As the nearly 4 million Americans recorded in the census of 1790 grew to more than 280 million in 2000, the character of their work changed as dramatically as their numbers. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, most Americans were farmers, farm laborers, or unpaid household workers. Many were bound (as slaves in the southern states, indentured servants elsewhere). Most farmers, craft workers, and shopkeepers were proprietors of family businesses. Most workers were of British origin, though there were large German and African American minorities. Many workers received part or all of their pay in the form of housing, food, and goods. The workday and work year reflected the seasons and the weather as much as economic opportunity or organizational discipline. Two hundred years later, farm labor had become insignificant, employees vastly outnumbered the self-employed, bound labor had disappeared, and child and unpaid household labor had greatly declined. Family and other social ties had become less important in finding work or keeping a job, large private and public organizations employed more than a third of all workers and set standards for most of the others, the labor force had become ethnically diverse, labor productivity and real wages were many times higher, wage contracts and negotiated agreements covering large groups were commonplace, and workplace disputes were subject to a web of laws and regulations.
These contrasts were closely associated with revolutionary changes in economic activity and particularly with the growth of modern manufacturing and service industries. After the middle of the nineteenth century, virtually all new jobs were in these sectors, which were also centers of innovation.
Technology
The changing character of work was closely related to the classic technological innovations of the nineteenth century and the beginning of modern economic growth. Innovations in energy use were particularly influential. Thanks to the availability of numerous waterpower sites in New England and the mid-Atlantic states, industry developed rapidly after the American Revolution. By the 1820s, the massive, water-powered Waltham Mills of northern Massachusetts and southern New Hampshire were among the largest factories in the world. By midcentury, however, steam power had become widespread in manufacturing as well as transportation, and steam-powered factories became the basis of the industrial economy. In 1880, the Census Bureau announced that non-factory manufacturing had become insignificant. The advent of electrical power at the turn of the century had an even greater impact. It made possible the giant manufacturing operations of the early twentieth century, the smaller, more specialized plants that became the rule after the 1920s, the great versatility in machine use that characterized the second half of the twentieth century, and the mechanization of stores, offices, and homes.
Steam and electrical power and related innovations in machine technology not only made it feasible to create large organizations but gave them an economic advantage over small plants and shops. Workers in the new organizations were wage earners, usually not family members (unlike most nineteenth-century executives), and often they were not even acquainted outside the plant. They rejected payment in kind or in services (company housing and company stores in isolated mining communities became a persistent source of grievances), started and stopped at specific times (the factory bell remained a powerful symbol of the new era), and became accustomed to a variety of rules defining their responsibilities and behavior. Mechanization also led to specialization of function. Factory workers (except for the common laborers, the least skilled and most poorly paid employees) were almost always specialists. Elaborate hierarchies of pay and status grew out of the new ways of work.
The industrial model soon spread to the service sector. Railroad corporations created hierarchical, bureaucratic structures with even stricter lines of authority and more specialized tasks than the largest factories. Insurance companies, department stores, mail-order houses, and large banks followed this pattern, though they typically used only simple, hand-operated machines. The growth of regional and national markets (a result of technological innovations in transportation and communication as well as the expanding economy) made the hierarchical, bureaucratic organization profitable even when power-driven machines played little role in production.
Immigration
Most workers who filled nonexecutive positions in the new organizations were European immigrants or their children. The rapid growth in the demand for labor (confounded by periodic mass unemployment) forced employers to innovate. In the nineteenth century, they often attracted skilled workers from the British Isles or Germany. By the latter decades of the century, however, they hired immigrants mostly to fill low-skill jobs that veteran workers scorned. Although immigration from Britain, Germany, and Scandinavia never ceased, most immigrants increasingly came from the economic and technological backwaters of Europe. By the early twentieth century, more than a million immigrants were arriving each year, the majority from eastern and southern Europe, where most of them had worked as tenant farmers or farm laborers.
An obvious question is why ill-paid American agricultural workers did not respond to the opportunities of industrial and service employment. Several factors apparently were involved. The regional tensions between North and South, where the majority of poor, underemployed agricultural workers were located, and the post–Civil War isolation of the South discouraged movement to industrial centers. Racial prejudice was also influential, though few white southerners moved north before 1915. Lifestyle decisions were also important. In the midwestern states, where industry and agriculture developed in close proximity and where racial distinctions were less important, farm workers were almost as reluctant to take industrial or urban service jobs. (There was, however, significant intergenerational movement, particularly among children who attended high schools and universities.) Consequently a paradox emerged: American farm workers seemed content to eke out a modest living in the country while European agricultural workers filled new jobs in industry and the services.
