lobbying. The AFL initiated organizing drives in occupations without a national union, with the goal of ultimately creating a new national union for that occupation. In contrast with the Knights of Labor, each union that joined the AFL was explicitly granted the autonomy to control its own affairs. - The AFL and its affiliated unions are illustrative of a business unionism philosophy. In contrast to the uplift unionism of the Knights of Labor, the business unionism of the AFL and its unions emphasizes immediate improvements in basic employment conditions—wages, hours, and working conditions. Business unionism accepts capitalism and the need for employers to make a profit, but seeks to win labor's fair share of the profits through collective bargaining backed up by the threat of striking. This is a pragmatic, business-like approach to employee representation; it is not an idealistic approach based on morality and cooperatives (or at the other extreme, revolution) but is unionism "pure and simple." In the words of Gompers, "Economic betterment—today, tomorrow, in home and shop, was the foundation upon which trade unions have been built." Business unionism continues to be the dominant philosophy of U.S. labor unions in the 21st century. - Beyond a business unionism philosophy, there are several additional central features of the AFL unions. Most AFL unions wholeheartedly endorsed a system of craft unionism. In this approach, unions were divided along craft lines—that is, by occupation or trade. Each union could focus on the unique concerns of workers in a single occupation and overcome this weakness of the Knights of Labor. Moreover, the craft unionism of the AFL was focused on skilled crafts such as printers, machinists, carpenters, cigar makers, and iron molders. Most AFL unions were openly hostile toward unskilled labor and represented only skilled workers. In fact, the Knights of Labor's inclusion of unskilled workers was a point of frustration among the trade unions that led to the formation of the AFL. The structure of the AFL unions was further guided by the principle of exclusive jurisdiction, in which only one union should represent workers in a craft. For example, the single carpenters' union was entitled to represent carpenters; it could not represent other occupations, and no other union could represent carpenters. An important function of the AFL was to resolve jurisdictional disputes; but as with other issues, the AFL lacked formal power to force rulings on the member unions. - By the 1890s industrialization and the factory system were firmly in place. There were 160,000 miles of railroad tracks, coal provided power for a vast range of machines so that most major industries were mechanized, and the United States was truly becoming an industrial nation. Workers were increasingly becoming subservient to machines, but skilled craftsmen in many industries—iron rollers, glassblowers, and coal miners, to name just a few—still had special knowledge of the production processes and therefore had some discretion or control over their work and their helpers. In the words of the militant union leader Big Bill Haywood, "The manager's brains are under the workman's cap." AFL unions and their members generally accepted this factory system (some sooner than others) but sought to maintain skilled worker control over the production process in addition to decent wages and hours of work. - As such, an important activity of the AFL unions was establishing and maintaining job standards through work rules. These rules frequently pertained to apprenticeship standards, tasks reserved for union members, undesirable or unskilled job duties that union members did not have to do (to prevent degradation of the craft), work allocation procedures, and other standards. Before the 1900s, these work rules were often established unilaterally by the unions and enforced by refusing to work on any other terms and by fining or expelling members who undermined these standards. Wage rates might be negotiated with employers, but skilled workers believed that their skilled status as craftsmen entitled them to establish work standards. Control over decision making was seen as necessary to promote human dignity and to reinforce the mental and civic skills needed for active participation in a democratic society. The AFL and Its Unions: Conflicts with Employers - A critical struggle in the development of U.S. labor relations in the early 20th century therefore revolved around employers' efforts to weaken the AFL's desired level of worker control and establish supervisory supremacy in production decisions. One of the most violent examples of this struggle for workplace control was the Homestead strike at the steel mill owned by Andrew Carnegie in Homestead, Pennsylvania. Of the 3,800 workers at the mill, the 800 most skilled belonged to the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers, an AFL-affiliated craft union. The Amalgamated at Homestead was the last union in Carnegie's operations, and he was determined to wrest control of Homestead away from the skilled union members—and their 58 pages of work rules—when their contract expired in 1892. When the union refused to accept 12-15 percent wage cuts, the mill was shut down. Management announced that the mill would reopen on July 6, 1892, as a nonunion operation. As the sun rose on July 6, hundreds of skilled and unskilled workers gathered on the mill property along the adjacent river armed with rifles, pistols, rocks, and fence posts to meet two barges containing 300 armed Pinkertons, who were supposed to secretly secure the mill property so that strikebreakers could be brought in. When the Pinkertons tried to come ashore, a gun battle broke out. No one knows who fired first, but the battle raged for hours. The Pinkertons eventually surrendered, but not before at least seven strikers and three Pinkertons were killed. On July 12, 4,000 soldiers of the Pennsylvania militia arrived in Homestead and secured the mill. Aided by new technology that reduced the skills needed for steelmaking, strikebreakers reopened the mill seven days later. - By October perhaps 100 strikers had returned to work and, guarded by the state militia, a thousand strikebreakers had been brought in. By the end of November the strike was officially over; only 400 of the 2,200 strikers who had reapplied for jobs were rehired. In 1892 profits in Carnegie's steel operations were $4 million, and by the end of decade they would be $40 million; Carnegie sold these operations in 1901 for $480 million. In the year after the strike, wages for skilled workers dropped significantly while the 12-hour workday continued. A union would not return to the Homestead mill until the 1930s—with the protection of a new labor law and the efforts of an industrial union to organize all workers, skilled and unskilled. - In a decade filled with violent clashes between strikers, strikebreakers, Pinkertons, and other armed agents, and of strikes broken by state militia or federal troops—from a streetcar strike in New Orleans to a miners' strike in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho—the second great labor history event of the 1890s was the Pullman strike in 1894. The Pullman Palace Car Company produced Pullman railroad cars in Pullman, Illinois. During the depression that started in 1893, Pullman cut wages by an average of 28 percent and laid off about one-quarter of the workers. Management pay and stockholders' dividends were not reduced, nor was the rent charged to workers for company-owned housing. After rent was deducted from his paycheck, one worker was reportedly left with a paycheck for 2 cents. Pullman workers joined an independent union led by Eugene V. Debs: the American Railway Union, which included both railroad employees and workers that made railroad cars (as at Pullman). Unlike the AFL craft unions with their principle of exclusive jurisdiction, the American Railway Union included multiple occupations—though as was common at the time, only white workers. - In May 1894, three grievance committee members at Pullman were discharged. When Pullman refused to arbitrate any disputed issues, workers struck and Pullman closed the plant. In solidarity, the railroad workers who belonged to the American Railway Union refused to handle Pullman cars on the railroads. The railroads fired anyone who honored this boycott, and the rest of each train crew often struck in support of these discharges. The Pullman dispute therefore quickly escalated into a national railroad strike (recall the "King Debs" drawing in Figure 2.1). The railroads started to put mail cars behind Pullman cars so when workers detached the Pullman cars, the mail would be disrupted. Aided by the U.S. attorney general, who was on the board of directors of one of the struck railroads, federal troops were placed on the trains in July 1894. This drastically changed the tenor of the strike, and violence erupted. In various conflicts 13 people were killed, and more than 700 railroad cars were destroyed by angry strikers in Chicago. Debs was arrested for conspiracy to disrupt the mail and served six months in jail. With federal troops protecting the trains and the leader of the American Railway Union in jail, the strike died out.

