International Typographical Union

The International Typographical Union (ITU) was a labor union founded on May 3, 1852 in the United States as the National Typographical Union. In its 1869 convention in Albany, New York, the union—having organized members in Canada—changed its name to the International Typographical Union. A 1986 merger vote, series of local mergers, and a 1988 jurisdictional agreement led to most of the ITU's mailers joining the IBT while the remaining typographers of the ITU joined the CWA. As of its dissolution in 1986, the ITU was the oldest surviving trade union in the United States.

The ITU was an industrial union with members involved in many aspects of the printing trade. For the first five decades of its existence, the union wielded influence greater than its raw numbers. Informally known as "printers", typographers were educated and economically mobile, which enabled them to influence the political process more readily than blue-collar workers could.

The nature of the printing industry also provided the printers with economic strength. Newspapers existed in virtually every major urban center in every section of the U.S. and Canada, and with them came the typographers' union. Printers had the ability to shutter the employers' mouthpiece, giving the union more power than the employer could muster.

ITU President W.B. Prescott, aware of this power, led the ITU in 1897 to win the best working conditions in the American publishing industry—a 48-hour work week and a standard wage scale for all printers in the city. During the Great Depression, the ITU introduced the 40-hour work week across the industry at no cost to employers as a way to share the fewer jobs available. That ITU initiative spread to other unions and has since been codified across the labor sector by federal legislation in the U.S. establishing the 40-hour work week.

The ITU was also a progressive union and sought to eradicate discrimination on the basis of race or sex. Women, namely Augusta Lewis, Mary Moore and Eva Howard, were permitted to join the union in 1869, making the ITU one of the first unions to admit female members.

The ITU is notable for its long history of democracy, popularized by the 1957 book Union Democracy. The local scale committees worked for a decent wage while the executive council sent ITU representatives to assist local unions in contract negotiations. All contracts had to be approved and ratified by both the Executive Council and the newspaper publisher. For most of its history, the ITU benefited from friendly and strong competition between Independents and Progressives for control of the union. Today, however, the ITU printers have been marginalized, due to the general elimination of the typographers' trade due to automation, computers and mechanization. The remnants of the union membership are in the Communications Workers of America and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters.