Regulation of Labor and the Work Place

In 1860 relatively few people worked for a wage. By 1900, however, more than two- thirds of the labor force sold their labor or skills to others for a daily or weekly wage. Children and women (most unmarried) formed an important part of the new economic order. By 1900 more than 700,000 children between the ages of ten and fifteen were at work in nonagricultural jobs, and more than 3.7 million women had entered the wage- earning labor force. The world of work in which they and their male counterparts toiled was often squalid, dangerous, and subject to the fluctuations of the business cycle. Downturns in the economy in 1873-1879, 1884-1886, and 1893-1897 threw hundreds of thousands of people into unemployment. In the Depression of 1893-1897 more than 18 percent of the labor force was unemployed, the greatest collapse in the labor market before the Depression of the 1930s.

These enormous changes in the work place and in the structure of the labor force were translated into two separate developments. The first was an increasing incidence of violent confrontation between labor and capital. A cut in wages, for example, by the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad in 1877 precipitated nationwide rioting that culminated in the destruction of millions of dollars worth of railroad property.

Unionization was the second response to industrialization. Just as capital sought to mobilize its resources, labor gradually accepted that it too would have to bring its collective power to bear. The early unions, such as the Knights of Labor, established in 1871, clung to a republican conception that stressed the individual worth and dignity of workers and that resisted full collectivization. But as labor increasingly became a commodity to be traded in the new world of industrial work, workers' combinations became tighter and more authoritative, a development that culminated in the formation of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) in 1886. Samuel Gompers, the first leader of the AFL, concluded that capitalism was in the United States to stay and that wage earners would have to gain their benefits within the existing system. Part of what labor wanted was legal recognition and protective legislation designed to improve working conditions.

State legislatures responded to developments in the labor market in often contradictory ways. On the one hand, the violence associated with the labor movement was translated into often harsh antiunion statutes. An 1885 Alabama law banned boycotts and picketing that blocked strikebreakers. The measure was entitled "An Act to protect and encourage industry within the State." ²⁰ Rhode Island imposed penalties on strikers who obstructed the movement of streetcars. Illinois, in the wake of Chicago's Haymarket Riot in 1886, passed the first state criminal syndicalism law. These laws, which became pervasive after World War I, established criminal penalties for people who attempted to bring about a change in industrial ownership.

The fear of social disorder that attended the labor movement was also a stimulus to reform. Several states outlawed the blacklist, which employers used to keep union members, once fired, from being rehired. The "yellow dog" contract, which pledged a worker as a condition of employment not to join a union, was also outlawed in several states but persisted in others until the New Deal. Other statutes forbade paying workers in scrip (a certificate constituting a kind of money) and required regular paydays.

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Date: 2015-01-29; view: 688