UPLIFT UNIONISM

One union that survived the depression of 1873-1878 was the Noble and Holy Order of the Knights of Labor. The Knights of Labor started as a union in the garment industry and emphasized secrecy to prevent employers from breaking it. Like many fraternal organizations of the time, the Knights of Labor initially had various rituals, passwords, and secret signs. If a member wanted to know if someone else was a member, he would say, "I am a worker," to which the correct response was "I too earn my bread with the sweat of my brow." The top leader was called the Grand Master Workman. As the union expanded outside the garment industry, secrecy was dropped in 1881. For a brief time in the mid-1880s, the Knights of Labor was the most influential labor organization in the United States with 700,000 members in 1886. Yet its decline was equally rapid, and 15 years later the organization had effectively faded away. The Knights of Labor: Objectives and Strategies - A primary concern of the Knights of Labor was the moral worth of a person. So the Knights of Labor is traditionally considered the major U.S. example of uplift unionism, a philosophy in which a union "aspires chiefly to elevate the moral, intellectual, and social life of the worker." Decent wages and working conditions were important because they served, in the words of one Grand Master, "the divine nature of man": "[The Knights of Labor] must base its claims for labor upon higher ground than participation in the profits and emoluments, and a lessening of the hours and fatigues of labor. These are only physical effects and objects of a grosser nature, and, although imperative, are but the stepping-stone to a higher cause, of a nobler nature. The real and ultimate reason must be based upon the more exalted and divine nature of man, his high and noble capability for good. Excessive labor and small pay stints and blunts and degrades those God-like faculties, until the image of God, in which he was created and intended by his great Author to exhibit, are scarcely discernible." - Shorter working hours were therefore needed so that workers would have greater time for education and moral betterment. - Organizationally, the Knights of Labor consisted of numerous local assemblies—as many as 1,500 at one point—and membership was open to nearly everyone. In fact the Knights of Labor wanted to unite all "producers," a group that included the equivalent of today's white-collar and professional workers as well as farmers, shopkeepers, and even employers. The central conflict was not with employers; it was with those who controlled money and who were perceived as not "producing"—bankers, stockbrokers, and lawyers. And consistent with the emphasis on morality, gamblers and liquor dealers were also excluded. But otherwise the Knights of Labor was broadly inclusive and emphasized the solidarity of all producers—including African Americans and women—as underscored by its motto, "An injury to one is a concern to all." In fact, while most unions at this time prohibited women from joining, the Knights of Labor had as many as 50,000 women as members, including clerks, dressmakers, and candy makers. - To accomplish its goals, the Knights of Labor emphasized cooperation and education. The ultimate goal was replacing capitalism with a system of producer cooperatives in which producers (not bankers and absentee owners) would own and control businesses. The bringing together of capital and labor into small cooperatives was believed to harmonize the interests of labor and capital (ending labor conflict) and avoid the problems of monopoly. Workers would regain a sense of control and autonomy, which industrialization and wage work were removing; and work would be restored to its noble purpose of serving personal and psychological needs and serving God. This latter goal rested on the then-common assumption that producing a tangible product (e.g., a barrel or a plow) was superior to contributing a less tangible service (e.g., management expertise or investment capital). This view may seem simplistic today, but remember that industrialization was a new phenomenon and that corporations and the nature of employment as we know it today were just emerging and were causing great upheaval throughout society. As such, the Knights of Labor's reform agenda sought to replace capitalism with a different system rather than simply cushion capitalism's perceived negative effects on workers. In fact, replacing the wage system with producer cooperatives was seen as a way to restore democracy because capitalism's inequalities and the wage system's degradation of workers were viewed as undermining the values and skills needed for a healthy, participative democracy. - The top leadership of the Knights of Labor opposed the use of strikes and boycotts. These economic weapons might achieve higher wages and shorter working hours; but remember that in the philosophy of the Knights of Labor, these economic improvements were not important in their own right. Broader reform to serve the divine nature of humanity through the creation of producer cooperatives and through individual education and moral betterment could not be achieved through strikes and boycotts—at least not in the eyes of the national leadership. There was also a practical element to this emphasis on education over strikes and boycotts: The leaders remembered labor's defeats during the strikes of the 1870s (recall the Great Uprising of 1877). The Knights of Labor: Conflicts and Demise - The reality of strike activity, however, did not always match these theoretical ideals. In fact, the Knights of Labor's largest success was arguably the 1885 Southwest System rail strike, in which a startling victory was won over this very large railroad system controlled by robber baron Jay Gould. This strike is popularly viewed as the first instance in which a U.S. union stood equal to a large, powerful corporation and as causing the Knights of Labor's dramatic growth in 1886. Victory was short-lived, however. The leadership's lack of emphasis on collective bargaining let Gould settle with weak language—not even union recognition was achieved. In fact, only a year later Gould successfully broke a violent strike with the help of Pinkerton spies. - Contributing to this defeat and the overall demise of the Knights of Labor was the most famous event associated with the Knights of Labor: the Haymarket Tragedy. A significant movement during the mid-1880s was the drive for an eight-hour workday. In 1884, May 1, 1886, was established by the forerunner of the American Federation of Labor as the effective date for the eight-hour day. (This is the modern origin of May Day—International Workers' Day—celebrated in many countries.) Numerous strikes occurred in 1886 to support this May 1 deadline, although consistent with the national leadership's emphasis on education rather than conflict, the Knights of Labor encouraged workers to write essays about the eight-hour day rather than strike. In Chicago's Haymarket Square, a rally to protest police repression of May Day strikers ended with police firing into the departing protesters after a bomb was tossed into the police ranks. The bomb thrower was never identified, but the Haymarket Tragedy caused near hysteria that anarchists and radicals were starting an uprising. Depictions in the media were sensationalized. In "the most celebrated trial of the late 19th century," eight anarchist leaders were found guilty of murder for killing the police. The evidence was fabricated, the judge was exceptionally biased, and all the jurors openly admitted to being prejudiced against the defendants. One juror was even a relative of one of the dead police officers. None of this prevented four of the eight defendants from being hanged. - The Knights of Labor was not directly involved in the Haymarket Tragedy, but it was the most visible labor organization at that time and was therefore greatly weakened by the public backlash against organized labor. The Knights of Labor was also undone by employers' antiunion activities, including the use of strikebreakers and labor spies. And the Knights of Labor suffered from conflicts with workers, trade assemblies, and independent trade unions that wanted more vigorous campaigns for improvements in bread-and-butter issues such as wages, hours of work, and working conditions, not moral betterment.

FROM LOCAL TO NATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS

In the 21st century we see working for someone else is natural. Most workers today are employees selling their labor for a wage or a salary, and many work for large organizations with 500 or more employees. This situation is taken for granted because it has been true for a century or more; but it is essential to appreciate that this pattern is the result of tremendous, tumultuous economic, and social changes that occurred in the 1800s—changes typically summarized as "industrialization." At the end of the 1700s, a large majority of free people were self-employed as farmers, shopkeepers, blacksmiths, shoemakers, and the like. In major cities a few skilled workers might have worked as employees for a master craftsman, but these businesses were small and local. The early "large" businesses were in the iron industry and employed perhaps 25 employees. Most individuals, then, controlled when, how, and how hard they worked. Slightly more than 100 years later, U.S. Steel employed 170,000 employees, Ford's Highland Park factory outside Detroit had 15,000 employees, and the era of self-employment was over. Working for a paycheck became widespread; fixed working hours and days, punctuality, and constant work effort replaced autonomous work habits. Business became "big business" characterized by hierarchical, centralized control and concentrated wealth and power. And as emphasized in Chapter 2, the pay was often low, the hours were long and dull, the work effort was intense and dangerous, and supervision was frequently abusive (recall Table 2.1). The roots of the modern labor relations system lie in these massive changes in the nature of work and of industrial society. Naturally, the forms and functions of labor unions paralleled these changes in work and business organization (see Figure 3.1). The earliest examples of unionlike activity in the United States were short-term actions triggered by specific complaints, such as a strike by fishermen on a Maine island in 1636 protesting the withholding of a year's wages or a strike by 20 journeymen tailors in 1768 in New York City protesting a reduction in wages. Not until the 1790s did Philadelphia shoemakers form the first permanent union. The first organizations were local and focused on a single-skilled occupation such as shoemakers, printers, carpenters, and tailors. These local craft unions established work standards and a minimum wage rate; union members agreed not to work for any employer paying less. Their existence, however, was tenuous. Some strikes were ruled to be illegal criminal conspiracies (see Chapter 4), and depressions in 1819 and 1837 severely crippled the early labor unions because union members were desperate for any work they could get. This importance of the legal and economic environment for labor relations is a universal theme from the 18th to the 21st centuries. As business organizations became larger and more national in scope, so too did labor unions. National unions began to develop in the 1850s—necessitated by the ability of manufactured goods to be shipped via railroads, and likely facilitated by the ability of union leaders to travel via railroads. While the budding national unions were mainly craft unions of pre-factory occupations such as printers, plumbers, and railroad engineers, some also included craft occupations in factory settings, especially iron molders and machinists. The iron molders' experiences in stove foundries are illustrative of the 19th-century transformation of work and therefore labor unions: With the advent of the railroads, iron stove manufacturers tried to capture national market share through mass manufacturing methods. Previously each iron molder used skill and discretion to mold an entire stove; but with a mass manufacturing system, the parts of the stove were divided and each molder was relegated to repetitively making one part. The work became impersonal and subject to constant pressure to reduce labor costs—a common trend resulting in the widespread labor problem described in Chapter 2. In Philadelphia, for example, foundry owners tried imposing four pay cuts between 1847 and 1857. The National Molders Union was thus formed in 1859 in reaction to these changing conditions. One year later, it had 44 locals ranging from St. Louis to New York to Toronto. After the Civil War this union became the Iron Molders' International Union, which for a time was the strongest in the country; its features resembled today's unions—centralized and national control, a per capita tax on all union members, creation of a national strike fund to support striking workers, and an emphasis on strong collective bargaining. The next step in the development of U.S. labor organizations was the creation of a national labor federation representing unions from different occupations or industries. The first such federation was the National Labor Union, founded in 1866. The National Labor Union lasted only six years, but it established a precedent for the labor movement by uniting diverse unions into a single federation. Moreover, the National Labor Union contrasts sharply with other U.S. union approaches and therefore helps broaden our thinking about possible union strategies. In particular, the National Labor Union emphasized political activity to bring about legal reform. In addition to campaigning for the eight-hour working day through maximum hour legislation, the National Labor Union favored currency and banking reform, women's voting rights, and ultimately a national labor political party.

