A History of Trade Unionism in the United States

by Selig Perlman

Twenty years later the whole situation was changed. The fifties were a decade of extensive construction of railways. Before 1850 there was more traffic by water than by rail. After 1860 the relative importance of land and water transportation was reversed. Furthermore, the most important railway building during the ten years preceding 1860 was the construction of East and West trunk lines; and the sixties were marked by the establishment of through lines for freight and the consolidation of connecting lines. The through freight lines greatly hastened freight traffic and by the consolidations through transportation became doubly efficient.

Arteries of traffic had thus extended from the Eastern coast to the Mississippi Valley. Local markets had widened to embrace half a continent. Competitive menaces had become more serious and threatened from a distance. Local unionism no longer sufficed. Consequently, as we saw, in the labor movement of the sixties the national trade union was supreme.

There were four distinct sets of causes which operated during the sixties to bring about nationalization; two grew out of the changes in transportation, already alluded to, and two were largely independent of such changes.

The first and most far-reaching cause, as illustrated by the stove molders, was the competition of the products of different localities side by side in the same market. Stoves manufactured in Albany, New York, were now displayed in St. Louis by the side of stoves made in Detroit. No longer could the molder in Albany be indifferent to the fate of his fellow craftsman in Louisville. With the molders the nationalization of the organization was destined to proceed to its utmost length. In order that union conditions should be maintained even in the best organized centers, it became necessary to equalize competitive conditions in the various localities. That led to a well-knit national organization to control working conditions, trade rules, and strikes. In other trades, where the competitive area of the product was still restricted to the locality, the paramount nationalizing influence was a more intensive competition for employment between migratory out-of-town journeymen and the locally organized mechanics. This describes the situation in the printing trade, where the bulk of work was newspaper and not book and job printing. Accordingly, the printers did not need to entrust their national officers with anything more than the control of the traveling journeymen and the result was that the local unions remained practically independent.

The third cause of concerted national action in a trade union was the organization of employers. Where the power of a local union began to be threatened by an employers' association, the next logical step was to combine in a national union.

The fourth cause was the application of machinery and the introduction of division of labor, which split up the established trades and laid industry open to invasion by "green hands." The shoemaking industry, which during the sixties had reached the factory stage, illustrates this in a most striking manner. Few other industries experienced anything like a similar change during this period.

Of course, none of the causes of nationalization here enumerated operated in entire isolation. In some trades one cause, in other trades other causes, had the predominating influence. Consequently, in some trades the national union resembled an agglomeration of loosely allied states, each one reserving the right to engage in independent action and expecting from its allies no more than a benevolent neutrality. In other trades, on the contrary, the national union was supreme in declaring industrial war and in making peace, and even claimed absolute right to formulate the civil laws of the trade for times of industrial peace.

The national trade union was, therefore, a response to obvious and pressing necessity. However slow or imperfect may have been the adjustment of internal organizations to the conditions of the trade, still the groove was defined and consequently the amount of possible floundering largely limited. Not so with the next step, namely the national federation of trades. In the sixties we saw the national trade unions join with other local and miscellaneous labor organizations in the National Labor Union upon a political platform of eight-hours and greenbackism. In 1873 the same national unions asserted their rejection of "panaceas" and politics by attempting to create in the National Labor Congress a federation of trades of a strictly economic character. The panic and depression nipped that in the bud. When trade unionism revived in 1879 the national trade unions returned to the idea of a national federation of labor, but this time they followed the model of the British Trades Union Congress, the organization which cares for the legislative interests of British labor. This was the "Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions of the United States and Canada," which was set up in 1881.

It is easy to understand why the unions of the early eighties did not feel the need of a federation on economic lines. The trade unions of today look to the American Federation of Labor for the discharge of important economic functions, therefore it is primarily an economic organization. These functions are the assistance of national trade unions in organizing their trades, the adjustment of disputes between unions claiming the same "jurisdiction," and concerted action in matters of especial importance such as shorter hours, the "open-shop," or boycotts. None of these functions would have been of material importance to the trade unions of the early eighties. Existing in well-defined trades, which were not affected by technical changes, they had no "jurisdictional" disputes; operating at a period of prosperity with full employment and rising wages, they did not realize a necessity for concerted action; the era of the boycotts had not yet begun. As for having a common agency to do the work of organizing, the trade unions of the early eighties had no keen desire to organize any but the skilled workmen; and, since the competition of workmen in small towns had not yet made itself felt, each national trade union strove to organize primarily the workmen of its trade in the larger cities, a function for which its own means were adequate.

The new organization of 1881 was a loose federation of trade and labor unions with a legislative committee at the head, with Samuel Gompers of the cigar makers as a member. The platform was purely legislative and demanded legal incorporation for trade unions,[22] compulsory education for children, the prohibition of child labor under fourteen, uniform apprentice laws, the enforcement of the national eight-hour law, prison labor reform, abolition of the "truck" and "order" system, mechanics' lien, abolition of conspiracy laws as applied to labor organizations, a national bureau of labor statistics, a protective tariff for American labor, an anti-contract immigrant law, and recommended "all trade and labor organizations to secure proper representation in all law-making bodies by means of the ballot, and to use all honorable measures by which this result can be accomplished." Although closely related to the present American Federation of Labor in point of time and personnel of leadership, the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions of the United States and Canada was in reality the precursor of the present state federations of labor, which as specialized parts of the national federation now look after labor legislation.