第10章工業化世界の生活と労働Life and Labor in the Industrial World
A particular type of reform movement resulted in the creation of trade and labor unions to represent workers in dealings with management. In trade unions, workers organized within a particular craft or industry. In labor unions, skilled and unskilled workers of all kinds joined together to promote and defend their interests. In Britain, trade unions were at the forefront of change. In 1866, the Trades Union Congress, a federation of English and Welsh trade unions, was formed primarily to represent the interests of skilled workers. In 1871, the British government legalized their existence, and in 1875, Parliament made it legal for workers to strike as well. The result was that trade union membership increased from about 100,000 to about one million by the middle of the 1870s. Coal miners, iron and steel workers, and textile factory employees were the first to unionize. In the 1880s and 1890s, unions began to make concerted efforts to organize unskilled laborers. Two million people had joined British trade unions by the beginning of the twentieth century.
Workers’ demands focused largely on improving wages, hours, and working conditions. Establishing an eight-hour day was the goal of many unions. When these goals were not met, they struck. In 1881, women in British match factories went on strike. They wanted relief from fourteen-hour days and the hazards of working with white phosphorous. Between 1910 and 1914, a period known as the Great Unrest, miners, dockworkers, and railway workers across Britain went on strike repeatedly, and workers in other industries walked off the job to place added pressure on the strikers’ employers to give in to their demands.
In the United States, both trade unions and labor unions existed. The American Federation of Labor (AFL), originally called the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions of the United States and Canada, was established by Samuel Gompers in 1886. Like the British Trades Union Congress, it included many different unions, though originally, only skilled White male workers could join. The AFL supported strikes, but Gompers preferred to avoid them. Even if he had favored strikes, it would have been difficult for members to use them. Employers routinely called in the police, private detectives, or the military to disperse striking employees, and union leaders could be jailed.
When Pullman employees went on strike in 1894, more than 100,000 American railroad workers refused to handle any train with cars manufactured by Pullman’s company. Rail travel ground to a halt, and the transportation of the U.S. mail along with it. Violence broke out as striking workers and those who supported them burned buildings and attacked African American men who had been hired by railroad owners to replace the strikers. The U.S. Army was brought in to end the strike by attacking the workers. Many strikes ended the way the Pullman strike had.