Organizing
The 1920s and 1930s were difficult, but exciting times in America, especially for the labor movement. The coal miners, the Pullman Porters, the Teamsters were all making great strides in organizing workers, but paying a very high price for that success.
The United Mine Workers would be involved in one of the longest and bloodiest fights of their history in 1920 and 1921. The violence began on May 19, 1920 when simmering hostilities between mine workers trying to organize and the private detectives hired by the mine owners trying to keep the union out, boiled over in the tiny community of Matewan, West Virginia in what has come to be known as the Battle of Matewan. The violence culminated in the Battle of Blair Mountain where 10,000 to 15,000 armed miners confronted police, militia, and private detectives in August 1921. It finally took military intervention by the Federal government to restore peace to the area.
The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters was organized by the predominantly Negro Pullman Porters in 1925. The "BSCP" suffered through a lengthy fight to achieve recognition by the American Federation of Labor (AFL) in 1935. BSCP signed its first collective bargaining agreement with the Pullman Company in 1937.
The International Brotherhood of Teamsters, formerly known as "International Brotherhood of Teamsters, Chauffeurs, Warehousemen and Helpers of America", had been involved in an intense struggle to organize since 1901. Between 1901 and 1935, the Teamsters engaged in countless small and large bloody and deadly confrontations over the right to organize and collectively bargain for wages and working conditions. As their early name implies, the Teamsters took in the related workers in order to strengthen its bargaining position with owners and management.
Read more about this topic: Leon Bates (American Labor Leader)
Famous quotes containing the word organizing:
“The lies fall like flaxen threads from the skies
All over America, and the fact that some of them are true of course
Doesn’t so much not matter as serve to justify
The whole mad organizing force under the billows of correct delight.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“Abolitionists were men of sharp angles. Organizing them was like binding crooked sticks in a bundle.”
—Jane Grey Swisshelm (1815–1884)
“When we say “science” we can either mean any manipulation of the inventive and organizing power of the human intellect: or we can mean such an extremely different thing as the religion of science the vulgarized derivative from this pure activity manipulated by a sort of priestcraft into a great religious and political weapon.”
—Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957)