Mass immigration was socially disruptive. Immigrants faced many hazards and an uncertain welcome. Apart from the Scandinavians, they became highly concentrated in cities and industrial towns. By the early twentieth century, most large American cities were primarily immigrant enclaves. (Milwaukee, perhaps the most extreme case, was 82 percent immigrant and immigrants' children in 1900.) To visitors from rural areas, they were essentially European communities except that instead of a single culture, a hodgepodge of different languages and mores prevailed. It is hardly surprising that observers and analysts bemoaned the effects of immigration and especially the shift from "old," northern and western European, to "new," southern and eastern European, immigrants.
In the workplace, native-immigrant tensions took various forms. The concentration of immigrants in low-skill jobs created a heightened sense of competition—of newer immigrant groups driving out older ones—and led to various efforts to restrict immigrant mobility. These tensions were exacerbated by ethnic concentrations in particular trades and occupations and the perception of discrimination against outsiders. A concrete expression of these divisions was the difficulty that workers and unions had in maintaining solidarity in industrial disputes. The relatively low level of labor organization and the particular character of the American labor movement have often been explained at least in part as the results of a heterogeneous labor force.
The end of traditional immigration during World War I and the low level of immigration during the inter-war years eased many of these tensions and encouraged the rise of "melting pot" interpretations of the immigrant experience. World War I also saw the first substantial movement of southern workers to the North and West, a process that seemed to promise a less tumultuous future. In reality, the initial phases of this movement increased the level of unrest and conflict. Part of the problem—repeated in the early years of World War II—was the excessive concentration of war-related manufacturing in a few congested urban areas. The more serious and persistent irritant was racial conflict, with the poorest of the "new" immigrants pitted against African American migrants. Although the wartime and postwar wave of race riots waned by 1921, the tensions lingered. In most northern cities, African Americans were much more likely to live in ethnically homogeneous neighborhoods than were any immigrant groups.
By midcentury, most Americans looked back at immigration as a feature of an earlier age and celebrated the ability of American society to absorb millions of outsiders. Yet at the same time, a new cycle of immigration was beginning. It had the same economic origins and many similar effects, though it differed in other respects. Most of the post–World War II immigrants came from Latin America and Asia rather than Europe. They settled over-whelmingly in the comparatively vacant Southwest and West, areas that had grown rapidly during World War II and continued to expand in the postwar years. In contrast, the Northeast and Midwest, traditional centers of industrial activity, attracted comparatively few immigrants. Most of the newcomers were poorly educated and filled low-skill positions in industry and the services, but there were exceptions. Among the Asian immigrants were many well-educated engineers, technicians, and professionals who quickly rose to important positions, a development that had no nineteenth-century parallel.
Employer Initiatives
Managers of large organizations soon realized that they were dependent on their employees. Turnover, absenteeism, indifferent work, or outright sabotage were significant threats to productivity and profits. Conversely, highly motivated employees could enhance the firm's performance. Traditional tactics such as threats of punishment and discharge were less effective in a factory or store with numerous work sites and a hierarchy of specialized jobs. Uncertain about how to respond, nineteenth-century employers experimented widely. A handful introduced elaborate services; others devised new forms of "driving" and coercion. Most simply threw up their hands, figuratively speaking, and delegated the management of employees to first-line supervisors, who became responsible for hiring, firing, and other personnel functions. As a result, there were wide variations in wages, working conditions, and discipline, even within organizations, as well as abuses of authority and high turnover. Friction between supervisors and wage earners became a common cause of labor unrest.
Remedial action came from two sources. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, state governments began to impose restrictions on employers, especially employers of women and children. By 1900, most northern and western states regulated the hiring of children, hours of labor, health and sanitation, and various working conditions. During the first third of the twentieth century, they tightened regulations, extended some rules to male workers, and introduced workers' compensation, the first American social insurance plans. In the late 1930s, the federal social security system added old-age pensions and unemployment insurance, and other legislation set minimum wages, defined the workday and workweek, and restricted child labor. Still, none of these measures directly addressed a variety of shop-floor problems. To remedy this deficiency, as well as to raise wages, the New Deal also promoted collective bargaining, most notably via the National Labor Relations Act of 1935.
