The Labor Movement in the United States of America — Part 1

Translated from a presentation at the party meeting in Viareggio on June 2006

The point of departure: Servants and Slaves

The story of the American labour movement, or, to be precise, of the labour movement in the United States, starts in the colonial period, at the time of the birth and development of those first settlements that would later evolve into colonies, and which at the end of the XVIII century would free themselves from the mother country.

It is important not to forget that the society founded on the western shores of the Atlantic Ocean had behind it a social, economic and political history that it shared with the countries of the Old World, and in particular with England, which had emerged from the Middle Ages quite a while before, creating the social and political foundations for the development of bourgeois society and for the establishment of the capitalist system. These foundations were the Reformation, the dissolution of the monasteries, the enclosure of the common land, the development of the mercantile bourgeoisie and the rise of the country as a commercial and maritime power. Thus the American Colonies were populated by colonists who had already left the legacy of the Middle Ages behind them, and an entirely un-mediaeval atmosphere predominated there. The founders of the colonies, above all in New England, incarnated the most unscrupulous aspect of the English bourgeoisie, which precisely in those years was preparing to deal the final blow to the old absolutist and monarchist regime.

One of the reasons the English Crown favoured the colonisation of North America in the 16^th and 17^th centuries was certainly as an outlet for the surplus population and in order to alleviate the social tensions arising from poverty and unemployment, which in their turn were a by product of the development of society in a bourgeois direction. As far back as 1576 Sir Humphrey Gilbert had favoured colonisation as a means of alleviating demographic pressure. Others would portray it as a means of getting rid of ‘undesirable elements’.

The composition of the colonies was therefore very heterogeneous. Apart from the band of puritans referred to in the history books (concentrated mainly in New England) there was a conspicuous number of criminals, prisoners and of every other conceivable type of refugee from the law. To these was offered the possibility of escaping justice by emigrating to America, but on arrival in the New World they were expected to pay the cost of their transatlantic passage with their labour. This possibility of acquiring extremely low cost labour attracted the attention of many rich English families who moved to America with the intention of acquiring land and benefiting form this labour.

In fact, it soon became clear to everybody that none of the riches discovered by the Spanish in Mexico and Peru existed in the in the area in which the English were staking their claim. Captain John Smith would write: “Nothing is to be expected thence but by labour”. Thus the profits to which the English investors aspired would be obtained by cutting down forests and cultivating the soil rather than from mining. America would bring great profits, wrote the Virginia Company in 1616-17 to prospective investors, in the measure that ‘more hands’ were made available.

But where would these hands come from? The Indians could be captured and forced to work as slaves but escaping was easy, and in such cases they had the unpleasant habit of returning to their tribes and returning to remove their former master’s scalp in lieu of severance pay. Hence the governor of New Amsterdam (the city founded by the Dutch, which later became New York after passing to the English Crown) issued an order, much to the displeasure of those who hoped to gain massive profits in double-quick time, that native Americans had be paid a salary.

Thus there commenced a propaganda campaign amongst European workers (there weren’t enough convicts) conducted mainly in the British Isles but also in Germany, where William Penn, the magnate who would found Pennsylvania, would go on his preaching tour. In fact enticing people to leave wasn’t that difficult: in England in the 1600s most workers were living in the direst poverty, in conditions which were as desperate as much from the health point of view as from hunger, which perpetually haunted them. The worker was also subject to laws which, in substance if not in form, treated them like slaves: there was a maximum but no minimum wage; the worker wasn’t allowed to abandon his employer at will, and there were stringent penalties for ‘vagabondage’, that is to say, the measures directed against those peasants who, deprived of their land, hadn’t immediately flocked in to join the city slums; and, of course, it was strictly forbidden to ‘conspire’ with other workers to defend oneself against the rapacity of the employers. In the other European countries capitalism was less developed, but continuous wars, big and small, made life just as unpleasant over most of the continent.

