To begin, there are two terms that are essential to knowing before starting to look at what Unions have done in the history of the United States. First, collective bargaining is a process in which established unions and management negotiate in order to reach a consensus on working conditions as well as packages of compensation. Basically, negotiating issues with policies that have already been put into effect. Also, what a union actually is. A union is an organized group of people (workers) who work collectively to ensure peoples rights and benefits in the work environment. Typically these union workers work for large companies, representing thousands of employees.
History of labor unions:
The first child labor law (1836) said that any child under the age of fifteen would be allowed to be employed unless he or she attended school for 3 months prior to his or her fifteenth birthday. During this time the government was unable to intervene with poor working conditions due to Lassez Faire “hands off”. One of the first unions was The Order of the Knights of Labor, started by Terence V. Powderly in 1869. This union was formed to unionize all American workers. They were responsible for the Alien Contract Labor Law of 1885. This prohibited immigrant laborers to do contracted work. During the 1870’s and 80’s the working conditions were extremely poor and caused many strikes and battles. For example, in Pennsylvania a group called the Molly Maguires burned buildings murdered bosses and other people who they felt like had offended them. Then the Panic of 1873 happened due to a ten percent cut in pay for unorganized railroad workers which caused four eastern rail trunk lines to stop operating for some time.
The Knights of Labor continued to grow even involving African Americans. In 1886 The Haymarket Square Riot went down where union workers came together to fight for an eight hour work day. Soon to follow in 1886 the AFL (American Federation of Labor) started up. They fought for higher wages and shorter work days. Between 1897and 1903 about half of American families didn’t own property and made below the average cost of living for a family of four. At the turn of the century union workers were low because of very few jobs and extremely low wages. In 1905 Mother Jones started the Industrial Workers Union of the World (IWW). In 1914, after the “Machine Gun Massacre” strikers got the attention of the House Mines and Mining Committee and especially President Woodrow Wilson, which created a truce with owners and to form a grievance committee place at each mine. Soon after tis an act was passed saying that unions were no longer against the law and that strikes, boycotting and picketing were no longer in violation of the federal law. Roosevelt set up the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933. This encouraged collective bargaining in unions, set up maximum work hours and minimum wage also, prohibited child labor. This act put almost four million people into industrial jobs. The Supreme Court soon deemed the act unconstitutional and was revised in the Wagner Act. In 1937, Congress of Industrial Organizations emerged led by John L. Lewis they started to unionize industries who were once against being unionized; steel, automobile, textile and public utilities were now unionized. The main goal was to represent workers with collective bargaining and they also introduced the sit-down strike tactic. By 1945 the maximum work week hours was set to forty and the minimum wage was set to forty cents per hour. After World War II wages declined by twelve percent. During the 1950’s people worked under forty hours a week, had an annual vacation of two weeks and had twice the income. After 1965 strong unions began to fragment political parties, embattle the congress and stymie congress’s efforts to heal the nation’s racial, ethnic and urban divisions. During the 1970’s and 80’s women really started to enter the work force and by 1987 almost fifty-five percent of women in the United States were working outside of the house. Today there are every few labor unions still working. In 2005, both the Teamsters and Service Employees union and the United food and Commercial Workers extracted from the union.
I feel like unions are extremely helpful and necessary to the working world and people who are working normal jobs. I think that sometimes the government looses sight of the specific needs of the American working class. The unions are what bridges the two worlds and creates communication of needs and what is going on. Since the union numbers have drastically declined over the past few years that communication has almost ceased to exist and has caused many problems for the economy as well as the definition of the American middle class. Unions may sound “out-dated” however, sometimes even the oldest ways of doing things can continue to work.
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