A NEW DEAL FOR WORKERS: LEGAL PROTECTION AND INDUSTRIAL UNIONS

On October 24, 1929, the stock market unexpectedly crashed. Consumer purchasing slowed and unemployment increased. Weak farm prices put farmers out of business; panics wiped out savings accounts, and banks closed. And then the economy plunged into the Great Depression. By 1933 the country's gross national product had declined by 29 percent, the steel industry was operating at 12 percent of capacity, the unemployment rate was nearly 25 percent with 15 million unemployed workers, and many others were working only part-time. Many companies that had implemented welfare capitalism programs in the 1920s abandoned them and slashed wages and jobs. Bread lines, evictions, and cardboard settlements of homeless families became common; thousands roamed the country looking for work. Today's unemployment insurance system had yet to be created, and the local poverty relief programs could not keep up with the incredible needs. Although economic activity partially rebounded in the mid-1930s, mass unemployment was a problem throughout the decade, and the Great Depression effectively lasted for the entire 1930s (see Figure 3.4). The widespread poverty is hard to describe in words, and at the time no one knew when it would end. - The severity of the Great Depression shook the intellectual foundations of the U.S. economy. The wisdom of relying on the invisible hand of free markets and the nation's elite—big business in particular—to promote widespread economic prosperity and security was discarded. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected president in 1932 and pledged "a new deal for the American people." The New Deal program of the Roosevelt presidency would ultimately create an active government role in guaranteeing the welfare and security of the population, including federally mandated minimum wages and overtime premiums, unemployment insurance and Social Security systems, and through the Wagner Act in 1935, explicit protections for workers trying to form unions. In this New Deal era, the pluralist industrial relations school replaces a laissez faire (neoliberal) approach as the intellectual foundations of government policy (recall the schools of thought from Chapter 2). Striking for New Labor Legislation - As will be described in Chapter 4, New Deal legislation starting with the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) in 1933 encouraged and emboldened workers to form unions. The AFL unions enjoyed a modest resurgence, and employers rushed to establish company unions to avoid independent unionization. In fact membership in company unions nearly equaled membership in AFL unions, with each group having around 3 million members. But the NIRA was weak, and there were tremendous strikes in 1934 as workers again clashed with employers who refused to recognize their independent unions. - A successful strike for recognition at a Toledo auto parts plant resulted in an extended battle between strikers (joined by the unemployed) and the Ohio National Guard. In Minneapolis, 3,000 truck drivers and helpers struck after the trucking companies refused to bargain with Teamsters Local 574. By infiltrating the union, the business leaders' Citizens Alliance lured strikers into an alley where they were brutally beaten by police. After additional violence, Local 574 agreed to an election to see if workers wanted to unionize, but the employers refused. Martial law was declared, and the National Guard took over the city. Around the same time, all of San Francisco was paralyzed by a general strike. San Francisco longshoremen struck for union recognition and an end to the shape-up system in which foremen selected workers by choosing them from a large crowd of hopefuls each morning. The strike spread up and down the Pacific coast. After police and the National Guard broke through the picket lines, 130,000 workers from many industries and occupations in San Francisco struck in support of the longshoremen. And this was not even the biggest strike of 1934—375,000 textile workers from Maine to Alabama struck to protest the firing of union supporters, the stretch-out (assigning more looms to each worker), and the failure of Roosevelt's New Deal to fulfill its promises of justice for workers. Songs of protest such as "The Big Fat Boss and the Worker" and "Cotton Mill Colic" that were spread by traveling folk singers and radio broadcasts helped give the workers a voice and contributed to a shared sense of oppression and struggle across otherwise isolated mill towns. The Rise of Industrial Unionism - In 1935 Congress passed the Wagner Act, which encouraged unionization, enacted legal protections for workers, and outlawed company unions. The Wagner Act will be presented in detail in Chapter 4; the key point here is that the U.S. federal government became supportive of union organizing and bargaining. By 1941 union membership tripled to about 8.4 million, or 23 percent of workers. This explosion in union membership was certainly connected to the new legal protections of the Wagner Act, but a second issue was also tremendously important: the rise of industrial unionism. Recall that the AFL emphasized craft unionism—organizing skilled workers into unions by craft or occupation. Craft unionism "reflected the industrial world of a half-century earlier: small shops, a simple technology, and the highly skilled workman." In contrast, industrial unionism seeks to organize all the workers in a workplace or industry regardless of their occupations or skill levels. - The mismatch between craft unionism and the emerging modern workplace was vividly revealed in the 1919 steel strike. At the start of a coordinated drive to unionize steelworkers at the end of World War I, no fewer than 24 AFL unions claimed jurisdiction over various occupations. In the ensuing strike for union recognition, the steel companies used all the tactics of the open shop movement—strikebreakers, negative publicity campaigns associating unionism with radicalism, blacklisting, martial law, and state militia—so there were many reasons for the strike's complete failure. But attempting to organize the industry along craft lines with 24 different unions contributed to this failure: the individual unions insisted on following their own procedures, some fought over jurisdictional issues, organizers were uncoordinated, and each union was unwilling to contribute the financial resources needed to counter the steel industry. The steel industry would not be unionized until the late 1930s—and then by an industrial union, not multiple craft unions. - Industrial unions emerged as a significant force in the mid-1930s, but the roots of industrial unionism are much older. The Knights of Labor and the Industrial Workers of the World were both industrial unions. In 1913 Mother Jones accurately saw into the future: "I know Industrial Unionism is coming, and you can't stop it." Mother Jones had extensive experience with industrial unionism because even though it was part of the AFL, the United Mine Workers was an industrial union for the coal industry. By a special AFL exception, it represented all workers in the mines and around them, including skilled workers typically represented by other AFL craft unions, such as carpenters. Several other unions within the AFL, such as the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, were also essentially industrial unions. - The rise of industrialized, mass manufacturing industries created huge numbers of unskilled and semiskilled factory workers in autos, rubber and tires, farm and construction machinery, airplanes, electrical products, and elsewhere. The jurisdictional disputes between competing unions that had plagued the AFL since the 1890s intensified with the rise of these mass manufacturing industries. The issue boiled over at the AFL's convention in 1935. On one side were the old-line, conservative craft union leaders who looked down on the unskilled mass-production workers and who saw industrial unionism as a threat to their own power. One such leader was the other Big Bill in U.S. labor history: Big Bill Hutcheson, leader of the carpenters' union, who wanted jurisdiction over any worker who worked with wood regardless of industry. On the other side were the leaders of unions that were already organized along industrial lines, led by the president of the United Mine Workers, John L. Lewis. Lewis particularly wanted to aggressively organize the steel industry to strengthen his union's power in coal (because coal fed, and was often owned by, the steel industry); he felt that an industrial union approach was necessary (recall the failed 1919 steel strike). Personality conflicts between various leaders magnified the disagreements. At the 1935 convention, Lewis was again unable to muster sufficient AFL support for launching organizing drives of mass-production workers by industrial unions. To underscore this conflict, Hutcheson called Lewis a bastard; the 225-pound Lewis responded by sending the equally large Hutcheson sprawling with a punch to the jaw. - Within a month, Lewis and the leaders of seven other unions formed the Committee for Industrial Organization (CIO) to pursue unionization of the mass manufacturing industries through industrial unionism. These unions were later suspended from the AFL. Mass-production workers were ripe for unionization—the work was physically difficult, the hours were long, and the supervision was arbitrary and abusive. Workers were looking for more equity, but also voice: "When Armour's pork division grievance committee complained to the plant superintendent about a speed-up and the lack of a relief man, Superintendent Renfro responded, "You've been getting along for a good many years this way. What's the difference now?" Crawford Love, hog-kill steward, told him frankly, "The difference is this. I've been up there for eighteen years, and for eighteen years we've been breaking our hearts for the company, but now we've got a chance to say something about it." - The CIO launched or supported organizing drives in the auto, steel, rubber, and radio industries and would become a very visible force in U.S. society. The intense conflicts and ultimate successes of these drives are revealed by the events between 1936 and 1941 in autos and steel. Sitting Down for Union Recognition - Despite the Wagner Act, the major automakers and steelmakers took a hard line against unionizing attempts. As in the 19th century, companies extensively used labor spies to infiltrate unions and thereby weaken or break them. In fact, a government investigation found that one local union of General Motors workers was so thoroughly infiltrated that after the company fired all the workers who were members, only seven members were left. All were officers, and all were spies working for seven different agencies. More generally, the Pinkertons alone infiltrated 93 separate unions. While General Motors relied on espionage, Ford did not hesitate to supplement spying with brass knuckles. Ford's infamous Service Department of over several thousand ex-boxers, violent criminals, and thugs arbitrarily ruled the factories with intimidation and force. Union organizers in several cities were brutally beaten in broad daylight while police watched, and one was even tarred and feathered. - Against this backdrop, the watershed General Motors sit-down strike began in December 1936 when workers in Flint, Michigan, took over two Chevrolet plants by sitting down and refusing to work or leave the plant. At the time, Flint was the heart of General Motors, the world's premiere corporation, and the most important issue was getting General Motors to recognize the United Auto Workers (UAW) as the employees' bargaining agent. Workers in Cleveland, Toledo, Detroit, and elsewhere followed suit and sat down in their factories, but the center of the strike was Flint. Strict discipline was maintained inside the plants by union leaders, and company property was not damaged; food was brought to the strikers by outside union members and the women's auxiliary. In early January 1937 police tried to recapture one plant with tear gas, but in the Battle of the Running Bulls, they were repulsed by fire hoses and strikers who threw two-pound car door hinges at them from the roof. The battle ended when women broke through the police lines and joined the picket line in front of the plant. The governor then ordered the National Guard to Flint to preserve peace, and a stalemate ensued. General Motors refused to negotiate until its plants were evacuated, but the UAW figured that if the plants were evacuated, General Motors would have no incentive to bargain. Faced with a governor who refused to order the National Guard to forcibly evacuate the plants—likely with considerable bloodshed and loss of life—General Motors agreed to recognize the UAW on February 11, 1937, and the six-week strike ended. With the exception of Ford—whose Service Department's violence suppressed unionization until 1941—this victory at General Motors was followed by a strong wave of unionization throughout the auto industry. - The ramifications of the UAW's victory in the General Motors sit-down strike spread beyond the auto industry. In 1936, Lewis and the CIO created the Steel Workers Organizing Committee (SWOC) to unionize the steel industry. The steel industry was full of employee representation plans (company unions), so the companies and the SWOC vied for the workers' support. In the aftermath of the UAW's sit-down strike and with the SWOC apparently winning more support than the company unions, the dominant steelmaker, U.S. Steel, announced in March 1937 that it had secretly negotiated an agreement with Lewis. A group of smaller steel manufacturers matched the terms of U.S. Steel's contract with the SWOC but refused to recognize the union. A government investigation later revealed that in preparation for a strike, one of these steel companies stockpiled eight machine guns, 190 shotguns, 314 rifles, 453 revolvers, over 80,000 rounds of ammunition, and over 3,100 canisters of tear gas. The expected recognition strike began in May 1937. Outside Republic Steel in Chicago, the police defied the courts by arresting peacefully picketing workers. A protest was thus called for Memorial Day. Marching to the steel mill, strikers and their families met a line of police that refused to let them proceed. Police fired into the crowd, killing 10 marchers. Seven of them were shot in the back. More than 50 were injured from gunfire or billy clubs. This event became known as the Memorial Day Massacre, but union recognition would not be achieved until 1941. The SWOC would eventually become the United Steelworkers of America, and with the UAW would be among the most important industrial unions in the postwar period. A New Federation to Rival the AFL - After the CIO organizing drives resulted in viable unions, the CIO renamed itself the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in 1938. This new federation of industrial unions rivaled the AFL federation of craft unions. There were now roughly 35 industrial unions affiliated with the CIO, and their growth was spectacular. Conservative estimates reveal that by 1941 the CIO had 2.85 million members—an increase of 2 million members from 1936. CIO industrial unions dominated the auto, steel, and rubber industries. The wave of CIO energy was not limited to the industrial centers of the Midwest. For example, CIO unions led organizing drives and strikes of Mexican American workers throughout the Southwest and West—such as pecan shellers in Texas, sugar beet harvesters in Colorado, copper miners in Arizona, and cannery workers in California. As such, the CIO achieved the broadest base of support that the U.S. labor movement had ever known: "The CIO had successfully organized the unskilled workers into industrial unions and broken through the narrow lines of craft unionism fostered by the AFL. It had welcomed, as the [AFL] had never done, immigrants, blacks, and women, without regard to race, sex, or nationality." - On the other hand, by the end of the decade the CIO unions were becoming centralized and grassroots initiatives increasingly took a backseat to leadership control. Accompanying this shift was a movement from community-based to workplace-based unionism. With the decreased emphasis on community and an increased portrayal of the workplace and unionism in masculine terms, women were relegated to marginal roles. Most CIO unions "wanted women to join unions, organize auxiliaries, and even shape union culture, but they did not make much room for them on center stage"; and "by reinforcing the patriarchal family, the CIO did not encourage workers to challenge traditional gender relationships as much as ethnic and racial ones." These issues have become significant concerns in the workplace of the 21st century. - It is also important not to overstate the differences between the two federations by the start of World War II. In their first years, the CIO unions relied heavily on aggressive workplace tactics—most visibly demonstrated by the sit-down strikes—and were significantly aided by communists, socialists, and other radicals. But unfavorable legal rulings—most visibly a 1939 Supreme Court decision that sit-down strikes are illegal—set the CIO unions on the path toward embracing the AFL's business unionism philosophy that emphasizes stable workplace collective bargaining to improve wages and working conditions. Moreover, the AFL had a larger membership and made gains during the 1930s as well. Much of the CIO's success was in durable goods manufacturing, where large corporations dominated. The more decentralized AFL unions grew significantly in other sectors with smaller employers: trucking, construction, service industries, and retail trade. Industrial unionism, therefore, might be well suited to mass manufacturing, but other models might better fit other situations.