Employers also played an important role in this process. Beginning at the turn of the century, a relatively small number of employers, mostly large, profitable corporations, introduced policies designed to discourage turnover and improve morale. Two innovations were particularly important. The first was the creation of personnel departments that centralized and standardized many of the supervisors' personnel functions. By the 1920s, most large industrial and service corporations had personnel departments whose functions and responsibilities expanded rapidly. The second innovation was the introduction of systematic benefit systems that provided medical, educational, recreational, and other services.
During the 1930s and 1940s, the federal and state governments embraced many features of this "welfare capitalism" in the process of creating a modest welfare state. Government initiatives extended some benefit plans to workers at smaller and less generous firms and encouraged the larger employers to create even more elaborate benefit programs. The spread of collective-bargaining contracts and a more prosperous postwar economy reinforced this trend. The years from the early 1940s to the mid-1970s would be the heyday of corporate benevolence.
Labor Unrest
The growth of industrial and service employment also introduced new forms of unrest and protest. The years from the 1870s to the 1940s witnessed waves of strikes, which were widely viewed as a perplexing and troubling feature of modern society. Yet strikes were only the most visible examples of the many tensions and conflicts characteristic of industrial employment. Dissatisfied wage earners had in fact two basic choices, "exit" and "voice." Unhappy workers could quit, or exit, and search for more satisfying jobs, or they could try to improve their current jobs through the use of their collective "voice," that is, through protests, complaints, and negotiations. Historically, most workers have concluded that quitting is easier than trying to create and maintain a union. Still, the history of organized labor (because it has been carefully documented) is the best available valuable measure of the tensions associated with modern employment and the ability of workers to exercise a "voice" in industry.
Nineteenth-Century Unions
The American labor movement dates from the early nineteenth century, first became an important force during the inflationary prosperity of the 1860s, and flourished during the boom years of the 1880s. During those years a pattern appeared that persisted through the twentieth century. The individuals most likely to organize were so-called autonomous workers, those who had substantial independence in the workplace. Most, but not all, were highly skilled and highly paid. They were not oppressed and with notable exceptions were not the employees of the new institutions most closely associated with American industrialization: the large factories, railroads, and bureaucratic offices. Rather they were the men (with very few exceptions) whose skills made them vital to the production process and who could increase their influence through collective action. Their strategic roles also made employers wary of antagonizing them, another critical factor in union growth. Employers typically countered unions with threats and reprisals. Low-skill employees had to take those threats seriously; autonomous workers could resist employer pressures.
Regardless of their particular jobs, workers were more likely to organize successfully in good times and when they could count on sympathetic public officials. Prosperity and a favorable political climate were important determinants of union growth; recession conditions and state repression often made organization impossible, regardless of other factors.
Two groups dominated the nineteenth-century labor movement. Miners were autonomous workers who were not highly skilled or highly paid. But they worked alone or in small groups and faced extraordinary hazards and dangers. Organization was a way to express their sense of solidarity, increase (or maintain) wages, tame the cutthroat competition that characterized their industries (especially coal mining), and restrict the entrance of even less skilled, lower wage workers. Unions flourished in both anthracite and bituminous coal fields in the 1860s and early 1870s, and they emerged in the western "hard rock" industry in the 1870s. After great turmoil and numerous strikes during the prolonged recession of the mid-1870s, miners' organizations became stronger than ever. Their success was reflected in the emergence of two powerful unions, the United Mine Workers of America, formed in 1890, and the Western Federation of Miners, which followed in 1893. They differed in one important respect: the coal miners were committed to collective bargaining with the goal of regional or even national contracts, while the Western Federation of Miners scorned collective bargaining in favor of workplace activism.
The second group consisted of urban artisans, led by construction workers but including skilled industrial workers such as printers and molders. Some of the unions that emerged in the 1820s and 1830s represented workers in handicraft trades, but in later years, organized workers were concentrated in new jobs and industries, though not usually in the largest firms. Organization was a way to maximize opportunities and simultaneously create buffers against excessive competition. Railroad workers were a notable example. Engineers and other skilled operating employees formed powerful unions in the 1860s and 1870s. Through collective bargaining, they were able to obtain high wages, improved working conditions, and greater security. However, they made no effort to organize the vast majority of railroad workers who lacked their advantages. Most railroad managers reluctantly dealt with the skilled groups as long as there was no effort to recruit other employees.
