February 2011
With the full-scale attack on collective bargaining launched by Wisconsin's Governor Scott Walker, maybe you're wondering how to convince your colleagues, friends or family that unions deserve support. Or perhaps, frankly, you need to hear those arguments yourself. The case is clear: a vibrant, powerful labor movement makes for a better America. Here's the evidence, with links providing more information.
The 1930's was a period of great economic hardship for the American people, a period of upheaval in the social and political structure. Streets were filled with hungry people waiting in breadlines. During the Great Depression, workers also walked the picket lines demanding their rights under laws passed during the New Deal.
The National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), passed in 1933, contained a section guaranteeing to workers a right to organize for the purpose of collective bargaining. Several large and sometimes violent strikes occurred in 1934 involving unions struggling for recognition as collective bargaining agent under the NIRA. Toledo, Minneapolis, and San Francisco were scenes of three of the best known strikes.
The level of strike activity was the highest in American history. Between May, 1933 and July, 1937, 10,000 strikes took place involving some 5,600,000 workers. It was a period of bitter conflict between Capital and Labor.
In May 1935, the NIRA was declared unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court. Its labor provisions, however, were replaced on July 5, 1935 by the National Labor Relations Act, popularly referred to as the Wagner Act.
This act set up elaborate machinery for the determination of collective bargaining agencies and for the protection of labor from unfair practices by employers who might attempt to hinder union organization. By its protection of workers who chose to organize, it went much further than any previous law to encourage a policy of collective bargaining. The steelworkers were among the first to begin organizing under this new law.
Mr. President and Brothers of the American Railway Union:
We struck at Mr. Pullman because we were without hope. We joined the American Railway Union because it gave us a glimmer of hope. Twenty-thousand souls, men, women, and little ones, have their eyes turned toward this convention today; straining eagerly through dark despondency for a glimmer of the heaven-sent message which you alone can give us on this earth.
Pullman, both the man and the town, is an ulcer on the body politic. He owns the houses, the schoolhouse, and the churches of God in the town he gave his once humble name.
And, thus, the merry war -- the dance of skeletons bathed in human tears -- goes on; and it will go on, brothers, forever unless you, the American Railway Union, stop it; end it; crush it out.
And so I say, come along with us, for decent conditions everywhere!
Within the year the ARU had 125 locals, as thousands rushed to join the new type of union. Whole lodges of established craft unions voted to affiliate with the ARU---and just in time for a fight!
The Great Northern Railroad had begun cutting wages in August of 1893, with more cuts made in January and in March of 1894. In April, ARU workers voted to strike. The Great Northern was completely shut down for 18 days, and wages were restored as a result of an arbitration award.. Workers were joining the ARU at the rate of 2,000 a day!
The Pullman Palace Car workers were among them. The Pullman shop workers went on a strike of their own (also against wage cuts) in May of 1894. After hearing a stirring address by Jennie Curtis, the youthful leader of the women workers in the Pullman Shops, a convention of the American Railway Union voted to support the Pullman workers by refusing to work any trains that included Pullman cars.
Thus, the Pullman Strike escalated into a nation-wide struggle between the railroad companies and the ARU. The union boycott of Pullman cars was extremely effective, particularly on the transcontinental lines extending west from Chicago.
The use of army troops brought about a bitter dispute pitting the Governor of Illinois and the Mayor of Chicago against President Grover Cleveland, who had ordered the troops sent in. And that led to the eventual defeat of Cleveland in his bid for renomination by the Democratic Party two years later. In the process of this epic tragedy, people were killed, the American Railway Union was destroyed, the Pullman workers were forced back to work on the company's terms, and George Pullman became a reviled caricature of the hard-hearted and unjust corporate Tycoon---all in order to keep labor in its place.
