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The first national union.
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a Massachusetts court ruled that unions were legal.
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founded by Samuel Gompers, organized skilled workers by crafts. They fought for higher wages, shorter hours, and improved working conditions through collective bargaining.
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in Chicago. Striking McCormick Harvester Workers clashed with police, four strikers were killed.
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founded to improve wages and working conditions of coal mine workers.
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Steel workers in Homestead, Pennsylvania struck against the Carnegie Steel plant because the company had reduced wages. The Homestead Strike of 1892 became violent when the steel company hired private police to protect strike breakers. In the ensuring confrontation, nine strikers and seven police officers were killed.
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founded by railroad fireman Eugene V. Debs
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manufactured sleeping and dining cars, went on strike because their wages had been cut. Acting out of sympathy for the Pullman workers, conductors and engineers of the American Railway Union refused to handle trains with Pullman cars attached. A federal judge ordered the strikes back to work, and when they refused, President Grover Cleveland sent in federal troops. The ensuring violence turned public opinion against the strikers, and their president, Eugene Debs, was jailed.
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The first major union, founded by Uriah Stephens, a Philidelphia tailor. By 1879, its membership of nine thousand included women, African Americans, and immigrants, both skilled and unskilled. By 1866, they boasted a membership of seven hundred thousand. They won several important strikes, but their influence declined after they were blamed for killing seven police officers who attempted to break up a meeting in Haymarket Square, Chicago.
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was organized in 1905 for unskilled workers and immigrants, advocated one large national union that would use strikes and sabotage to achieve its goals as opposed to the more peaceful American Federation of Labor. (also known as Wobblies)
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allowed picketing and limited the use of injunctions in labor disputed.
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created by A. Philip Randolph
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(Wagner Act) protected the rights of workers to organize and elect representatives for collective bargaining. Also in this year the CIO, Congress of Industrial Organization, was formed by several AFL unions to promote unionismin industry.
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established a minimum wage (twenty-five cents an hour) and time and a half for over forty hours of work a week.
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prohibited child labor
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these two merged together in 1955
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President Ronald Regan fired 11,500 air traffic controllers for striking in violation of a no-strike clause in their contract.
