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Objectives/Essential Questions Why did workers demand changes in working

conditions and wages?

How did labor unions help workers get economic and political influence?

Vocabulary Sweat Shop

Trade Union

Collective Bargining

Strike Breaker

Injunction

• Life was hard for the industrial age worker.

• Industrialization caused many skilled workers to lose their jobs.

• These workers not had to work at jobs in factories for unskilled labor which caused

the to work for poor wages.

• Child labor also led to a decrease in wages for workers.

• Many workers took jobs in dangerous factories called sweatshops.

• These workers had to endure low wages, long hours, and dangerous working

conditions.

Sweatshops were factories in which a middleman, the sweater, guided workers in

clothing production. The sweatshops left many experienced tailors without a job,

because the cheap clothes were preferred by many people.

•During the Industrial Revolution families migrated from the rural farm areas to

the newly industrialized cities to find work.

•Once they got there, things did not look as bright as they did. To survive in

even the lowest level of poverty, families had to have every able member of

the family go to work.

•This led to the high rise in child labor in factories.

•Children worked up to 19 hours a day with only one, one hour break.

•Many children were killed or injured in accidents involving industrial

machinery

During the Industrial Revolution, the economy depended on women to

work in the factories. Women mostly found jobs in domestic service, textile

factories, and coalmines. The women that worked in these factories faced

unsanitary working conditions and dangerous work. Also, as a result of the

need for wages in the growing cash economy, families became dependent on

the wages of women. The average wage in New York state in 1926 for women

employees was $17.41, and for men $31.47. Statistics show that women's wages

are from one-third to one-half less than men's wages. The majority of women

working in the industrial revolution faced a life of hardship.

Labor unions were formed when dissatisfied workers formed in to

groups to demand better pay and working conditions. In 1869 garment cutters formed the Noble and Holy Order of the

Knights of Labor. The members of the labor union met secretly and had

handshakes so that their employers wouldn‟t find out about them.

Something that was unique about this labor union was that its members

included African Americans, women, and unskilled laborers. The Knights

of Labor had more than 700,000 members at its peak.

In 1886, the American Federation of Labor was officially formed. It

represented many skilled workers in various crafts. The President of the

American Federation of Labor was Samuel Gompers. The organization

worked for higher wages, shorter hours, better working conditions, and

the right to bargain collectively with employers.

Samuel Gompers was the first and longest

serving president of the American Federation of

Labor. Under his leadership, the American

Federation of Labor became the largest and most

influential labor federation in the world. It grew

from a small association of 50,000 in 1886 to an

established organization of nearly 3 million in 1924

that had won a permanent place in American

society.

Collective Bargaining is a negotiation between

organized workers and their employer or employers to

determine wages, hours, rules, and working conditions.

The American Federation of Labor pressed for this

right.

Mary Harris “Mother” Jones was very involved in the

struggles of coal miners, and helped at many protests and

strikes. She was a very persuasive speaker, and she had a fiery

personality. One of her best-known activities was leading a

march of miners' wives "who routed strikebreakers with brooms

and mops in the Pennsylvania coalfields in 1902."

Another one of her famous strikes was leading the "children's crusade," a

caravan of striking children from the textile mills of Kensington,

Pennsylvania, to President Theodore Roosevelt's home in Long Island, New

York, in 1903, to dramatize the case for abolishing child labor. Mother Jones

went on to participate in 1915 and 1916 in the strikes of garment workers and

streetcar workers in New York, and in the strike of steel workers in Pittsburgh

in 1919.

The International Ladies Garment Workers Union was

one of the most important and progressive unions in the

1930‟s. It was also once one of the largest Labor Unions of the

United States, and it also contained mostly female members.

In 1909, 20,000 New York shirtwaist makers, mostly women,

launched a fourteen-week strike, called “The Uprising,”

followed several months later by a strike of 60,000 cloak

makers. In the negotiations that followed, the ILGWU was

recognized by the industry and won higher wages as well as

important new benefits for its members, such as health

examinations.