Therefore the propaganda was lent a willing ear. The cost of the voyage, however, at £.6 to £.10, represented an enormous sum for a proletarian and it was simply too much. Thus there developed the system of contract servitude known as indentured labour. By this means the individual who embarked for the New World would serve as a bonded labourer for a number of years, usually from two to seven, but generally the latter. During this time he would receive no pay and was prohibited from abandoning his place of work. He did however have the right to be fed and lodged and to receive an indemnity at the end of his service, supposedly enough to start a new independent life when the contract expired, and even enable him, maybe, to go out and exploit indentured labour himself. That was the theory anyway but the reality wasn’t quite so rosy. One study shows that only 20% of indentured servants actually managed to settle a piece of land or become an artisan. None of them struck it rich because the all of the wealth was flowing into the hands of the big landowners and merchants, and it was they who became richer and richer during the colonial period. The other less fortunate 80% might simply die (many of them), return to England or else end up amongst the mass of poor whites, who lived from hand to mouth, sleeping where they could, without property (and therefore without a vote), and without any prospects.

The contracts were drawn up at the point of embarkation and retained by the ship’s captain, who sold them on arrival in America to recuperate the cost of the voyage and to derive an ample profit. To take advantage of this business companies soon set up branches in the two biggest settlements on the East coast, namely, the Massachusetts Company of New England, run by puritans who soon made it independent from London, and the Virginia Company, which instead continued to depend directly on the mother country. The puritans of Massachusetts, who were anxious to preserve their community’s religious and moral purity, were suspicious of this influx of people of not always exemplary morality; besides which it was mainly free men, who could afford the cost of their passage, who went by preference to New England. Indentured labour, on the other hand, was the principal source of labour power in the Centre (New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania) and particularly in the South (the colonies of Virginia and Maryland to begin with, then the Carolinas), at least until the end of the 17^th century.

Another aspect of the journey about which the emigrants were generally ignorant concerned the voyage itself; like the slaves making a similar, if longer, journey in identical ships many would die before reaching their destination. Conditions below decks were terrible, and amongst the things that had to be contended with were terrible hygiene, excessive promiscuity, sickness, food that was rotten and inevitably in short supply, and contaminated water. Survivors would tell how to keep from starving they had to eat mice and rats, which were bought and sold on board ship. There were even cases of cannibalism on journeys that turned out to be longer than expected. And on top of it all the survivors were often compelled to pay the travel costs of their deceased shipmates, paying the ship’s captain in the form of additional years of service.

Emigration to the New World guaranteed a constant flow of English paupers along with a lesser number of Germans, Irish and other nationalities. By 1770, along with half a million African slaves, a quarter of a million indentured servants had arrived in America and at least 100,000 of them had been transported against their will (either as convicts or kidnapped in their home port, the latter often children, who were captured in the cities of Great Britain in much the same way as the slaves in Africa, who would end up dying like flies). This means that at the time of the War of Independence out of the 2.5 million inhabitants, most of whom were farmers, the vast majority of the labour force was unfree. In the South, slaves soon replaced white servants: they didn’t go off when their contracts expired (nor would they have known where to go) and they cost half as much to maintain.

This wasn’t actually the case to begin with. Even if brought to America by force, it seems that the Africans as well were also indentured servants, freed when their contract expired. Thus the number of free Africans in the South was by no means insignificant even before the Civil War. Only around 1660 did the Slave Codes start to take effect in various colonies, laws which transformed servants into slaves: henceforth children born to slaves became the property of the mother’s owner, and for two centuries the slaves were deprived of their rights as free men (to meet and to vote, standing as witness, freedom of movement, right to bear arms, etc).

Mind you, the white servants weren’t much better off, on the contrary, some maintain that their situation was even worse. In fact a master, who was interested in keeping his slaves healthy since they constituted his capital and would remain such for the rest of their lives, might not be interested in the health of his servants, who would sooner or later leave; and for whom, if crippled, blind or ill on the expiry of their contract, the master wasn’t held responsible. A similar destiny, by the way, might easily befall those apprentices who, ending up with a greedy or cruel master, were exposed to dangers, harsh punishments and malnutrition and might not even end up learning a trade. Servants who married without their master’s permission were punished as adulterers, and their children deemed to be bastards.

