Labor federation competition in the United States

The two factions of the popularly supposed defunct K. of L. [ Knights of Labor ] are busy soaking each other while the Detroit I. W. W. lands a right swing to the jaw of the Chicago bogus outfit.

At the fourth NLU congress, Susan B. Anthony's credentials were challenged and subsequently rejected on the grounds that she had used the Workingwomen's Protective Union as a strike-breaking organization.

[18] For a time a significant faction of the NLU embraced Greenbackism, which aimed to make capital cheaper and, it was hoped, would lead to producers' cooperatives and the abolition of the wage system.

"[21] Rayback continues, When reformers urged cooperation with women and Negroes in industry, trade unionists who were inclined to look upon both groups as cheap labor competition became incensed.

During the postwar recession trade unionists accepted Greenbackism as a means of establishing cooperatives which would eliminate "wage slavery" and alleviate the "miserable condition of workingmen."

[28] The problems that the federation confronted were not going away, and some of the ideas promoted by the NLU — accumulated wealth as unpaid labor; the inadequacy of traditional "bread and butter" unionism; the culpability of the wage system in the impoverishment of working people; the desire for a more equitable society; the importance of educating working people about the ways in which they are exploited — these ideas would resonate in other labor organizations in the decades yet to come,[29] at times as a dominant theme, but increasingly as a cry of opposition against the mainstream.

Occurring after a four-year depression, the railroad strikes of 1877 were, ...spontaneous upheavals of protest and rebellion involving large numbers of dissatisfied workers who were unorganized, without overall leadership and without a program of action... [It was] the first great class confrontation in America, and a portent of things to come.

Among this faction two elementary passions developed: an attitude of "give no quarter" and a fierce desire to express the power they felt in their alliance with the Knights of Labor—the great unconquered champion of the underdog.

The legislative program included the goal of legal incorporation of trade unions in order to shield the organizations from attacks using state conspiracy laws.

We are fighting only for immediate objects—objects that can be realized in a few years... we say in our constitution that we are opposed to theorists... we are all practical men...[66] Curiously, it was the early AFL that voiced support for the Haymarket defendants.

He asked that AFL railroad brotherhood affiliates present the following proposition to the Railway Managers' Association: ...that the strikers return to work at once as a body, upon the condition that they be restored to their former positions, or, in the event of failure, to call a general strike.

[92] Writing about the response of the AFL three decades later, Bill Haywood declared, This was the blade of treachery, with a handle made of a double cross, that was plunged into the breasts of the strikers of the Pullman car shops.

Through his appeals to government and the public, Mitchell was helping to build an alliance of conservative union leaders and liberal business men through the National Civic Federation (NCF).

[95] Critics of the NCF argued that its goals were to suppress sympathy strikes, and to replace traditional expressions of working class solidarity with binding national trade agreements and arbitration of disputes.

[97] In Taking Care of Business, Paul Buhle writes, In 1903, United Mine Workers President John Mitchell declared revealingly, "The trade union movement in this country can make progress only by identifying itself with the state."

However, longterm benefits for working people from the alliance between conservative union leaders and liberal businessmen proved illusory; employers had become alarmed over the aggressiveness and the success of AFL affiliates.

A stumpy Jewish immigrant from the London ghetto, Sam Gompers was shaped by the world of his father, who rolled rich cheroots and aromatic panatelas in cigar-making lofts on New York's Lower East Side... the rollers [that young Gompers joined] were educated men, their craft an ancient skill, their union like that of the medieval guilds, designed as much to protect their hard-won turf from less-skilled workers as to wrest concessions from their employers.

Labor Historian Melvyn Dubofsky observed, By 1900, most of the unions affiliated with the AFL spoke for members who still possessed valuable and scarce skills, took pride in their crafts, won better treatment for themselves than for the mass of workers and quarrelled with employers over their just share of the bounty of Capitalism rather than with the system itself.

Boyce's miners were, for the most part, relatively uneducated men without highly marketable skills, who were often confronted with mine owners and state governments ready to put down labor unrest with strikebreakers, vigilantes, and militias.

[103] Boyce responded, I never was so much surprised in my life as I was at the (Cincinnati) convention, when I sat and listened to the delegates from the East talking about conservative action when four million idle men and women are tramps upon the highways...

The corporations and trusts have monopolized the necessities of society and the means of life... Let the rallying cry be: Labor, the producer of all wealth, is entitled to all he creates, the overthrow of the whole profit-making system, the extinction of monopolies, equality for all and the land for the people.

[118] As the WFM was systematically repressed and ALU locals came under pressure from the Citizens' Alliance, the AFL saw more opportunity in what rivals had come to call "union scabbing" than in acting in solidarity with the other federations.

A great merger movement had swept through corporations in the period from 1899 to 1903, and labor radicals believed that "the unifaction of capital represented by the rise of the new trusts needed to be countered by an equally unified organization of the entire working class.

Society witnessed "Charles Schwab of Bethlehem Steel heralding the day when labor would rule the world and Samuel Gompers edging rapidly toward the businessman's creed of maximum production..."[124] While the AFL vigorously supported the national war effort, the IWW opposed it.

[127] Government actions had their counterpart in the society at large: ...anti-war ideas were in many parts of the country forbidden in published or spoken form, and those who voiced them faced deportation, arrest, beatings by vigilantes, and even lynching.

[130] Big Bill Haywood, the IWW's highest ranking organizer recorded in his autobiography that Robert Bruere, an investigative labor writer, discovered that, Sam Gompers had gone to Newton Baker, then Secretary of War, and had presented to him a plan to annihilate the I.W.W.

[133] In Colorado, a state-wide strike of twelve thousand coal miners under the banner of the IWW was sabotaged by a UMWA partisan, a genuine hero of the Ludlow era.

In 1906, Western Federation of Miners member Harry Orchard, who would later admit to working for the Pinkerton Detective Agency and spying for the Cripple Creek Mine Owners' Association, assassinated former Idaho Governor Frank Steunenberg.

McParland then had the WFM leaders illegally arrested in Colorado and transported to Idaho by a secret train after using extradition papers which falsely claimed the three men had been present at Steunenberg's murder.

Although the AFL president harbored little love for the WFM renegades who had founded the IWW, he was outraged at the manner of their arrest, and urged his union to "provide means of protection, methods of defense and channels of publicity on behalf of Moyer, Haywood, and Pettibone.