THE GREAT UPRISING OF 1877

The 1870s ushered in an era of intense and violent labor conflict that would continue into the 20th century. Throughout this period, the rhetoric of protecting the individual liberty to hire or work on terms of one's own choosing was used to justify the armed repression of unions, and the resulting story of labor history is "written in blood." A massive depression in the mid-1870s caused severe unemployment and wage cuts, and union membership plummeted. A six-month coal strike in eastern Pennsylvania in 1875 involved open battles between strikers and company-paid police. The coal company hired an agent of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency—an organization that emerges repeatedly in employers' strikebreaking efforts in U.S. labor history—to infiltrate the miners. The strike ended when the miners agreed to a 20-percent wage reduction, and based on the Pinkerton agent's testimony—perhaps fabricated—10 miners were hanged for killing several mine bosses. But this was just the beginning. In response to a 10-percent wage cut (on top of wage cuts in earlier years of the depression), workers on one railroad and then another, and another, went on strike in July 1877. The strike quickly spread until railroad activity in large sections of the country was affected. Large crowds stopped trains, spiked switches, and took over depots and roundhouses. Two hundred federal troops were first sent to Martinsburg, West Virginia, and violence flared elsewhere. Nine people were killed in rioting in Baltimore; the state militia fired into a crowd in Pittsburgh, killing 20 and prompting a night of conflict, fire, and destruction that resulted in $5 million of railroad property damage. These events became known as the Great Uprising of 1877 because this was much more than a railroad strike. More workers were involved than in any other labor conflict of the 1800s. Many of these were not railroad workers. Coal miners, ironworkers, and others aided railroad workers in many locations. Black longshoring workers in Texas and sewer workers in Kentucky struck for higher pay. Chicago and St. Louis experienced general strikes in which thousands of workers shut down many businesses. State militia and federal troops were used to forcefully end demonstrations and restore order in many locations. Yet despite its widespread intensity, the uprising ended nearly as quickly as it began, and railroad traffic resumed normal operations at the end of the month. The Great Uprising of 1877 is probably more notable for what it represents than what it accomplished. The numerous strikes clearly reflected pent-up grievances of workers in many industries and locations struggling with the forces of industrialization and the conflict between labor and capital. The uprising also demonstrates the shared concerns of workers and is frequently used to define the beginning of the modern era in U.S. labor relations—one in which capital and labor are often sharply at odds. By some accounts, business fears of future labor insurrections led to more aggressive strategies to repress labor activity. Alternatively, by showing that federal and state troops would protect business property, the events of 1877 may have made big business "emboldened to confront labor rather than bargain with it." In either case, the Great Uprising of 1877 laid the foundation for future labor-management conflict, not cooperation. More broadly, the Great Uprising of 1877 can be seen as a "social earthquake." Some of the violent attacks on railroad property may have resulted not from work-related grievances but from frustration with the invasion of railroads into local communities, often against the wishes of local residents and small retail shop owners. But whether rooted in work or community, individuals turned to collective action, protest, and sometimes violence when they felt otherwise powerless.

WORKERS OF THE WORLD UNITE!