From the 18^th century onwards, England, whose incredible economic ascent had begun, put severe restrictions on emigration to ensure there was sufficient manpower for its own nascent manufacturing industry. Thus, throughout the 1700s, waves of immigrants from Scotland, Ireland, Germany and Switzerland, including significant numbers of skilled craftsmen, would supplement the Anglo-Saxon elements disembarking on the Atlantic coast. In general, a new system of servitude known as the ‘redemptioner’ system was used. This was characterised by variable lengths of service according to the servant’s qualifications and skills, the nature of the job and related to the consequent length of time required to accumulate the sum necessary for him to redeem himself from servitude. These variations meant many different types of servant would arise with an overall tendency toward prolongation of the duration of contracts (often because many of these emigrants brought their families with them) but without altogether ruling out the possibility, which had attracted so many of these emigrants in the first place, that one day they would own a piece of land and be able to work it on their own account.

Without the system of bonded labour, however arbitrary and harsh it may have been, the colonies in the Centre and the South would have found it very difficult to get properly established.

At the mercy of their masters, who could be extremely cruel, servants would often abscond, whites and blacks frequently running off together to live with the nearest Native American tribe. The chronicles also tell of organised revolts by white servants, such as the one in Virginia in 1661-62 and the famous Bacon Rebellion, also in Virginia, in 1676, when the rebellion would include white servants, slaves and emancipated slaves, and small farmers. At least 40 revolts have been documented during the colonial period alone. Of these both the one around Charleston in 1730, which was particularly widespread, and the Stono Rebellion nine years later, also in the Charleston area, were both slave revolts. In the course of the latter, more than 200 slaves burned down houses and killed various slave-owners, sparing only those who had treated them decently. They had managed to obtain firearms, but before their march to freedom – which they sought in Florida – was concluded, they were overpowered and massacred by the white militia. This rebellion would endure long memory of the Southern slave holders giving them sleepless nights for many years to come.

Despite the laws outlawing them, there are numerous reports too of these labourers going on strike to obtain better living and working conditions. It was common for the white semi-slaves to run away; the punishment, along with flogging and other physical punishments, was an extension of their period of servitude. In the case of a revolt, which also occurred in the North (notably the one in New York in 1741, in which blacks and whites fought side by side) repression was ruthless. But brutal repression and exemplary punishments didn’t remove the danger of insurrections, which arose out of the real conditions of these first forced proletarians, and some concessions would eventually be made around food and clothing, etc. In the North, in any case, where slavery had never really suited the bourgeoisie, fear of slave revolts spread to all classes and many began to propose that slaves be substituted with free workers.

In Virginia, on the other hand, where forced labour suited the planters very well, the constant fraternisation of these workers across the divide of skin colour began to be viewed as extremely worrying, and they decided to take measures to combat it. In 1705 a law was passed that notably improved the condition of the white servant, the main measure being an improvement in the endowment the master had to render on termination of the contract (provisions, money and a gun); an endowment which had dropped considerably from the 1681 level: in fact up until that point 50 acres of land had been allotted as well. And it is from this period that we can trace the birth of a phenomenon which would be assiduously cultivated by the ruling class over the century that followed, racism; a sentiment which was actively propagated amongst the lowest strata of the white proletariat, corrupting them with a few miserable privileges which allowed them to feel somehow superior to their coloured co-workers and giving them cause to fear their own possible decline into a condition even worse than their own.

The servants had more rights than the African slave: as well being allowed to stand witness they had legal status and could take legal action. They therefore had a real prospect of being fully integrated into society with full rights. It was for this reason that workers of this type continued to flood into the Colonies, amounting to half of all emigrants before Independence. African slaves were utilised as workers in workshops and shipyards, usually hired out for a number of months or years to the industrial capitalist. But there was still a growing need for free labourers, above all in the North. Indeed if slave labour was economical convenient on the plantations, where there was work to be done throughout the year, this wasn’t the case in industry where the requirement for labour suffered from extreme seasonal oscillations. If servants and slaves both had to be fed, clothed and housed even in the off-season, the free labourer could simply be sacked. And, as we have seen, slaves and servants represented capital, which was lost if they took themselves off. Clearly great advantages attached to free labour, as Adam Smith would himself admit in The Wealth of Nations in 1776.

