T HE O RGANIZED L ABOR M OVEMENT 13.3

O BJECTIVES Asses the problems that workers face in the late 1800s. Compare the goals and strategies of different labor organizations. Analyze the causes and effects of strikes.

K EY P ARTS Workers Endure Hardships Labor Unions Form Strikes Rock the Nation

I NTRODUCTION Read section 13.3 Answer questions 5&6.

W ORKERS E NDURE H ARDSHIP The industrial expansion in the United States made the American economy grow by leaps bounds. In the late 1800s factory owners would try to maximize profits and employed people who would work for low wages. Immigrants made up a large percentage of these workers.

C ONT. Factory workers would work 12 hours a day, 6 days a week in hot, dark, and dirty workhouses known as sweatshops. Factory owners strictly monitored work time and production of their employees to maximize efficiency and production. By the end of the 1800s nearly one in five children between the ages of worked rather than going to school.

C ONT.. This lead to the stunting of the children's growth both physically and mentally. Women also entered the workforce as laundresses, telegraph operators, and typists. But most women worked in the factories. Company towns were isolated communities near workplaces designed to force the people who live their to work in the nearby factories.

C ONT … Factory owners would own the company town’s general store, and forced his laborers to buy their goods from there and also allowed credit; with a high interest rate. This means with the low income of the employees they would purchase things on credit to survive but as soon as their paycheck came in most of the time all of it had to paying off their debt. Ultimately enslaving them to their work.

L ABOR U NIONS F ORM In the 1820s factory workers tried to gain more power against employers by using the technique of collective bargaining. Some strikes were local but often they occurred over several states. The first national labor union was formed in 1834 called the National Trades Union.

C ONT. In the 1830s a movement called socialism spread throughout Europe. This is an economic and political philosophy that favors public instead of private control of property and income. Socialist’s believe that society at large should take charge of a nations wealth. In 1848 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels expanded on the ideas of socialism in a treatise or pamphlet entitled Communist Manifesto.

C ONT.. This pamphlet denounced capitalism and predicted that workers would overturn it. This did not line up well with the American ideals of free enterprise, private property and individual liberty. The wealthy in particular opposed socialism because it threatened their fortunes.

C ONT … In 1869 Uriah Smith Stephens founded the labor union called the Knights of Labor. They worked largely as a secret society devoted to broad social reform such as replacing capitalism with workers’ cooperatives. In 1886 Samuel Gompers formed the American Federation of Labor which was not as successful as the Knights of labor due to the high dues for membership and not allowing women into the union.

S TRIKES R OCK THE N ATION As membership in labor unions rose and labor activists became more skilled in organizing large- scale protests. On May 1, 1886 thousands of workers mounted a national demonstration for an eight hour workday in several cities. Fights broke out in the strikes and on May 4, a protestor threw a bomb that killed a dozens of people both police and protestors.

C ONT. This violence caused the knights of labor to fizzle out because people were not willing to go that far. Strikes would continue throughout the late 1800s. The Homestead Strike was part of an epidemic of steelworkers’ and miners’ strikes that took place as economic depression spread across America.

C ONT.. The Pullman Strike consisted of 300,000 railroad workers walking away from their jobs. This halted railroad traffic and mail delivery. Railroad owners. Grover Cleveland send in federal troops to end the strike, and they did so successfully. The strikes initially had good intentions but ultimately lead to the great depression.