WHAT MAKES YOU STRIKE?
WHAT MAKES YOU STRIKE?
GULF BETWEEN THE RICH AND THE POOR
• Industrialization had lowered the price of consumer goods • Most factory workers couldn’t afford them
• Richest 9% owned 75% of the nations wealth• Out of a class of 24 that’s just about 2 people
• Rich had extravagant lifestyles• Poor made only a few hundred dollars a year
POOR HOUSING CONDITIONS
• Multiple people living in small living quarters• High rent
• Communities sharing outhouses• No running water• Poor sanitation• Disease spreads easily• Tuberculosis• Cholera• Typhoid• Small-pox
POLLUTION
• Smog and soot hung in the air• Asphyxiation• Sick• Acid rain
CHILD LABOR
• Forced into tight spaces (Size)• Wore chains around their waist which distorted
them made them smaller died in childbirth• As young as 4• 12 hour days • Sometimes with a 1 hour break (Dinner)
WORKING CONDITIONS
• Long hours• hazardous conditions• Forced labor
CHANGES
• investigate coal mines, factories, mills
• The combination of:• public outrage• political pressure• changes in the law(eventually led to better and safer working conditions)
• pressure from the workers + protest = organized self-help groups (Trade unions)
SOCIALISM
• 1830’s• Socialism – an economic and political philosophy
that favors public instead of private control of the means of production• More simply – everyone gets the same equal share• Cooperate not compete
COMMUNISM
• 1848• Communism – a more radical form of socialism• Communist Manifesto – denounced capitalism
and predicted the workers would overturn it. • Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
THE IDEA WAS
• Haves and the Have nots• bourgeois and proletariat• Rich and workers
• Have nots would overthrow the upper class (more of them) and establish a dictatorship where the government would eventually disappear and everyone would live equally
…..BUT NEITHER REALLY CAUGHT ON
• Wealthy• Saw it as a threat to their fortunes
• Politicians• Saw it as a threat to public order
• Most Americans• Saw it as a threat to deeply rooted American values of
private property, free enterprise and individual liberty
….BUT UNION LABORS DID
• Early Labor Unions• Construction and manufacturing
• NTU – National Trade Union• Lasted only a few years • Resurfaced after the Civil War
• Labor Unions were meant to help out in hard times but became an avenue for expressing worker’s demands to employers• Shorter workdays, higher wages, and better working
conditions
KOL
• Knights of Labor• Philadelphia 1869• Goal: All working men and Women, skilled or unskilled into
one union
• Terence Powderly Leadership• Equal pay for equal work• 8 hour workday• End to child labor
• Preferred not to strike• One strike helped them avoid a pay cut and soar to 700,000 members –
others ended in violence with no success• 1890’s weak
AFL
• American Federation of Labor• 1886
• Samuel Gompers• Craft Union – skilled workers• Specific to each trade
• Found ways to exclude African Americans and Women (believed they would drive wages down)
HOW THEY DIFFER
KoL
• Anyone worker• Allowed Women and
AA• Relied on Political
activity and education
AFL
• Skilled Workers• Excluded Women and
AA• Relied on economic
pressure (strikes and Boycotts)
HOW TO GET AHEAD
• Collective bargaining - a process in which workers negotiate as a group with employers
• *still a tactic used today – look at school districts!!
• Another tactic to help with CB – ‘closed shop’ a workplace in which only union members worked
IWW
• Industrial Workers of the World• a.k.a. wobblies• unskilled laborers• Radical (many socialists)• Violent strikes
EMPLOYERS REACTIONS TO UNIONS
• Feared if they paid workers more, their cost would go up and they would be less competitive in the market
• 1. forbidding union meetings• 2. firing union organizers• 3. forcing new employees to sign “yellow dog”
contracts – promising never to join a union or strike• 4. refusing to bargain collectively when strikes did
occur• 5. refusing to recognize unions as their workers’
legitimate representative