Recipe for Disaster
A "recession," as we would call it now, gripped the nation's economy beginning in 1893. Orders for Pullman cars fell off and management began a program of lay-offs and wage cuts. The cuts, applied not to managerial employees but only to the hourly workers, averaged 25 percent. Since Pullman wages were close to the subsistence level, it was a recipe for disaster. The situation was all the more desperate for the workers who lived in the town, because the company refused to lower the rents. Even more galling, the company made sure it collected the rents---right out of the pay! The company's control of the town (and the people in it) was close to absolute. Even the Green Stone Church was the company's property. Its use was rented out for religious services for a fee. Pullman expected the church building to earn the usual six percent return on investment. Indeed, George Pullman, expected the church building to be rented by various denominations, their services to operate much like the shifts in his shops.
The National Park Service (NPS) Theme Study in American Labor History offered the Newberry Library a unique opportunity to negotiate the terrain between preservation, memory, and labor history. The process of determining national significance and finding extant sites for labor history has raised important questions about the relationship and compatibility of preservation and labor history.
Challenging the Labor History Theme Study is the need to merge the NPS criteria for preservation with recent scholarship on labor history, and make labor history visible through landmark preservation. The attempt to find a suitable site for recognizing the national significance of the 1886 Haymarket incident in Chicago offers an interesting example of the difficulties in achieving this goal, but also in how doing so might help us broaden our understanding of memory, history, and authenticity.
Historians consider Haymarket one of the seminal events in the history of American labor. On May 1, 1886, close to 300,000 strikers nationwide and 40,000 in Chicago took part in demonstrations for the eight-hour day. This movement was part of an intern ational struggle for workers' rights, and the heart of the movement was in Chicago, where the anarchist International Working Peoples' Association (IWPA) played a central role in organizing the May Day strikes. On May 4, members of the IWPA organized a rally at Haymarket Square to protest police brutality against striking workers on the South Side. As the last speaker finished his remarks, police marched in and demanded an end to the gathering. Then an unknown assailant threw a bomb into the crowd, killing and wounding several police officers and protesters. Police apprehended eight anarchists on charges of conspiracy to commit murder. The trial and subsequent execution of four of the men--Albert Parsons, August Spies, Adolf Fischer, and George Engel--has served as enduring symbol of labor's struggles for justice.
(Delivered by Captain William P. Black, Attorney for the Haymarket defendants, who had been executed on November 11, 1887.)
"I must not keep you long, and yet there is one thing that I specially want to say, because doubtless in this great throng there stand many who misapprehended their position and their views.
"They were called Anarchists. They were painted and presented to the world as men loving violence, riot, and bloodshed for their own sake; as men full of an unextinguishable and causeless hatred against existing order. Nothing could be further from the truth.
"They were men who loved peace, men of gentle instincts, men of gracious tenderness of heart, loved by those who knew them, trusted by those who came to understand the loyalty and purety of their lives.
"And the Anarchy of which they spoke and taught--what was it, but an attempt to answer the question, 'After the revolution what?' They believed--ah! I would that there were no grounds for this belief--that there was that of wrong and hardship in the existing order which pointed to conflict, because they believed that greed and selfishness would not surrender, of their own volition, unto righteousness.
Exiled 40 years in the political wilderness, a major party triumphs, led by a self-made real estate tycoon who captures the governor's office. Within six months, ignoring threats to his own and his party's future, this leader moves to redress one of the most shameful injustices in the state's history.
A good scenario for a movie, perhaps with Frank Capra directing, Jimmy Stewart playing the governor and Lionel Barrymore as a bigoted, reactionary newspaper editor out to ruin the governor. However, this is not a script treatment but reality--events that occurred a century ago in Springfield, Illinois when Governor John Peter Altgeld dared to defy the combined financial, political, and journalistic powers of the state simply to do the right thing.
Today, the notion of freeing three innocent men from the jail cells where they had languished for seven years seems not only logical but popular. But when Altgeld boldly scrawled his name across the pardons for Samuel Fielden, Oscar Neebe, and Michael Schwab on June 26, 1893, he unleashed upon himself a torrent of political and personal abuse from such "respectable" organs as the Chicago Tribune and the New York Times that has rarely been matched.