The Triangle Shirtwaist

Factory fire in New York City on

March 25, 1911, was the largest

industrial disaster in the history of

the city of New York, causing the

death of 146 of the 500 garment

workers who either died in the fire or

jumped to their deaths. The fire led

to legislation requiring improved

factory safety standards and helped

spur the growth of the International

Ladies' Garment Workers' Union,

which fought for better working

conditions for sweatshop workers in

that industry.

URL Video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UdNYqBP_5q4

Many strikes took place when Unions responded to

low wages and fired employees. Many of these strikes

ended in violence. Many of the companies hired

strikebreakers to replace the striking workers. During a

strike, if violence occurred, the federal troops would

restore order.

During the nation-wide strike for the 8-hour workday, which

began May 1, 1886, a mass meeting was held in the Chicago Haymarket

to protest a police action of the previous day in which workers were

killed. When police ordered the protest meeting to disperse (peaceful

though it was), a bomb was thrown by an unknown person, killing

several officers. This became known as the "Haymarket Riot." The 8-

Hour Day Movement was destroyed in the nation-wide hysteria, which

followed.

In 1892 there burst out the fury of the so-called Homestead

strike, which was really a lockout, involving on the one hand the iron

and steel workers, who, with a membership of nearly 25,000, were one

of the strongest unions in the country, and on the other the Carnegie

Steel Company. Three years previously the union had been recognized

by the company; indeed, had entered with it into a three-year contract,

at the expiration of which Carnegie wanted the men to take a reduction

of wages. The union declined these terms and on July 1st, before they

could declare a strike, the workers were suddenly locked out.

Before that occurred, however, Andrew Carnegie, already famous as a

major prophet of American „democracy‟, anticipating violence, had hurriedly

turned the command over to the company‟s superintendent, Henry C Frick, a

frank and brutal union-hater, and departed for Europe.

Frick immediately indicated by his action that he meant war to the

bitter end. He erected a wire fence three miles long and 15 feet high around

the works and called upon the Pinkerton Detective Agency to send him 300

gunmen. The locked-out workers heard that the Pinkertons were coming,

and they watched for their arrival. They knew that the gunmen would be

armed and prepared themselves to meet them on their own terms. On the

night of July 5th , a boatload of Pinkertons attempted to land in Homestead.

A battle followed, in which 10 men were killed and three times that number

wounded. At the end the workers got the better of the gunmen, captured the

entire 300, minus the few who were killed, held them prisoners of war for 24

hours, and finally ran them, disarmed, out of town.

Incensed, Frick then called upon the governor of the

state of Pennsylvania for the militia and within a few days the

little mill town of 12,000 was an armed camp. The soldiers

stayed till the end of November, when the strike officially

ended in the utter defeat of the workers. The union‟s treasury

was empty; winter was coming on, and families were going

cold and hungry. In desperation, workers returned to work as

non-unionists.

The problem that caused the Pullman Strike arose after

the panic of 1893, when the workers of Pullman received

several wage cuts that on the average added up to twenty-five

percent. These cuts were bad in themselves, but when added

with Pullman's actions of not lowering the rents for company

owned homes in Pullman, the labor began to unite.

The Pullman Strike of 1894 was the first national

strike in United States history. It, before coming to an end,

involved over 150,000 people and twenty-seven states and

territories. It would temporarily stop the nations railway

system. The entire rail labor force of the nation would walk

away from their jobs. In supporting the capital side of this

strike President Cleveland for the first time in the Nation's

history would send in federal troops, who would fire on and

kill United States Citizens, against the wishes of the states.

Eugene Victor Debs was an American labor and a political

leader. He was one of the founders of the International Labor

Union and the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). He was also

five-time Socialist Party of America candidate for President of the

United States.

In 1893 Debs was elected the first president of the American

Railway Union (ARU). During the Pullman Strike in 1894, Debs

was arrested and charged with contempt of court. He was

sentenced six months in prison.

Exit Slip Why did workers demand changes in working

conditions and wages? List five reasons.

How did labor unions help workers get economic and political influence? List three reasons.


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