United States Labor Movement
United States Labor Movement
The Labor Movement in the United States of America started in the formative years of our nation. Its purpose being to organize workers to strive for better working conditions, reasonable pay and better treatment in the workplace. From it’s beginnings in the early to mid nineteenth century during the Industrial Revolution to the modern era of today, the labor movement has fought hard forming labor parties and labor laws to give the American worker the rights they deserve. One of the earliest and more influential of labor organizations came to be in 1860; The Knights of Labor. The Knights of Labor mission was to “inform, and support working families, and to organize them to better represent their rights” (The Knights of Labor, 2011, ¶1) By the end of the 1800s the Knights had become a national fixture and included all workers into the group such as lawyers, doctors, gamblers and bankers. The main focus of the Knights of Labor were to push for an eight-hour work day; to rid child labor from existence, to do away with convict contract labor as they opposed the source of cheap labor taking jobs away from workers who needed a job; and equal pay for all their workers. In the early goings, they were opposed to the use of strikes however that trend changed and work stoppages had become a very good tool to use. The Knights of Labor had reached its apex in 1886 with over 700,000 members however their organizational structure was not up to the task and the movement was all but abandoned. They remained a fixture in the labor movement until 1949 when the remaining members dropped their affiliation (The Knights of Labor, 2011).
The Labor Movement in the late 1800s experienced a number of incidents that escalated into violence. In 1877; railroad workers in West Virginia protested a ten percent wage cut leveled by Baltimore & Ohio Railroad. The strike occurred during a time of
The Labor Movement in the United States of America started in the formative years of our nation. Its purpose being to organize workers to strive for better working conditions, reasonable pay and better treatment in the workplace. From it’s beginnings in the early to mid nineteenth century during the Industrial Revolution to the modern era of today, the labor movement has fought hard forming labor parties and labor laws to give the American worker the rights they deserve. One of the earliest and more influential of labor organizations came to be in 1860; The Knights of Labor. The Knights of Labor mission was to “inform, and support working families, and to organize them to better represent their rights” (The Knights of Labor, 2011, ¶1) By the end of the 1800s the Knights had become a national fixture and included all workers into the group such as lawyers, doctors, gamblers and bankers. The main focus of the Knights of Labor were to push for an eight-hour work day; to rid child labor from existence, to do away with convict contract labor as they opposed the source of cheap labor taking jobs away from workers who needed a job; and equal pay for all their workers. In the early goings, they were opposed to the use of strikes however that trend changed and work stoppages had become a very good tool to use. The Knights of Labor had reached its apex in 1886 with over 700,000 members however their organizational structure was not up to the task and the movement was all but abandoned. They remained a fixture in the labor movement until 1949 when the remaining members dropped their affiliation (The Knights of Labor, 2011).
The Labor Movement in the late 1800s experienced a number of incidents that escalated into violence. In 1877; railroad workers in West Virginia protested a ten percent wage cut leveled by Baltimore & Ohio Railroad. The strike occurred during a time of
References: Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) History, (2006) Retrieved from: http://www.resource4flsalaw.com/historyoffairlaborstandardsact.html Foner, Phillip S. (1977) The Great Labor Uprising of 1877. New York, New York: Pathfinder Books The Homestead Strike (1999) Retrieved from: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/carnegie/peopleevents/pande04.html The Knights of Labor (2011) Retrieved from: http://www.knightsoflabor.com Kutalik, Chris (2005) What Does the AFL-CIO Split Mean? Retrieved from: http://labornotes.org/node/776 The Labor Union Movement in America (2012) Retrieved from: http://www.socialstudieshelp.com/eco_unionization.htm The National Labor Relations Act (n.d.) Retrieved from: https://www.nlrb.gov/national-labor-relations-act The Pullman Strike: Chicago, 1894 (1998) Retrieved from: http://www.kansasheritage.org/pullman/index.html