The first part of the new century—the early 1900s—was marked by sharp contrasts. The richest 1 percent of households controlled 45 percent of total U.S. wealth—the highest concentration ever. Almost unimaginable wealth was accumulated by industrialists like Carnegie, Rockefeller, Morgan, and Vanderbilt while millions of workers and their families, including many new immigrants, struggled with day-to-day survival. Whether in rural, company-owned towns or urban tenements, families lived in fear of unemployment, accidents, poor health, and making ends meet. While railroad tycoon Jay Gould earned $10,000,000 a year, the average unskilled worker earned $10 a week, which meant his family could barely afford a run-down, two-room (not two-bedroom) apartment without running water. Many children had to work to supplement family incomes. This period was an era of tremendous industrial growth, but also of relatively stagnant wages and dangerous working conditions. The early 20th century was the age of big business. The increased size and power of major corporations were graphically illustrated by the trusts—the companies that were able to monopolize and dominate their industries. By 1905, the Standard Oil Company refined nearly 25 million barrels of oil (85 percent of the market); U.S. Steel had more than 150,000 employees and 200 mills (60 percent of the steel industry), and International Harvester manufactured more than 500,000 agricultural harvesting machines (85 percent of the market). The size of individual factories also continued to grow because the economical use of new mechanized production methods often required a large-scale operation—for example, steel mills were not cost-effective unless they produced at least 2,500 tons a day. The rise of big business created important contrasts, especially between large corporations and individual workers, and between professional managers and unskilled laborers. Scientific management, or "Taylorism" after Frederick Winslow Taylor, decomposed skilled jobs into basic repetitive tasks, creating sharp contrasts between professional, scientifically trained managers and unskilled occupations while also creating a contradiction between "scientific" job design and the assignment of workers based on racial and ethnic biases. When Henry Ford added the assembly line to narrowly defined jobs in 1913, the mass manufacturing model was established for much of the rest of the century. The labor movement was also rife with contrasts. In the Homestead strike skilled and unskilled workers stood together, but this was the exception rather than the norm. Most of the AFL-affiliated craft unions focused exclusively on skilled, white craftsmen and excluded unskilled, minority, immigrant, and female workers. Even the American Railway Union, which embraced unskilled workers, discriminated against African American workers. There was also tension between the dominant craft union approach and a perceived need by other workers and union leaders for industrial unionism—that is, organizing workers of all occupations within an industry into a single union. Though affiliated with the AFL, the United Mine Workers (UMW) is an early example of an industrial union because it tried to unionize all employees in the mining industry, led in part by the colorful Mother Jones. The UMW also stood out from other unions of the time in its acceptance of African American workers. Within the labor movement, divergent views of business unionism and pure and simple unionism were another sharp contrast in this period. During the Pullman strike, the Gompers-led AFL refused to support Eugene Debs's industrial union, the American Railway Union. Although this refusal may partly have reflected a pragmatic decision not to join a losing cause, it also shows a fundamental difference between the conservative business unionism philosophy and more militant alternatives. In fact, as Gompers and other AFL leaders watched judges and the armed forces violently repress strikes and labor demonstrations that were publicly labeled as radical—such as the Great Uprising of 1877 and the eight-hour-day strikes of 1886—the conservatism of business unionism in seeking narrow economic gains for workers rather than more radical reforms to capitalism was reinforced. In contrast, other labor leaders reacted to this repression by pursuing more radical, militant approaches. From 1905 to 1925, the visible radical and militant approach was that of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), often referred to by its nickname the "Wobblies." The perspective of the IWW was cleverly captured by one of its leaders: "I've never read Marx's Capital, but I have the marks of capital all over me." The IWW: Objectives and Strategies - The IWW is the major U.S. example of revolutionary unionism, a philosophy that emphasizes: "the complete harmony of interests of all wage workers as against the representatives of the employing class, and seeks to unite the former, skilled and unskilled together, into one homogeneous fighting organization. It repudiates, or tends to repudiate, the existing institutional order and especially individual ownership of production means, and the wage system." - In terms of the intellectual schools of thought presented in Chapter 2, this philosophy is rooted in critical, Marxist, or radical industrial relations thought that believes the employment relationship is characterized by antagonist class-based conflict. Consequently, revolutionary unionism tries to create working-class solidarity rather than solidarity by occupation or industry and ultimately seeks to overthrow capitalism. From this perspective, the labor movement is seen as an agent for revolution. - Founded in 1905 out of frustration with the discrimination and conservatism of the AFL, the IWW was inclusive and radical. Recall that the American Railway Union lost the Pullman strike when, among other things, the AFL and craft-based railroad unions refused to help. Events like this fostered the IWW's industrial union emphasis on working-class solidarity. Its goal was to form "One Big Union" that embraced all workers across all industries—skilled and unskilled, young and old, native-born and immigrant, white and nonwhite, male and female. The radical component of the IWW's philosophy can also be traced to events like the Pullman strike and miners' strikes, in which the IWW leaders felt that elected officials, judges, police, and the army helped employers break strikes. These IWW leaders turned to more radical viewpoints that emphasized the need for worker control of economic and political institutions. And seeing elected officials and judges as effectively controlled by employers, the IWW leaders felt that reform could not be achieved through voting. Instead direct worker action was emphasized: "As defined by Wobblies, direct action included any step taken by workers at the point of production that improved wages, reduced hours, and bettered conditions. It encompassed conventional strikes, intermittent strikes, silent strikes, passive resistance, sabotage, and the ultimate direct action measure: the general strike." - The mission of the "One Big Union" was therefore to engage in a class struggle with capitalists. - The IWW's direct action philosophy is called syndicalism. Unlike the Knights of Labor, the IWW did not overlook short-term improvements in working conditions; these short-term improvements were viewed as important victories for bettering workers and advancing the larger struggle against the capitalists. Signed contracts, however, were viewed negatively by the IWW as legitimizing the capitalist system and restricting the IWW's ability to choose when to engage in direct action (rather than having to wait until a contract expired). The IWW also developed a rich tapestry of songs, poems, stories, skits, and visual images to convey its message and reinforce working-class solidarity. In fact today's most well-known union song, "Solidarity Forever," was originally a Wobbly song. The IWW: Conflicts and Demise - Consistent with the IWW's inclusiveness, its biggest victory was the Lawrence, Massachusetts, textile workers' strike in 1912. After a wage reduction, the workers spontaneously walked out, and within three days 20,000 employees were on strike. Many of the strikers were Italian immigrants, but there were also significant numbers from Germany, Poland, Russia, and elsewhere—at least 25 nationalities in all. It was an intense strike: Dynamite was planted to discredit the IWW, martial law was declared after a clash killed one worker, the strike leaders were arrested, and police brutality made national news. The strikers maintained their unity, however, and after two months the textile companies agreed to the strikers' demands. The IWW also fought on behalf of miners, loggers, and migratory agricultural workers in the West—sometimes with success, sometimes without. - Unsurprisingly, employers and AFL unions were hostile toward the IWW and its radical agenda. World War I further heightened fears and led to greater repression of the IWW. In fact, as part of an anticommunist red scare, Big Bill Haywood and 100 other Wobblies were found guilty of essentially opposing the war and sent to prison in 1918. An IWW leader was lynched in Montana. And in Bisbee, Arizona, labor radicalism met corporate vigilantism: The sheriff and 2,000 anti-IWW townspeople rounded up 1,200 striking copper miners in the middle of the night at gunpoint, put them on railroad cattle cars, and forcibly deported them to the New Mexico desert, where they were stranded without food or water in the July heat. A railroad company provided transportation; the telegraph company agreed not to let any messages leave Bisbee. The IWW survived in a meaningful way for only a few more years. - Although the IWW exists today (and is actively organizing retail food workers), its greatest activity occurred between 1905 and 1925. Even during this period, there were probably no more than 60,000 Wobblies at any one time; and though its revolutionary aims were not embraced by others, the IWW's inclusiveness and emphasis on social justice provided sparks (and sometimes tactics) for the industrial unions that would mushroom in the 1930s, and some activists today continue to advocate direct action by workers to challenge perceived corporate domination. In the short run, however, the IWW's radicalism likely increased employer hostility toward labor unions.

The current U.S. labor relations system is a product of history. Some of this history is relatively recent, such as the series of teacher strikes in 2018 and 2019, whereas other aspects might seem like ancient history, such as the Great Uprising of 1877; but it is all relevant to a richer understanding of labor relations. Workers' efforts to form unions are better appreciated against the backdrop of changes in the nature of work and the growth of corporate power. The continued emphasis on seniority rights in U.S. union contracts is more logical in the context of the abuses of all-powerful supervisors in the early 1900s. Union hostility toward nonunion forms of employee representation is rooted in corporate manipulation of company unions in the 1930s. U.S. labor laws that emphasize representation elections stem from the historical record of strike activity and labor-management conflict. Moreover, unions and their members tend to have longer memories than corporations and their leaders. Historical events are frequently an integral part of a union's culture, and history therefore continues to influence the perspectives and behaviors of today's union leaders. Consequently, a good manager must appreciate the historical context within which unions operate, make decisions, and form perceptions about management motives not only to better understand unions' roles in society but also to develop good working relationships with union leaders.

