The Labor Movement in the United States of America – Part 5

Presented at the September 2007 party general meeting in Genoa

Trade union activity resumes

We saw how the early 1830s were characterized by renewed trade union activity, partly owing to a general worsening in working class living standards. A large number of banks seemed to pop up from nowhere following the destruction of the Central Bank by Andrew Jackson; banks which flooded the country with paper money and triggered a serious inflationary spiral. We recall that the North had always been the stronghold of the pro-centralization “federalist” party, which advocated strong federal government and the creation of a powerful Union Bank; objectives which, especially to begin with, served commercial and later industrial interests in the North. The interests of the South were instead better represented by the “democratic” party, which supported decentralization and maximum autonomy for the individual states, fearful that the central government could end up in the hands of a financial oligarchy. In addition this party defended the interests of agriculture against those of other economic sectors and small enterprises against the large. These objectives were shared not only by the farming population in the South, but also by a large part of the popular masses in the North, composed in the main of small-holders and artisans.

Between 1834 and 1836 the general price index rose by 25%, and prime necessities much higher. In 1836 a bushel of wheat cost $12 compared to $5 two years earlier. Rents rose from $25 to $40 over the same period. Furthermore, the jobs of skilled workers were being threatened by an inexorable and ever-growing division of labor. Added to which the employers, emboldened by the crisis, became increasingly strict in the workplace, blatantly ignoring the wage levels set by the professional associations.

The hatters in Baltimore and the carpenters in New York were the first to react. In 1833 they launched an agitation which ten years earlier would have been a purely local affair, whereas now that the Working Men had managed to link up the working class in different areas and different professions, it had a much wider impact. The skilled workers in both cities, by now well on the road to building bona fide trade unions of their own, put their hands in their pockets. The tailors and building workers of New York contributed $300 to the carpenters’ strike fund and the printers met to discuss the possibility of going out in sympathy. In the same city, a month after these unprecedented events, the General Trades Union (GTU) was formed, the first city-wide confederation of skilled workers, precursor of the future trades’ councils and the Italian Camere del Lavoro. The example was followed in Philadelphia, Boston, Baltimore and Washington, before crossing the Appalachians and spreading to the workers of Louisville, Cincinnati and other cities in the Midwest.

This trade union phase of the working class movement was more restricted geographically than the political phase which preceded it, but its influence was more deeply felt among broader sections of the urban proletariat. None of the trade unions admitted women yet and only those in Philadelphia allowed unskilled workers to join, but all of them experienced growth as workers from the most difficult and worst paid trades joined up. Thus more privileged workers such as jewelers and goldsmiths joined unions on a par with those working at the loom and established bonds of solidarity. In 1835 the General Trades Union of Philadelphia numbered no fewer than 53 sections, three times more than the old Mechanics’ Union, and one more than its counterpart in New York. It is estimated that across the entire country between a fifth and third of all workers joined these federations, the highest figure before the Civil War.

Struggles were particularly fierce in the sectors where women predominated. Female wage labor was concentrated in only a few sectors of production such as textiles. Despite the fact they were easier to blackmail than men, women often proved to be far more militant and courageous; and even if their bitter struggles often ended in defeat, they managed to win a fair few battles as well. In certain cases they received solidarity from the male workers’ associations, in Philadelphia for instance, but in general male workers, white male workers, that is, were not in favor of women entering the trades for reasons analogous to those behind their ostracism of black workers, slave or free. The New York tailors addressed the 1,600 strong Tailoresses’ Society with the disparaging comment that “the physical characteristics of women and their moral sensibilities” meant they were more suited to domestic activities. The National Trades Union, an assembly of town-based trade unionists which met annually between 1834 and 1836, prepared a report on female labor in 1836. Although it supported the unionization of all female workers, the report’s outlook was gloomy, predicting a future in which women’s labor and mechanization would “render male labor superfluous”. The brutal conclusion was that the employment of women “must be gradually eliminated”. Faced with opposition from a still immature male labor movement, along with objective difficulties in the labor market (the work of women was in general less physical and there was a high turnover rate, not least because women sooner or later tended to get married and leave the factory, which also resulted in a lack of deeply rooted traditions of struggle) opportunities for the unionization of women were obviously severely restricted.

