Gilded Age - Labor Unions

Labor Unions

Craft-oriented labor unions, such as carpenters, printers, shoemakers and cigar makers, grew steadily in the industrial cities after 1870. These unions used frequent short strikes as a method to attain control over the labor market, and fight off competing unions. The railroads had their own quite separate unions. An especially violent strike came during the economic depression of the 1870s, as the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, lasted 45 days and resulted in damages to railroad property. The strike collapsed when President Rutherford B. Hayes used federal troops to quell the organized violence. Starting in the mid-1880s a new group, the Knights of Labor, grew rapidly. Too rapidly, for it spun out of control and failed to handle the Great Southwest Railroad Strike of 1886. The Knights avoided violence, but their reputation collapsed in the wake of the Haymarket Square Riot in Chicago in 1886, when anarchists bombed the policemen dispersing a meeting. At its peak, the Knights claimed 700,000 members. By 1890, membership had plummeted to fewer than 100,000, then faded away.

The most dramatic major strike was the 1894 Pullman Strike, a coordinated effort to shut down the national railroad system. The strike was led by the upstart American Railway Union led by Eugene V. Debs. The union defied federal court orders and President Cleveland used the U.S. Army to get the trains moving again. The ARU vanished and the traditional railroad brotherhoods survived, but avoided strikes. The new American Federation of Labor, headed by Samuel Gompers, found the solution. It was a coalition of unions, each based on strong local and Organized Labor in America (1993)