Two related yet distinct historical elements are emphasized throughout this chapter: events and organizational strategies. Every student of labor relations should be aware of the major events in U.S. labor history. These events often reveal the leading issues and conflicts of an era, and they altered the course of labor relations. It is thus difficult to understand labor relations without discussing these events. At the same time, the history of labor relations contains a rich tapestry of organizations and strategies. Some of these organizations and strategies exist today; others have passed into the annals of history. A broad historical investigation therefore provides the opportunity to consider a wider range of organizational strategies than currently exists in 21st-century labor relations. This wider analysis sharpens our understanding of each organizational strategy while broadening our ideas for future options. As a key example, today's U.S. unions are dominated by a business unionism philosophy, but an investigation of several historical labor organizations reveals significantly different philosophies. Examination of these philosophies and their accompanying strategies enriches our understanding of business unionism and also provides potential ideas for future labor union strategies. Consideration of major events and organizational strategies in the history of U.S. labor relations also illustrates the twin roles of the environment and individual choice that are so important for understanding outcomes. As this chapter unfolds, pay attention to how the external environment—the economic and political climate, technology, and the like—affects events and organizations, but do not reduce workers, unions, managers, and corporations to mere puppets of the environment. History reveals choices that are actively made by individuals and organizations. This history is more than just labor history—the study of workers and their unions. The historical development of U.S. labor relations also involves important components of social, business, economic, and legal history. The historical development of U.S. labor law is discussed in Chapter 4; our concern for the rest of this chapter is the rich fabric of events, organizations, and strategies that weave together with social, economic, business, and labor history to show the historical development of the U.S. labor relations system.

STAYING UNION-FREE IN THE EARLY 1900s

Until the Great Depression of the 1930s, employer resistance to unions in the 20th century consisted mostly of the open shop movement and then the strategy of welfare capitalism. Craft unions wanted to control the standards of their crafts by (1) restricting entry to skilled workers to maintain high wage levels and (2) having workers rather than employers determine all aspects of work to maintain worker dignity. A central goal of the AFL craft unions was therefore the closed shop—a workplace closed to all except union members, with the union controlling who could become a member. Naturally employers strenuously opposed closed shops because they wanted to control hiring and the nature of work. Beginning around 1903, employers launched a large-scale effort to achieve what they labeled the open shop. This label should not be taken literally—an open shop is not open to all workers, union and nonunion (or white and black). Rather, an open shop is a thoroughly nonunion operation of employees selected by the employer. The open shop movement was therefore a concerted drive by employers and their employers' associations in the early 1900s to create and maintain union-free workplaces. The Open Shop Movement - To the public, the open shop movement portrayed an ideology of individual freedom. Unions were depicted as violating individual liberties by denying workers the ability to choose where to work and on what terms. This was a very public campaign, as underscored by the advertisement from 1921 shown in Figure 3.3. In the advertisement, note the emphasis on individual liberties: "the right to work unmolested" (in other words, without a union), the "independence" of employees, "individual initiative," and the "free exercise . . . of their natural and constitutional rights." This rhetoric of individualism went so far that the open shop movement was renamed the American Plan in the 1920s. Employers further used the rhetoric of individual liberty to argue that unions should not be allowed to interfere with management's control of its private property (its business). As such, the advertisement in Figure 3.3 further equates the open shop with the "liberty and independence" of the employer that protects the employer's "natural and constitutional rights." - Not heavily publicized, however, was that this drive for individual liberty was conducted by sophisticated local and national alliances of powerful employers and employers' associations. In other words, the open shop movement consisted of well-orchestrated collective activity by business. In Minneapolis over 200 employers formed an organization in 1903 called the Citizens Alliance, which openly promoted the open shop and fought unions until the 1940s. In the name of individual liberty, the Citizens Alliance collectively created a trade school to educate skilled workers who were also schooled in the importance of individualism, blacklisted union supporters, operated a network of hundreds of labor spies, and recruited a private army when necessary. Dues payments to the Citizens Alliance were used to provide financial assistance to struck employers (just like a union strike fund); and if this was not enough, the business community threatened to boycott businesses that agreed to a union's terms (just like a union boycott). These activities and the recruitment of strikebreakers were facilitated by national employers' associations such as the National Association of Manufacturers (just as a union might get support from the AFL). Employers were also often successful in using court-ordered injunctions to break strikes (see Chapter 4). These are exactly the types of collective activities that were being publicly vilified as "un-American" when conducted by workers and their unions. And Minneapolis was not unique: There were hundreds of open shop organizations in major cities around the country in the first few decades of the 20th century. - Some employers also exploited racial and ethnic tensions to foster open shops. Employers mixed nationalities or had them complete with one another in a divide-and-rule strategy to prevent workers from acting in solidarity with others. Many AFL craft unions were discriminatory and openly hostile toward anyone except white men. The Pullman Company trained African American workers for skilled positions to keep the skilled labor force divided by racial tension and therefore nonunion. Pullman locations in which the labor movement was weaker saw fewer African American workers hired for skilled positions because the threat of unionization was not as strong. Worker solidarity across occupations was also weakened through racial and gender segregation—on Pullman cars, for example, conductors were always white and porters were always black; men cleaned the exterior of the railroad cars, women the interior. As another example of discrimination, to keep wages low, female clerical workers were fired when they got married. - The open shop movement was sometimes characterized by open warfare. Professional strikebreaking companies provided a complete array of strikebreaking services: trained workers, armed guards, food and medical supplies, cots, and the like. In other cases police and the National Guard repressed strikes, sometimes violently and illegally. During one strike, the National Guard used military tribunals to prosecute more than 100 civilian strikers while denying them defense attorneys; other violations of strikers' civil liberties were common. The Ludlow Massacre is often used to illustrate the extent to which employers would go to maintain an open shop. In 1913, workers struck the Rockefeller-owned coal mines in southern Colorado for union recognition and improved wages and working conditions. The strikers were forced out of their company-owned homes and moved into tent colonies, including one in Ludlow. Guerilla warfare broke out between strikers and the company's private army. The stockholders were told that this strike was over the closed shop; and John D. Rockefeller, Jr., testified before a congressional hearing in April 1914 that he would stand by the principle of the open shop even if, as the question was posed to him, "it costs all your property and kills all your employees." Two weeks later a gun battle broke out between the strikers and the Colorado militia, which was staffed essentially by company hirelings and guards. After the shooting killed perhaps 10 strikers, the militia overran the tent colony at Ludlow. The tents were soaked with kerosene and lit on fire. Two women and 11 children died hiding in a hole under a tent. The Rockefeller-owned mine never did recognize the union. Other indicators of the intensity of conflict in this era include that four million workers were involved in strikes in 1919, including a general strike that paralyzed Seattle; huge coal mine, textile, and steel strikes; and a strike by Boston police. In 1921 over 10,000 frustrated coal miners fought a weeklong armed battle at Blair Mountain, West Virginia, against deputies funded by nonunion mine owners determined to keep the United Mine Workers out of southern West Virginia. Federal troops caused the miners to give up the battle, and the mines remained nonunion until the 1930s. Welfare Capitalism - The negative publicity about this type of violence and the destructiveness of bitter strikes caused some companies to switch from aggressively suppressing unions to avoiding unions through less confrontational methods. Dating back to the late 1800s, some companies implemented a strategy of welfare work, which sought harmony between workers and their employers by creating a family-like company spirit and enhancing the welfare of workers. Elements of welfare work included attractive company housing, recreational programs, libraries, landscaped factory grounds, profit sharing, and pension plans. Initially, this was not accompanied by widespread efforts to change the oppressive nature of the actual jobs or the harsh supervisory methods. - However, in the aftermath of the Ludlow Massacre and the labor shortages and unrest of World War I, the personnel management function was created. In the 1920s, then, welfare work was supplanted by welfare capitalism which sought to win worker loyalty and increase efficiency by improving supervisory practices, implementing orderly hiring and firing procedures, providing wage incentives, offering protective insurance benefits, creating a positive culture, improving the physical work environment and safety, and providing employee voice. Depending on one's perspective, welfare capitalism represents either a sophisticated managerial strategy to control the workplace and prevent unionization, or the beginnings of today's strategic human resource management and high-performance workplaces. Nevertheless, union avoidance by killing the labor movement with kindness was at least one important aspect of welfare capitalism. Note further that employers lobbied against legislating the same types of benefits provided by welfare capitalism; employers wanted their employees to be dependent on, and therefore loyal and tied to, the company—not the government, a local community, or a union (a pattern that continues today). - The most controversial aspect of welfare capitalism—then and now—was the attempt to provide employee voice or industrial democracy through employee representation plans or company unions. One of the first examples was the Rockefeller Plan, crafted to offset the negative publicity of the Ludlow Massacre, in which a committee of equal numbers of managers and elected employee representatives would meet to resolve labor issues. These types of employee representation plans are often called company unions because they are similar to a union in that workers and managers meet to discuss work issues, but they are established and often run by the company. By the mid-1920s, it was estimated that there were over 400 company unions covering more than 1 million workers. - The debate over company unions—which continues today (see Chapter 10)—is whether they provide legitimate employee voice or are management-dominated schemes that are manipulated to keep independent unions out. In other words, are company unions sham unions? Company unions could not strike and did not have the authority to force management to discuss specific issues. But they did provide an open channel of communication with management and a forum to present grievances; to prevent unionization, companies made concessions to the employee representatives at least sometimes. Unlike the AFL craft unions at the time, the Pullman Company's employee representation plans were integrated, and African American workers served as representatives equal to whites. Pullman also negotiated wage increases and other improvements with the employee representation plans several times in the 1920s. However, these agreements coincided with periods of union activity when the threat of unionization was high. The company also discriminated against workers who did not support the employee representation plans. The struggle by the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, an independent union, to organize the Pullman porters was portrayed in no uncertain terms as a drive to break porters from the chains of the company-dominated representation plan. The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters would eventually become the first African American union to sign a contract with a major corporation, but not until the great union upsurge in the New Deal of the 1930s.