Male trade unionism had a better time of it. In fact, is difficult in fact to think of a better advertisement for workers’ associations than the strikes of 1835. These awakened the combativeness of workers in trades with no previous tradition of struggle, and which joined the GTU. The existing trade unions gained an influx of new members, ranging from poor immigrants to evangelical Christians, and started to co-ordinate their activities across different cities. Printers, shoemakers and carpenters held national meetings to agree on the regulation of apprenticeships, to fix uniform wage rates and to adopt membership cards that allowed migrant workers the possibility of transferring their union membership across different localities.

Few improvements were gained, however, as most of their attention and energy was absorbed by the struggle to keep up with inflation, which gave rise to a wave of strikes: in 1836 the New York workers stopped working on at least ten occasions and the Philadelphia workers went out on strike even more often. These strikes were made possible by GTU funds and by extraordinary expressions of solidarity by the individual trade unions. Even if the local trade union remained the principal weapon of solidarity and struggle, efforts to build national organizations continued. But the improvement of canal and railroad transportation made it easier for employers to attack the local trade unions through blacklists and the shipment of scabs from one area to another. The workers understood well enough that if wages were lower in one part of the country the bosses would be compelled by the laws of competition to reduce wages elsewhere. Workers in some trades were successful in their attempts to build larger national trade union networks, but none of these would last for long. One of them was the National Trades Union, referred to above.

The strike wave of 1836 triggered the inevitable response from employers. In New York and Philadelphia the employers formed their own associations, which set themselves the task of defeating strikes and destroying the unions. The bosses in New York were particularly successful in their campaign, receiving the backing of judges and the police. The owner of a stone-cutting firm in New York won a suit for damages against striking workers; clothes dealers got twenty workers jailed for conspiracy, the honorable judge declaring that “this isn’t simply a conflict between workers and entrepreneurs, but a struggle on which depends the entire harmony of the union”. While judges plied their dirty trade in the courthouses, battles were being fought in the streets: swarms of policemen were sent in to repress striking dockworkers who were calling for wage increases; when, after long and repeated clashes, the strikes still continued, the city’s mayor did not hesitate to send in the militia, forcing the workers back to work at gunpoint. It was a similar story in Philadelphia, where the unsuccessful attempts to repress longshoremen prompted the mayor to have the union leaders arrested and thrown into jail. In both cities there was a very decisive response from the workers with a demonstration of at least 30,000 workers in New York, which was an entirely new phenomenon. In Philadelphia it was immediately decided to allow longshoremen to join the GTU, who up to then had been excluded because they were unskilled.

In fact these were not the first occasions that the employers had called on the judiciary, police and militia to intervene. In 1829 construction workers on the Chesapeake-Ohio canal were arrested after they went on strike, and then shortly after released. And we have already mentioned the shoemakers of Geneva in New York State, who were arrested for conspiracy in 1833 and slung into jail. Only in 1842 did the Supreme Court of Massachusetts declare that these old conspiracy laws, of English origin, did not apply to the trade unions.

At this point it is worth recording the significance of the militia. In colonial America the militia was based on the tradition of the fyrd, an institution of the European Anglo-Saxon tribes which imposed military service on all free men. It was employed against Native Americans in the period when British regular forces were not yet in place. During the American Revolution, the militia, known as the minutemen, made up the bulk of the American military forces and it also functioned as a reserve force from which regular soldiers could be recruited. The militia would carry out a similar role during the War of 1812 against the British and during the American Civil War, after which it would fall into disuse. But in most of the States volunteer units were formed, drawing on the better off strata (i.e. from those who could afford to pay for a uniform) and these were placed under the control of the State governor. In the 1870s and 1880s these units would be become known as the National Guard, and the State governors would use them to repress workers’ strikes; indeed we will see how this corps, under their new name, would be used ever more frequently by the bourgeoisie as an instrument of repression.

Meanwhile intellectuals and political radicals were rather worried by the turn of events: despite the undeniable gains made in the period between 1828 and 1836, they feared that the strike wave of “might degenerate” into an endless cycle of strikes, which would distract attention away from the “higher” aims of “social reconstruction”, that is putting a brake on the “competitive frenzy” (their definition of capitalism) and building alternatives to bourgeois institutions. In the summer of 1836 radicals started to warn about the dissipation of energy and “waste of resources” that trade union struggles represented. The crisis meant they had an attentive audience.

Illusory alternatives

The crisis of 1837 dealt a tremendous blow to trade union activity. Production virtually ground to a halt and thousands upon thousands of workers were cast into the ranks of the unemployed. By January 1838 there were 50,000 unemployed in New York alone, with an additional 200,000 defined as “in utter and hopeless distress with no means of surviving the winter but those provided by charity”. It was the same story in Philadelphia, Boston, Baltimore and other manufacturing cities.