The Eighteenth Century: Birth of the Urban Proletariat

Whereas in the Colonies of the North an economy was forming based mainly on small commercial production, essentially agricultural and craft based, with a few exceptions such as the shipbuilding and construction industry, those in the South were developing the system of great plantations which required a large and ever growing mass of labourers. In order to satisfy the demand for labour, which the influx from Europe was unable to satisfy, it was necessary to obtain immigrants from elsewhere. Alongside the white component there started to appear, from the second half of the 1600s, the African slave. The indigenous peoples, as had already become evident in the colonies of Latin America, had proved not to be suitable as slaves for numerous reasons. Not that this prevented them from being enslaved, and in 1730 25% of slaves were in fact Native Americans.

The Black slaves were forcibly imported from Africa by the Royal African Company (the first ever shipment – of 20 – were put ashore and sold by a Dutch man-o’-war in 1619), and the South’s vital need to ensure itself a massive supply of labour would predispose it to frame the previously mentioned Slave Codes, which differentiated the figure of the African slave from that of the white servant by gradually increasing the formers obligations until their period of service became virtually unlimited. Africans, after all, were always involuntary immigrants, and it wasn’t therefore necessary to treat them well to encourage others to follow in their footsteps: their bondage was permanent, not just limited to a few years; usually they were non-Christians; it was convenient to treat them as non-citizens, without the concomitant citizen’s rights; finally, the colour of their skin set them apart and made it easy to the implement the Slave Codes. Thus did slavery, in its North American guise, come into being.

The greatest concentrations of African slaves became localized in the tobacco plantations of Virginia, North Carolina and Maryland and in the rice and indigo plantations of South Carolina and Georgia. The working conditions of the black slaves were obviously harsh, but they weren’t that much better for the whites, who were subjected to severe restrictions even though officially ‘free’. Labour was regulated by ancient English laws which restricted the mobility of labourers, who had no power over their contracts, not even whether they worked or not. There was therefore the obligation to work, prices and wages were fixed by local laws, and both masters and servants were prohibited from making any adjustments to them. The period for apprenticeships was fixed at seven years, and often taking up another trade was prohibited as well.

But the regulations could not stop economic development, only slow it up.

In the mostly self-sufficient communities of New England the quality of craft production was deteriorating: in fact with so much land available it was very easy for badly treated workers to simply abandon their trade and become independent farmers. Thus rustic craft production arose, with the peasant farmer in the little puritan villages turning his hand to pretty much anything during the long boring winters.

From the beginning of the 18^th century, as the villages expanded into cities and as a certain specialisation of labour, favoured by generally high levels of education, became justifiable, the crafts began to assume greater importance. Whilst European products were still those most in demand, artisans and craftsmen started to be needed again, above all in the cities of the Centre and the North. The South, meanwhile, remained predominantly autarchic and rural.

Immigration started to rise again, part of which was composed of artisans who unlike indentured servants paid their own passage, and who often brought with them a small nest egg with which to set up in business in an environment which promised a lot more than their mother country. Naturally enough the first types of organisation formed by these craft workers were identical to the ones they had left behind in Europe, namely the guilds. Already in 1648 the coopers and cobblers of Boston had organised themselves in such a way, with the declared aim of establishing strict professional rules and thus of maintaining a craft monopoly within a few hands. Setting rates of pay and establishing the rules governing apprenticeship, the guilds only really developed in the great cities of the Central North, and even there it was with difficulty due to the social fluidity of the New World. The bakers came to an agreement amongst themselves to refuse to make bread, given the cost of flour, if official prices fell too low: and this led, in 1741, to what is held to be the first strike in American history. But in fact it wasn’t so much a fight between workers and bosses as a reaction by artisans and small masters against the regulation of prices by the authorities.