WARTIME AND POSTWAR LABOR RELATIONS

World War II was particularly important for the development of U.S. labor relations. War production ended the mass unemployment of the 1930s. This new labor market power allowed unions to strengthen their weak spots—such as at Ford and the smaller steelmakers in 1941. At the same time government leaders wanted to keep union militancy under control, so strikes would not interfere with the production of airplanes, tanks, and other defense products. A National War Labor Board (NWLB) was therefore created by President Roosevelt to prevent labor disputes. The result was that organized labor traded its right to strike in return for enhanced workplace security. This further institutionalized labor unions—union membership rose by six million workers to a union density of 36 percent—and also enhanced the power of union leaders at the expense of the rank and file. The result was a bureaucratic form of unionism as rank-and-file militancy was channeled into legalistic grievance procedures (see Chapter 9). The NWLB also created fringe benefits such as holiday pay, shift differentials, and health insurance benefits to work around wage controls. All these features—bureaucratic, centralized unions, formal grievance procedures, and extensive benefits—remain central in U.S. labor relations today and can be traced to the wartime need for stable production. While there was a significant amount of wartime labor-management cooperation, threats to the traditional dominance of white men in the workplace brought challenges and conflict. Wartime production demands drew women into factory work in unprecedented numbers—think "Rosie the Riveter"—but unions did little to prevent their equally quick postwar purge; instead unionism as a male institution was reinforced. More progress was made integrating African American workers than women. This was not easy. For example, efforts to open up better jobs to African American workers led to hate strikes in Philadelphia, Detroit, and elsewhere as white workers refused to work with nonwhites, sometimes quietly supported by managers in order to weaken unions. And while racial and ethnic challenges would and still continue, supportive unions were able to use seniority systems and grievance procedures to combat discrimination and racism. Cementing the Postwar Model of Labor Relations - The end of World War II brought on the Great Strike Wave of 1945-46. For the 12 months beginning in August 1945, 4,600 strikes occurred involving 4.9 million workers and resulted in nearly 120 million lost worker-days. There were large yet relatively peaceful strikes in autos, steel, coal, rail, oil refining, longshoring, meatpacking, and electrical products. This level of strike activity surpassed any other year in U.S. history. Important causes included decreased employee earnings with the inevitable postwar production slowdown, rising prices with the lifting of wartime price controls, and a renewed drive by management to reassert its workplace control and cost discipline (which had waned during the war because costs could be passed through to government contracts). This strike wave led to major changes in the Wagner Act through the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947 (see Chapter 4). - The strike with the most lasting significance during this wave was the UAW strike at General Motors. Walter Reuther, the ambitious leader of the UAW, wanted to link workers' and consumers' interests and therefore demanded a 30-percent wage increase without an increase in auto prices. Reuther demanded that General Motors open its financial books when it claimed that it could not afford such an increase, and 200,000 General Motors, workers went on strike in November 1945. General Motors was adamant about retaining its right to manage both in the boardroom and on the shop floor. After 113 days Reuther declared victory, but corporate America really won: General Motors did not open its books and retained its right to manage. This established the postwar model of union representation: unions could negotiate for higher wages, better benefits, and favorable seniority provisions, but they would not be involved in production decisions. From this point forward, union contracts increased in length and detail while shop floor activism was curtailed by the workplace rule of law. The workplace rule of law was increasingly enforced by college-educated foremen under pressure to speed up the pace of work; grievance resolution became more formal, and injury rates increased. - The largely bureaucratic nature of U.S. unions was further cemented in the late 1940s and 1950s when opposition groups within the major CIO unions were driven out under the guise of rooting out communists during the beginnings of the Cold War. Allegedly communist-controlled unions were expelled from the CIO. This led to raiding attempts as CIO unions tried to win bargaining rights in units represented by the expelled unions; this raiding activity was in addition to the ongoing raids between AFL and CIO unions. Such raids consumed precious resources for little gain, and in 1955 the AFL and CIO reconciled. A single, united federation was born: the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO). - Public attention to the labor movement in the 1950s largely focused on allegations of union corruption—as captured by the classic 1954 movie On the Waterfront, in which Marlon Brando portrays a boxer wrestling with his guilt over providing muscle for a corrupt union boss on the New Jersey docks. Fears of union corruption and the presence of mafia-infiltrated local unions led to the passage of a major federal law (the Landrum-Griffin Act) in 1959, which will be discussed in the next chapter. The 1960s witnessed the start of another upsurge in union membership—this time among teachers, police, and other employees of various local, state, and federal governments. As in the private sector, public sector workers' attempts to unionize to fight low wages, onerous working conditions, and other indignities date back to the early 1800s. Government employers fought back with yellow dog contracts and restrictive legislation. In 1959 Wisconsin passed the first law protecting public sector collective bargaining; since that time the federal government and a number of other states followed. As a result, public sector union density exploded and today many of the occupations with the highest level of union representation are in the public sector. The development of firefighter unions illustrates the trajectory of public sector unionism (see the accompanying "Public Sector Labor Relations" box). In contrast to this rise in public sector unionism, postwar U.S. union density in the private sector peaked at around 35 percent in the mid-1950s (recall Figure 1.4). A Turbulent End to the 20th Century - For private sector unions, the remaining decades of the 20th century would be years of turbulence and decline (see Figure 3.5). One source of labor movement turbulence was the postwar civil rights movement. The question of race and ethnicity in the U.S. labor movement is a thorny one. There is no question that African American and Mexican American workers faced pervasive discrimination and were often relegated to the most menial, dangerous, and low-paying jobs. Throughout the historical development of U.S. labor relations, there are examples where unions contributed to this problem either passively or actively, and other examples where unions fought to break down discriminatory practices. The AFL craft unions are well known for their history of excluding African American workers, but even progressive CIO leaders like Walter Reuther had difficulties ending discriminatory practices that were embedded in rank-and-file workers and their local unions. Southern workplaces, in particular, remained largely segregated until the 1960s; at paper mills, for example, there were separate entrances, pay clocks, pay windows, bathrooms, water fountains, and cafeterias for blacks and whites. From 1946 to 1953 the CIO aggressively tried to organize workers in the South, but this "Operation Dixie" failed partly because many Southern white workers refused to join together with African American workers. Where unions did exist in the South, black workers were commonly segregated into Jim Crow locals with seniority ladders separate from white workers. As such, labor relations reflected larger societal patterns of discrimination. - During the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s, the CIO's sit-down strikes of the 1930s inspired the sit-ins that desegregated Southern restaurants. While the AFL-CIO generally remained on the sidelines or helped the civil rights movement quietly, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and the UAW contributed significant amounts of money and leadership. In fact, these two unions played instrumental roles in the 1963 March on Washington, famously remembered for Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed discriminatory practices by both employers and unions, but issues of social and economic justice continue to be closely intertwined. In Memphis, the 1968 killing of two African American sanitation workers by an unsafe garbage compactor unleashed years of pent-up frustration over racism and oppression, and over 1,000 black sanitation workers went on strike. For two months participants in the Memphis sanitation strike demanded not only improved wages and working conditions but also civil rights and respect—goals immortalized by their signs, which said simply, "I am a man." The strike was a major civil rights event that included peaceful marches and violent race riots. Martin Luther King was in Memphis supporting the strike in April 1968 when he was assassinated, and the city finally compromised with the strikers two weeks later. The workers won improved wages, promotions on the basis of seniority rather than racism, a nondiscrimination clause, and recognition for their union. - Another source of postwar turbulence for the U.S. labor movement was the economy. The stability of the mass manufacturing system was undermined by the oil crisis of the 1970s followed by increased globalization and financialization (see Chapters 10 and 11). Intense competitive pressures resulted in a period of concession bargaining in the early 1980s. Under the threat of significant job loss, many unions agreed to wage freezes or cuts, benefit reductions, and looser work rules; the most visible examples were in the auto and steel industries. More generally, the 1980s are believed to represent the return of a much more adversarial labor-management climate. In 1981, President Reagan fired the air traffic controllers during the illegal PATCO strike and hired replacement workers (see the "Ethics in