With a third of the working class unemployed and most of the others working only part-time, the trade unions of the 1830s would disappear, one after the other. This included the National Trades Union and its associated labor newspapers. Of course this process was accelerated by an offensive on the part of the employers, who saw an opportunity to smash the workers’ movement. So, notwithstanding a few magnificent cases of intransigent resistance, the bosses would win the day, and by 1839 wage cuts ranging from 30 per cent to 50 percent had been forced on the workers.

In these circumstances alternatives to direct action against the bosses would gain a hearing not only among the radical petty bourgeoisie but also among workers. Some claimed that the only solution lay in prayer and spiritual comfort; others that the workers could still elevate themselves mentally, despite what the factory system was doing to their body and spirit.

Some saw the origins of the people’s suffering in the nature of capitalism: a few capitalists had taken control of the means of production and used this control not for the welfare of the people, but for their own profits. Whenever these profits stopped, they shut down production, throwing thousands out of work, and misery would spread throughout the land. The solution, according to this school of thought, lay in a new social order that would abolish all types of slavery and oppression by restoring control over productive forces to the people. Only such a society could usher in an era of universal freedom, peace and harmony in place of war, discord and suffering. To achieve the new social order all that was necessary was for the rich and powerful to endorse the scheme and support it financially; all could then participate in the building of the new communal co-operative society. These were the visions of the Utopian Socialists, in particular the American disciples of two great European thinkers, Robert Owen and Charles Fourier.

We have already covered this phase of proletarian history on numerous occasions since, and a masterly critique can be found in the early writings of Marx and Engels, so we won’t dwell on it here. But suffice to mention that the influence of the Owenite movement in America can be traced back to 1825, when it was greeted with much enthusiasm and a certain degree of success. Numerous colonies were immediately established in several States but these soon failed, and none of them survived beyond 1828. Owen returned to America in 1845 on a speaking tour, and that was about it.

But whereas Owen intended to abolish private property so that technical progress could be exploited in the workers’ interests rather than serving only to increase employers’ profits, Fourier intended to preserve it, preaching a return to the land and condemning industrial production as the worst of all evils. The ideas of Fourier, who never set foot in America, were supported there by his disciple Albert Brisbane. In 1843 several colonies known as phalanxes or phalanges were founded, but all of which, with a couple of exceptions, closed down by the end of the year. Despite the failure of the utopian colonies the influence of utopianism as an ideology continued to exert a certain influence over the working class. What had nevertheless become clear was that a new social system couldn’t be introduced from scratch, bit by bit, and powered only by the force of conviction.

Producers’ (rather than consumers’) co-operatives first appeared in various cities in the early 1830s. They would soon be swept away in the impending crisis but the firm conviction remained among many workers that the only way to improve their lives was through new forms of production and distribution, and this would pave the way for a revival of the co-operative movement in the 40s and 50s. In the minds of the theorists like Blanc in Europe, co-operativism would slowly supplant, by force of example, the bourgeois economic system; but as far as the workers were concerned its value lay instead in the degree to which it resolved their immediate problems.

As in the case of the utopians, we have also already criticized (with particular reference to the history of the English labor movement) the co-operative phase that the working class passed through at a certain, primitive, stage in its development, a critique that need not be repeated here. Like the utopian colonies, In America the co-operative movement met with failure as well. This was particularly true of the producers’ co-operatives, whose weak point was their chronic lack of capital, which held back investment and rendered them less able to resist the ruthless competition of individual producers, who didn’t hesitate to sell below cost to wear down their resistance.

The consumers’ co-operative movement arose a bit later, at the height of the crisis, but only really took off in 1845, when the Working Men’s Protective Union was founded in Boston. This initiative, soon taken as a model for hundreds of other similar associations, had as its principal aim the acquisition of the necessities of life at lower prices for its members, who also benefited from sickness provision and old-age insurance. These co-operatives fared better than the others, lasting up to the outbreak of the war; but in the end they too were undermined by the same forces which had brought the others to their knees. Some of the movement’s theoreticians would express their disgust at the “meanness” of the workers, who only seemed interested in saving a few dollars.