The limitations of this approach inspired efforts to organize other workers, and the notable exception to this approach was the Knights of Labor, which briefly became the largest American union. The Knights attempted to organize workers regardless of skill or occupation, including those who were members of existing unions. Several successful strikes in the mid-1880s created a wave of optimism that the Knights might actually succeed, and membership rose to a peak of more than 700,000 in 1886. But employer counterattacks, together with the Knights' own organizational shortcomings, brought this activity to an abrupt halt. Thereafter, the Knights of Labor declined as rapidly as it had grown. By 1890, it had lost most of its members and was confined to a handful of strongholds.
Twentieth-Century Unions
After the severe depression of the mid-1890s, which undermined all unions, the labor movement enjoyed a long period of expansion and growing influence. Autonomous worker groups, led by coal miners and construction workers, dominated organized labor for the next third of a century. The debate over tactics was decisively resolved in favor of collective bargaining, though a dissenting group, the Industrial Workers of the World, rallied critics with some success before World War I. Collective bargaining was effectively institutionalized during World War I, when the federal government endorsed it as an antidote for wartime unrest. The other major development of this period was the emergence of an effective union federation, the American Federation of Labor (AFL), which dated from the upheavals of 1886 but only became influential with the membership revival of the early twentieth century. Under its shrewd and articulate president, Samuel Gompers, the AFL promoted the autonomous worker groups while professing to speak for all industrial workers. Gompers and his allies disavowed socialism and efforts to create an independent political party, policies that led to an erroneous perception (encouraged by their many critics) of indifference or hostility to political action. On the contrary, Gompers closely aligned the AFL with the Democratic Party and created aggressive lobbying organizations in the states and in Washington.
Labor's political activism seemed to pay off during World War I, when Gompers was appointed to a high post in the mobilization effort and the federal government directly and indirectly encouraged organization. The greatest gains occurred in the railroad industry, which was nationalized in 1917. Under government control, railroad managers no longer could oppose organization and collective bargaining. By 1920, most railroad employees were union members. Government efforts to reduce unrest and strikes also resulted in inroads in many manufacturing industries. In 1920, union membership totaled 5 million, twice the prewar level.
These gains proved to be short-lived. The end of wartime regulations, the defeat of the Democrats in the 1920 national elections, new employer offensives, and the severe recession of 1920–1922 eliminated the conditions that had encouraged organization. Membership contracted, particularly in industry. The decline of the coal and railroad industries in the 1920s was an additional blow. By the late 1920s, organized labor was no stronger than it had been before the war. The one positive feature of the postwar period was the rapid growth of service sector unionism.
The dramatic recession that began in 1929 and continued with varying severity for a decade set the stage for the greatest increase in union membership in American history. Recessions and unemployment typically reduced the appeal of any activity that was likely to provoke employer reprisals. This was also true of the 1930s. Union membership declined precipitously between 1930 and 1933, as the economy collapsed and unemployment rose. It also plunged in 1937–1938, when a new recession led to sweeping layoffs. Union growth occurred in 1933– 1937, and in the years after 1939, when employment was increasing. Yet the generally unfavorable economic conditions of the 1930s did have two important indirect effects. Harsh economic conditions produced a strong sense of grievance among veteran workers who lost jobs, savings, and status. Because the depression was widely blamed on big-business leaders and Republican officeholders, it also had a substantial political impact. The 1932 election of Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had strong progressive and activist credentials as a Democratic politician and especially as governor of New York, proved to be a turning point in the history of the labor movement.
The expansion of union activity after 1933 reflected these factors, particularly in the early years. Roosevelt's New Deal was only intermittently pro-union, but it effectively neutralized employer opposition to worker organization, and with passage of the National Labor Relations Act in 1935 it created a mechanism for peacefully resolving representation conflicts and introducing collective bargaining. Although the ostensible purpose of the legislation was to foster dispute resolution and higher wages, it indirectly promoted union growth by restricting the employer's ability to harass union organizations and members. In the meantime, industrial workers, notably workers in the largest firms such as steel and automobile manufacturing companies, reacted to the new opportunities with unprecedented unity and enthusiasm. The depression experience and the New Deal appeared to have sparked a new era of militant unionism. An important expression of this change was the emergence of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, a new labor federation created in November 1938 by John L. Lewis, the president of the United Mine Workers, and devoted to aggressive organizing, especially in manufacturing.