Action" feature at the end of this chapter). Many believe that this emboldened private sector employers to take a hard-line approach with their unions. Following the PATCO strike, a number of bitter strikes in the 1980s and 1990s involved management's use of permanent strike replacements: the Phelps-Dodge copper strike in Arizona (1983), the Hormel meatpacking strike in Minnesota (1985), the International Paper strike in Maine (1987), the Greyhound bus strike (1990), the Ravenswood aluminum strike in West Virginia (1990), the Bridgestone-Firestone tire strike in Illinois (1995), and the Detroit newspaper strike (1995), to name just a few. Harkening back to the earlier era of the Pinkertons, the provision of antiunion consultants, armed guards, and surveillance forces continues to be big business. Many of these more recent strikes ended in defeat for the strikers, though in 1997 the Teamsters mobilized rank-and-file militancy, built public support for the plight of part-time workers, and won a highly visible 15-day strike of 185,000 United Parcel Service workers. - Frustration with the direction of the labor movement even resulted in a rare contested election for the leadership of the AFL-CIO. In 1995 John Sweeney, president of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), and a slate of insurgents defeated the longtime officials selected by outgoing AFL-CIO president, Lane Kirkland. Sweeney's subsequent efforts to shake up the AFL-CIO and its affiliate unions included devoting significant resources to union organizing and political mobilization—including a program called Union Summer, in which college students spend a summer working on organizing campaigns. LABOR RELATIONS IN THE 21ST CENTURY - The challenging times of the late 20th century have continued for labor unions into the 21st century (see Figure 3.6). Globalization continues to undermine labor's bargaining power by putting domestic workers into competition with low-cost alternatives. Downward pressures on labor costs are now magnified by the rise of financialization in which corporations are increasingly driven by financial concerns such as boosting stock prices to satisfy Wall Street expectations and increase the value of executive stock options, and in which corporations and private equity firms seek profits through financial transactions rather than through the delivery of valuable goods and services. And private-sector union density has dropped to less than 10 percent. - Sharp increases in the costs of employee benefits are also a problem in many industries. For example, with the threat of Walmart moving into the southern California grocery industry, the unionized grocery chains demanded significant cuts in health insurance benefits. When negotiations broke down and Vons workers went on strike in October 2003, the other grocery chains locked out their employees, and the strike/lockout by 60,000 workers dragged on for four months before the union agreed to the industry's two-tiered wage and benefit system (subsequently ended in the next negotiating round in 2007). In addition to health care, outsourcing and job safety were key issues in a 2015 oil refinery strike involving over 6,000 workers, and outsourcing was again a major issue a year later when over 35,000 Verizon workers went on strike. Safer workloads and greater protections against sexual harassment were among the important demands when hotel workers went on strike in numerous cities in 2018. Even very high-paid employees are not immune to pressures for concessions in a weak economic environment, as illustrated by the 18-week National Football League (NFL) lockout and the 23-week National Basketball Association (NBA) lockout that occurred during 2011. Various companies and unions react differently to such tremendous pressures, and labor relations practices have become more divergent. Some labor-management relationships have become more adversarial, whereas others are trying to create stronger union-management partnerships (see Chapter 10). - In the public sector, union density continues to hover around 35 percent (recall Figure 1.4). Public sector unionism, therefore, is one of the labor movement's strongest areas and cannot be ignored in contemporary labor relations. But even here labor unions now face a challenging environment because public sector unions are seen by conservatives as a roadblock to reducing the size of government. In 2005, newly elected Republican governors in Indiana and Missouri rescinded bargaining rights for state employees. In 2011, a wave of proposed bills in state legislatures sought to weaken or restrict public sector unions and cut public employee pensions. One of the most dramatic of these was enacted in Wisconsin, but not until after the state experienced several weeks of intense worker and union protests. Wisconsin Governor Walker's Budget Repair Bill repealed collective-bargaining rights for some public sector employees, limited collective bargaining for other employees to wages, prohibited dues collection through paycheck deduction, and required annual votes of unionized workers to maintain certification. In 2017, Iowa enacted a law modeled after Wisconsin's. As another example of the turbulent labor relations environment in the public sector, a newly enacted law in Ohio that would also have limited public sector bargaining rights was overturned by voters. Under the Trump administration, Supreme Court vacancies have been filled with conservative judges, which resulted in a major ruling against public sector unions in the 2018 Janus case which will be discussed in Chapter 4. But some public sector workers are pushing back. In 2018, there were very vibrant, successful statewide strikes in West Virginia, Oklahoma, and Arizona by teachers frustrated with low pay and reductions in state funding for public education. Early in 2019, teachers in Los Angeles, Denver, and Oakland also struck for better pay and conditions, while West Virginia teachers walked out a second time to protest legislative attempts to privatize public education. - The economic and political environment continues to pressure the labor movement to change. Union mergers have washed away many historical distinctions between craft and industrial unions. Today diverse occupations and industries are frequently represented in a single general union. The United Steelworkers union represents not only steelworkers but also employees across the entire manufacturing spectrum plus nurses, public school food service workers, and public sector clerical, technical, and professional employees. The Teamsters union literally represents occupations from A (airline pilots) to Z (zookeepers). As a result, general unionism has largely replaced craft unionism and industrial unionism. - Within the AFL-CIO, there have also been debates over how to reverse labor's declining influence, with some unions favoring more emphasis on organizing and less emphasis on political activity. In fact, divisions on this issue led seven large unions that favored organizing over political activity to break-away in 2005 and form a new labor federation, the Change to Win federation. As of 2019, however, only three of the original unions remained in Change to Win; a fourth union is affiliated with both the AFL-CIO and Change to Win. The AFL-CIO also created a community organization called Working America to assist nonunion workers in advocating for their rights through political mobilization and by increasing awareness of steps workers can take to be more empowered on their jobs (see www.fixmyjob.com). Whether the structural changes in the labor movement can overcome the effects of globalization, financialization, and other pressures is a major question for the future of U.S. labor relations. Another challenge for the labor movement is climate change. In 2019, a "Green New Deal" initiative received significant publicity. Among its goals is the eventual use of only clean, renewable, and zero-emission energy sources. Some labor groups such as the Labor Network for Sustainability aggressively support this and other initiatives to address climate change, but unions that represent workers in coal and electrical power generation see this as a threat to jobs in those industries. - Despite these challenges for the labor movement, millions of productive unionized workers go to work each day protected by unionized contracts negotiated without strikes, and there are pockets of vibrancy. SEIU has organized thousands of health care workers, including home care workers. Some unions have reached out to immigrant workers and incorporated their languages, and cultural traditions. In addition to the AFL-CIO's Working America, unions are also increasingly supporting nonunion workers through what has been called "alt-labor"—worker centers like the Restaurant Opportunities Center and other organizations that seek gains through education, protest, lobbying, lawsuits, and other means, especially in situations where formal union recognition is very difficult to achieve such as in the fast-food industry. Perhaps the most visible tactic is the one-day strike/protest to create publicity and worker solidarity, such as the series of fast-food strikes in conjunction with the Fight for $15 starting in 2012. This initiative has resulted in employers increasing wages and lawmakers raising minimum wages. As part of the Fight for 15$ movement, in September 2018 thousands of McDonald's workers in several states struck for a day to demand improved efforts to combat workplace sexual harassment. Separately, two months later, more than 20,000 Google employees worldwide protested for a day to challenge Google's handling of sexual harassment cases. - In conclusion, the largest unions and watershed strikes in various eras often involve traditional blue-collar occupations—railroad workers in the 1870s, skilled craft steelworkers in the 1890s, coal miners in the early 1900s, and semiskilled auto assemblers in the 1930s—but the history of U.S. labor is not strictly a blue-collar affair. During the 20th century waitresses, actors, university clerical workers and professors, teachers, hotel and casino workers, journalists, athletes, agricultural workers, nurses, and airline pilots unionized. Even doctors, university teaching assistants, and nude models have tried to form unions. The details may differ, but the fundamental reasons are universal: to seek greater equity and increased voice in the workplace through collective action with coworkers. Studying labor history reveals the various forces that may cause workers to seek unionization and the wide-ranging organizational and policy responses. And thus the historical record provides a rich foundation for understanding the development of the U.S. labor relations system and options for its future.