The second great evangelical revival of 1840-43, which gained a broad following within the proletariat, symbolized the idealistic vulnerability of the workers. Huge numbers of “missionaries” traveled through town and countryside to ensnare people experiencing difficult times, partly with inspirational words, but also with the sweet smell of hot soup. The prophets of the new word convinced poverty-stricken workers that Christ had brought hard times to punish the sins of the world, but that he was preparing better times ahead and salvation for those who mended their ways; and the churches filled up.

Naturally abstinence from alcohol was requirement. But sobriety was not a monopoly of the religious movements; trade union activists had also been advocating it over the previous decade. Certainly the knowledge of the negative effects of alcohol, the pressure exercised by the employers who wanted a sober workforce and the enforced frugality of the economic crisis all favored the condemnation of alcohol. The most important of the organizations promoting temperance was the Washington Temperance Society, founded in 1840, which would eventually boast a membership of 3 million, chiefly drawn from the proletariat. Even if these figures are exaggerated we are talking about two to three times more proletarians than were in trade unions at the height of the struggle seven years previously. The Washingtonians also carried out mutual aid and benefit activities, and yet, above all in the North, they had raised liquor to the rank of the workers’ number one enemy, worse even than the greedy banks and exploiting bosses.

Another important reformer was George Henry Evans, former supporter of Skidmore, who elaborated a program of agrarian reform. The plan of the Agrarians or National Reformers, as they were known, essentially consisted of dividing up public land into 160 acre plots and distributing them to every family that requested one. The territories would then be enriched by urban centers equipped with structures useful to the community, supporting both leisure activities and the local economy. In these centers exchange would take place directly without mediation. National Reform was for the antebellum generation what co-operativism was for the generation before. Evans believed that thanks to the vast expanses of land available in the West, the proletariat could escape the destiny of the worker in Europe, where the land was completely under the control of a few privileged landowners. Land reform would bring so much prosperity in its wake that society as a whole could be changed. “And all this,” he concluded,” can be obtained by a simple vote, if the workingmen throughout the country will unite”. Even though the movement, composed of proletarians who wanted to become small farmers, contained utopian aspects, it had links with the labor movement: the rich, bourgeoisie and landowners couldn’t join and were recognized as enemies. Thus the National Reform Association (NRA) formed in 1844, was not a trade union organization but rather a reformist initiative, even if the boundary between it and trade unionism was often blurred. Its supporters recognized the right to strike, even if they did not consider it a weapon that was useful to them in obtaining their particular aim. In any case this movement would still constitute the most important element within the labor movement in the 15 or so years before the Civil War. The structure of the NRA was akin to a modern party, with local sections and due-paying members, periodic conferences, and its own press. The Association also took root in the Midwest, full as it was of subsistence farmers and workers of peasant extraction, where its influence was felt mainly in the cities it took to issuing rallying cries on behalf of co-operation and the ten-hour day.

Despite profound differences between them, Owenites, Associationists (Fourierists) and Land Reformers were all agreed on one thing: the workers would be able to resolve their problems only after they had realized their programs. The first two movements would even publicly condemn the efforts of workers to obtain a shorter working day, arguing that “a mere shortening of hours of labor” would only convert them “from twelve and fourteen to ten hour slaves”. And the same went for wages. Since it was the system itself that was to blame for everything, the mass of the workers had first to understand that nothing short of the abolition of capitalism made sense. Evans took a slightly different position: his movement supported the struggles on behalf of the workers’ claims but at the same time tried to convince them that nothing would last unless land reform was achieved.

These ideas did not just remain on paper. The utopians joined workers’ organizations and took part in their meetings, with the aim of convincing workers that the attempt to obtain a better standard of living in the present society was a waste of their energy. Hopes for a better future lay elsewhere. Impassioned orators often succeeded in making converts, sometimes even managing to carry entire trade union organizations into the co-operativist and reformist camps.

The latter, reformists or utopians, failed to understand something which for Marx was immediately obvious: the capitalist “evil” they were trying to exorcise was actually historically favorable, insofar as it laid the material foundations for the advent of communist society. It wasn’t a matter of “creating” communism through a sheer act of will, irrespective of the existing political and economic forces, but rather a case, using the class’s movement for material survival in the face of its daily difficulties as leverage, of refining the weapons needed to conquer political power, that being the essential instrument required for “the Reversal of Praxis”, in order to “free” society from the bottlenecks of capitalism.