Read more: Governor John Peter Altgeld Pardons the Haymarket Prisoners
The chief political right of the citizen in our government based upon the popular will, as regulated by law, is the right of suffrage; but to that right two others are auxilary and of almost equal importance. 2. the right of the people to assemble in a peaceable manner to consult for the common good.
These are among the fundamental principles of government and guaranteed by our Constitution. Section 17, article 2 of the bill of rights declares: The people have a right to assemble in a peaceable manner to consult for the common good, to make known their opinions to their representatives and apply for redress of grievances.
Jurists do not regard these declarations of the Bills of Rights as creating, or conferring the rights, but as a guarantee against their deprivation or infringement by any of the powers or agencies of the government.
The rights, themselves, are regarded as natural inalienable rights belonging to every individual, or as political and based upon, or rising from principles inherent in the very nature of a system of free government.
The right of the people to assemble in a peaceable manner to consult for the common good being a constitutional right, it can be exercised and enjoyed within the scope and spirit of that provision of the Constitution, independently of every other power of the state government.
August Spies, Haymarket Martyr
Five score years so soon are gone
That crown that fateful hanging day,
Yet still the years live on and on
And never will they go away!
Eight doomed martyrs spoke their dreams:
An eight-hour day, their modest hope;
For such effrontery it seems
Four lives were snatched by hangman's rope!
But by a miracle of fate
The voices still ring loud and clear;
The voices stilled by cruel hate
Are heard today, this hundreth year!
So many years have passed them by,
Yet louder still the timeless call
Rings 'round the world, a battle cry
For workers' rights, for peace for all!
Raise high the flag, you workers brave,
March strong and steady, side by side,
On First of May this hundredth year,
So not in vain those martyrs died!
by Susan Kling
May, 1990
The story of the Haymarket Martyrs, and their monument in Forest Home Cemetery, begins at a convention of the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions in 1884. The Federation (the predecessor to the American Federation of Labor) called for a great movement to win the 8-hour workday, which would climax on May 1, 1886.
The plan was to spend two years urging all American employers to adopt a standard 8-hour day, instead of the 10 to 12, even up to 16-hour days that were prevalent. After May 1 of 1886, all workers not yet on an 8-hour schedule, were to cease work in a nation-wide strike until their employer would meet the demand.
80,000 Marched
Although some employers did meet the deadline, many did not. Accordingly, great demonstrations took place on May 1 all across the country. Chicago's was the biggest with an estimated 80,000 marching on Michigan Avenue, much to the alarm of Chicago's business leaders and newspapers who saw it as foreshadowing "revolution," and demanded a police crackdown.
Illinois author, Victor Hicken describes the origins of political radicalism among miners in central and southern Illinois.
Read more: Mine Union Radicalism In Macoupin and Montgomery Counties, IL
After the Civil War, the availability of natural resources, new inventions, and a receptive market combined to fuel an industrial boom. The demand for labor grew, and in the late 19th and early 20th centuries many children were drawn into the labor force. This article and exercise addresses the issue of child labor through the photographs of Lewis Hine. It was written by Linda Darus Clark, a teacher at Padua Franciscan High School in Parma, Ohio and is reposted courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration.
Read more: The Photographs of Lewis Hine: The Documentation of Child Labor
"Mother" Jones was American Labor's best know "agitator" in the turn of the century era. She was especially close to the coal miners whom she referred to as her "boys," but she went anywhere when called on for help.
"Solidarity Forever," the most often sung of all labor songs, was written in 1915 by IWW-member Ralph Chaplin.
A famous labor organizer of the early 20th Century, killed by deputies during a Pennsylvania coal mine strike.
An account of issues, events, and personalities associated with coal mining in the latter part of the 19th century to early 20th. Did you know that John L. Lewis worked in the northern fields?
A celebration held October 11, 1998 marks the centennial of the Battle of Virden
He rose from boy laborer in the mines to become the president of the United Mine Workers of America.
Page 1 of 3
Illinois Labor History SocietyWebsite by WebTrax Studio
based on a template by RocketTheme