In fact, on the few occasions that workers acted in their own interests and took action seperately from the masters and master craftsmen, it was almost always prompted by a wish to eliminate competition from black labour, whether slave or free. What they achieved, or caused, was the abolition of slavery in the Centre-North. In the South, on the other hand, where the black population was far more numerous, they only succeeded in excluding the latter from the highly specialised trades.

Another struggle that left its mark on the chronicles of colonial America is that of the black chimney-sweeps of Charleston in 1761. Contemporary accounts relate, rather peevishly, that, “they had the nerve, after reaching an agreement amongst themselves, to increase the normal rates, and to turn down work if their exorbitant demands were not satisfied”. The slaves on the plantations could not, of course, resort to such measures; for them, same as for the indentured servants, the only effective form of protest was collective rebellion, it was either that or running away. The newspapers of the period give full and detailed accounts of the dramatic results of both these choices. Slave rebellions were nevertheless rare before the 18^th century, although becoming more frequent later on as the number of slaves increased, as they became more familiar with the environment increased and as better communications became established.

Following the events described above, relating to the first century of slavery, there was an explosion of revolts in the crisis-ridden period which led up to the colonial rebellion and independence. These took place from 1765 onward, in the wake of an extremely hard fought rebellion in Jamaica in 1760 (which the authorities only managed to repress with much difficulty) and of other rebellions which would tear through the Caribbean like a hurricane over the ensuing years.

Thus the slaves in the North American colonies would take advantage of the growing rift between the imperial and colonial ruling classes and revolts would break out pretty much everywhere: in Virginia (1767), New Jersey (1772), South Carolina and Massachusetts (1774), New York, Maryland, Virginia, South Carolina, North Carolina (1775), and South Carolina (1776).

The Working Class Before Independence

Summing up the key characteristics of the proletariat in America in the period before Independence isn’t easy. Certainly there was an enormous difference between the standard of living of the Black slave on the plantations and the specialised worker in the Northern cities. The difference was such, indeed, that it would be perpetuated for a long time to come and become a defining characteristic of American society. But even amongst the free workers there existed a heterogeneity linked to geographical origin, class, race, religion, to the various types of proletarian employment and to the uneven economic development in the various parts of the country, which, along with the notable distances between the cities and the difficulties of communication, made it difficult for class consciousness to emerge. Such was also the case in the cities in which, in the seventeen hundreds, the various types of worker started to congregate.

A second important characteristic of American society at the time was its contiguity with the agrarian world; a world in which land wasn’t an object of speculation as in contemporary Europe but where it was there for the taking, for whoever wanted it.

A third feature, linked to the preceding ones, which distinguished the North American environment from the European was the relatively high lwages paid to the free workers. Despite repeated attempts to regulate wages, these still remained between around 30 and 200% higher than in England; and this was the case from the very beginning: even in 1639 there were complaints that if wages weren’t lowered, “the servants will become masters, and the masters servants”. But it was not just the remunerative side of things that European travellers would remark upon. They would also have cause to note, often with barely concealed disgust, the extreme familiarity between employees and bosses; this, too, an American peculiarity which would endure until the birth of large scale industry, and indeed, in a certain sense, one which has been customary amongst ‘yanks’ up to the present day.

But the life of the wage earner in colonial America certainly wasn’t all sweetness and light. The comparison above, as well as being made with the awful conditions of the European wage earner of the time, only held good when there actually was work. During periods of unemployment the worker was often unable to prevent his children from starving, or himself from ending up in jail. Real wages were often reduced by a high rate of inflation as well. If prices dropped the courts would order the workers to accept a proportional reduction in wages, if they rose, the same courts would set a cap on wages; and to ask for a raise was to risk being punished with a hefty fine, something which was far from uncommon during periods of economic upturn, or in the sparsely populated towns. If on the other hand the bosses offered more, in order to attract labour, it was still the workers who were punished by the courts. The employers’ associations, who would display a level of hypocrisy that would come to define the American bourgeoisie, maintained that such measures served to ‘save the American worker from himself’, it being taken as said that the worker, with money in his pocket and a bit of free time, would inevitably engage in activities which were ruinous to his physical and moral health.