Although the National Labor Relations Act (and other related legislation designed for specific industries) most clearly and explicitly addressed the industrial relations issues of the 1930s, other New Deal measures complemented it. The move to regulate prices and production in the transportation, communications, and energy industries, which began with the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933 and continued with a variety of specific measures enacted between 1935 and 1938, created opportunities for unions. Regulated corporations had powerful incentives to avoid strikes and cooperate with unions. As a result, about one-third of union membership growth in the 1930s occurred in those industries. If the United Automobile Workers of America and the United Steel-Workers of America were symbols of the new militancy in manufacturing, the equally dramatic growth of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters symbolized the labor upheaval in transportation, communications, and energy.
Government regulations played a more direct role in the equally dramatic union growth that occurred during World War II, when aggregate membership rose from 10 million to 15 million. Most new jobs during the war years were in manufacturing companies that had collective bargaining contracts and in many cases union security provisions that required new hires to join unions. War mobilization thus automatically created millions of additional union members. Government efforts to discourage strikes also emphasized the unions' role in a bureaucratic, intensely regulated economy. By 1945, the labor movement had become a respected part of the American establishment.
Postwar Labor
By the mid-1940s full employment, high wages, and optimism about the future, based on a sense that government now had the ability to manage prosperity (together with awareness of the social safety net that government and business had created since the mid-1930s) replaced the depressed conditions of the 1930s. The experiences of workers in the 1940s and 1950s seemed to confirm the lessons of the New Deal era. With the exception of a few mild recession years, jobs were plentiful, real wages rose, and the federal government continued its activist policies, gradually building on the welfare state foundations of the 1930s. The labor movement also continued to grow, but with less dynamism than in the 1940s. Optimists viewed the merger of the AFL and CIO in 1955, ending the internecine competition that dated from the late 1930s, as a likely stimulus to new gains.
In retrospect, however, those lessons are less compelling. The striking feature of the economy of the 1950s and 1960s was not the affirmation of earlier developments but the degree to which the character of work and the characteristics of the labor force changed. Farming and other natural-resource industries declined at an accelerated rate, and industrial employment also began to decline, but service-industry employment boomed. Formal education became even more important for ambitious workers. Married women entered the labor force in unprecedented numbers. Employers, building on the initiatives of earlier years, extended employee benefit programs, creating a private welfare state that paralleled the more limited public programs. Civil rights laws adopted in the early 1960s banned racial and other forms of discrimination in employment decisions.
One other major development was little noticed at the time. Organized labor stopped growing, partly because it remained too closely wedded to occupations, such as factory work, that were declining, and partly because the employer counterattack that began in the late 1930s at last became effective. A major factor in the union growth of the 1930s and 1940s had been an activist, sympathetic government. Although some postwar employer groups sought to challenge unions directly, others adopted a more subtle and successful approach, attacking union power in the regulatory agencies and the courts and promoting employment policies that reduced the benefits of membership. These attacks gained momentum during the administration of Dwight D. Eisenhower (1953–1961). One additional tactic, locating new plants in southern or western states where there was no tradition of organization, also helped to isolate organized workers.
The impact of these varied trends became inescapable in the 1970s, when the economy experienced the most severe downturns since the 1930s. Manufacturing was devastated. Plant closings in traditional industrial areas were common during the recessions of 1973–1975 and 1979–1982. Well-known industrial corporations such as International Harvester collapsed. Unemployment reached levels that rivaled the 1930s. Productivity declined and real wages stagnated. Exploiting anxiety over the future of the economy, Republican Ronald Reagan ran successfully on a platform that attacked the welfare state and industrial relations policies that emphasized collective bargaining.
The experience of the 1970s accelerated the changes that were only dimly evident in earlier years, creating a labor force that was more diverse in composition and overwhelmingly engaged in service occupations. The return of favorable employment conditions in the 1980s was almost entirely a result of service-sector developments. Formal education, antidiscrimination laws, and affirmative action policies opened high-paying jobs to ethnic and racial minorities, including a growing number of immigrants. At the same time, industry continued its movement into rural areas, especially in the South and West, and unions continued to decline. Indeed, according to the 2000 census, only 14 percent of American workers belonged to unions.
The results of these complex developments are difficult to summarize. On the one hand, by the 1990s many workers enjoyed seemingly limitless opportunities and accumulated unprecedented wealth. Severe labor shortages in many industries attracted a flood of immigrants and made the United States a magnet for upwardly mobile workers everywhere. On the other hand, many other workers, especially those who worked in agriculture or industry and had little formal education, found that the combination of economic and technological change, a less activist government, and union decline depressed their wages and made their prospects bleak. At the turn of the century, the labor force and American society were divided in ways that would have seemed impossible only a few decades before.
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