Economic revival in the 1840s

With the economic revival in 1844, evangelists and temperance leagues lost their hold over the workers. But something of it remained within the class, a moralistic approach to the social question. In the small towns a kind of Christian Laborism took hold, in the big cities it took various forms including Nativism, that is, the assertion of the superiority of Americans born in American (although, blacks and the real Native Americans of the country were, needless to say, not included in this exclusive club). This was the new spirit of the times, which would smooth the path to the ideology of “Free Labor”. There were few major battles in these years and what struggles there were tended to focus on the length of the working day.

The country’s pace of development was quickening. Between 1840 and 1860 the numbers of workers in manufacturing sector doubled, while the value of what they produced in the same companies quadrupled. The railway network increased tenfold and there was a similar growth in the population of the urban centers. By now no-one could seriously believe that capitalist development could be arrested. The workers’ movement would slowly begin to pick up again. The big difference compared with ten years previously was that the initiative no longer lay in the hands of the apprentices, the small craftsmen, and the skilled workers in small semi-industrialized enterprises, but with the working class in the factories, who now started to make their voice heard. Meanwhile, many from the class which had sent De Tocqueville into such raptures, the small farmers, were now facing ruin and starvation, and had little option but to head for the nearest city to offer their labor power for sale. Without embarking on the long and hazardous journey to the West, the workers were unable to escape their class and be anything other than workers for life: the American proletariat was becoming permanent.

In New England at the start of the period, labor in the first large factories was primarily female, as were the Female Labor Reform Associations, which emerged from 1845 along with numerous journals. These were organizations of a cultural and political nature, whose scope was to work in favor of female labor at a number of levels; and if required they also functioned admirably as trade union organizers. Another aspect characterizing the working class of New England was that it had not benefited from the improvements that had been conceded elsewhere on working hours; the great majority of its members still worked from 12 to 14 hours per day. Even those who had enjoyed a reduction had been driven back, with the crisis, to working “from dawn to dusk”.

It must be immediately stated that in the period in question, the movement for the reduction of the working day aimed primarily at the imposition of new limits by statutory means. If in 1840 President Van Buren had conceded the 10 hour day to federal employees, obtaining it in private enterprises would prove considerably more difficult. The strategy principally involved the attempt to organize mass pressure on legislators, in order to oppose the control that corporate bosses had over them. Thus commenced activity based on petitions and of support, granted or denied, to parliamentarians depending on their attitude regarding the reduction of working hours in the factories.

The principal outcome of the mobilization was the birth in 1844 of a combative organization named the New England Workingmen’s Association. Founded on the activism of propagandists devoted to the cause, it was soon won over by Fourierists, which meant that little was achieved on either the trade union or legal level. Fortunately the decline of the utopians was already well under way, and by the end of 1845 the Association was again in the hands of the workers whose primary objective was the reduction of working hours. The results, however, were slow to come, and within the movement it was attempted to make use of direct struggle with the weapon of the strike, a course of action which was followed above all by textile workers. But the movement’s weakness was such that at the end of 1846 it devoted itself solely to petitions.

This instrument was not totally ineffective. Although the first States to grant the 10 hours were New Hampshire (1847), Maine and Pennsylvania (1848), the gain remained more symbolic than anything else, in that the law allowed, at the strong insistence of the bosses’ organizations, local bargaining to determine overtime rates. In practice the worker was forced to sign a contract requiring him to work more than 10 hours; those who did not sign were not engaged and ended up on the blacklist. In practice, therefore, it changed nothing, but from the historical perspective it was certainly an achievement, because there was strong working class resistance to the contracts, even if at the end of the day, the bosses won almost everywhere.

The New England Workingmen’s Association once again fell into the hands of the utopians, and in 1848 it closed its doors. The Female Labor Reform Associations succumbed to the same fate. There were further tough fights in Pennsylvania, but in the course of the 1850s, although many States formally granted the 10 hours, the laws were always ineffective, either because contracts allowed for exceptions, or because they simply did not include penalties for failure to implement them. The movement for the 10 hour day was not however without consequences, and a general reduction of working hours occurred: while in 1830 the average working day in America was 12 and a half hours, 30 years later it had fallen to 11 hours. This was no small gain and it was not conceded through the benign attitudes of the bosses but achieved by the workers using all the means at their disposal, in a situation of extreme objective weakness.

The issue of the working day also affected the South: in 1853, in Georgia alone, a law was approved that limited the “dawn to dusk” working day by granting the customary meal breaks, which is to say 10-11 hours. This was, however, an exception, with no similar law being approved anywhere else in the South until after the Civil War.