Strikes and trade unions were strictly prohibited under laws dating back to 14^th century England, (we will see how it was not until the 1720s that the legal obstacles to the workers’ economic struggles were removed, although the bourgeoisie would still be able to count on the continuing support of the judiciary, the police, the national guard, the army and private police forces in their battles against the workers, and moreover to a greater degree than normal in the Western democracies). This prohibition has been described by an English historian as a conspiracy of the bourgeoisie and the public powers to keep the proletariat in its place and in a state of permanent poverty. Adam Smith himself would confirm that “whenever the government attempts to deal with the conflict between masters and workers, its counsellors are always the masters”. And he added: “There are no laws preventing agreements to lower the price of labour, but a great number that prevent any agreement to raise it”.

Of the actual struggles that took place between free proletarians and masters very little is known, both because not many of them occurred and because contemporary accounts are somewhat reticent. In 1636 a Maine ship owner announced that his workers and sailors had “mutinied” because he hadn’t paid their wages: the struggle took the form of a mass walk out. Five years later, also in Maine, we hear about carpenters engaging in a work-to-rule, protesting about the lack of food. Still in the same period there is the first lock-out in American history, when a Gloucester ship owner ordered his determinedly combative workers to stop work and take themselves off.

The first sector to be industrialised, and consequently to have a working class which to a certain degree was concentrated in one place, was the ship yards, and it was here that the trial of strength of the nascent North American bourgeoisie with its English and Dutch competitors would commence. Although carpenters predominated, it was an industry in which most types of craftsmen were required. Wage labour however was slow to develop within the remaining crafts and areas of production. The manufacture of consumer products was the prerogative of lone artisans, who would work from home and occasionally emerge to sell what they had produced in the surrounding countryside, or exchange it for agricultural products, either for personal consumption or to sell in the towns. There wasn’t really much of a market to speak of: every farm was highly self-sufficient and amongst the roles performed within the peasant household were those of carpenter, spinner, weaver, candle-maker, shoemaker and smith. Leaving aside the crafts based in the shipyards the skills most in demand were those relating to mills and foundries, to barrel-making and saddle-making, to carriage building and to the manufacture of metal and glass objects.

As demand rose, the artisan found he could only increase his output by associating his activity with the labour of others. For £.10 to £.20 he could purchase a contract servant, and have him work for seven years or so in exchange for board and lodging and a few items of clothing. Although acquiring or hiring an African slave was a possible alternative we have already seen how in actual fact it was the free labourer who would come to replace the contract servant, especially in the Central North.

Given the composition of the labour force, the trade union agitations of the seventeen hundreds consisted more than anything of lock-outs of artisans demanding better retribution for their independent labour: thus was the case in 1684 for the New York street cleaners, in 1741 for the caulkers in Boston, and in 1770 for the coopers in New York. In the case of the latter they would be tried and ordered to pay heavy fines and the ones working for the local authority were sacked. Historians generally refer to the Philadelphia Printers’ Strike in 1784 as the first real strike of wage earners in North America; but there was also a struggle that took place in the colonial period, that of the New York tailors in 1768, which could also credibly claim that distinction.

We cannot as yet say that permanent trade unions existed. Specialised workers continued to meet in societies they shared with master artisans and small masters. These were mutual aid societies that only rarely concerned themselves with wages and hours; and if they did, it was only to plead for better laws, often with corporative objectives.

But workers were in great demand, and a clear sign of this is the number of advertisements for skilled workers. The earliest ones date from 1715, whereas we have to wait until 1770 before the first employment bureau is founded, in New York City.

Thus did the American working class arise, fostered by the decline of indentured labour and by the arrival of free workers from Europe. From the very start these workers would fall into two clearly defined groups: the specialised workers, equipped with a trade learnt in an artisan’s workshop and with specialised tools, and the manual labourers, the non-specialised, who neither possessed the knowledge nor the ability relative to a given trade, and who had their muscle power alone to sell.