WHAT MAKES YOU STRIKE?. GULF BETWEEN THE RICH AND THE POOR Industrialization had lowered the price...

WHAT MAKES YOU STRIKE?

GULF BETWEEN THE RICH AND THE POOR

• Industrialization had lowered the price of consumer goods • Most factory workers couldn’t afford them

• Richest 9% owned 75% of the nations wealth• Out of a class of 24 that’s just about 2 people

• Rich had extravagant lifestyles• Poor made only a few hundred dollars a year

POOR HOUSING CONDITIONS

• Multiple people living in small living quarters• High rent

• Communities sharing outhouses• No running water• Poor sanitation• Disease spreads easily• Tuberculosis• Cholera• Typhoid• Small-pox

POLLUTION

• Smog and soot hung in the air• Asphyxiation• Sick• Acid rain

CHILD LABOR

• Forced into tight spaces (Size)• Wore chains around their waist which distorted

them made them smaller died in childbirth• As young as 4• 12 hour days • Sometimes with a 1 hour break (Dinner)

WORKING CONDITIONS

• Long hours• hazardous conditions• Forced labor

CHANGES

• investigate coal mines, factories, mills

• The combination of:• public outrage• political pressure• changes in the law(eventually led to better and safer working conditions)

• pressure from the workers + protest = organized self-help groups (Trade unions)

SOCIALISM

• 1830’s• Socialism – an economic and political philosophy

that favors public instead of private control of the means of production• More simply – everyone gets the same equal share• Cooperate not compete

COMMUNISM

• 1848• Communism – a more radical form of socialism• Communist Manifesto – denounced capitalism

and predicted the workers would overturn it. • Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

THE IDEA WAS

• Haves and the Have nots• bourgeois and proletariat• Rich and workers

• Have nots would overthrow the upper class (more of them) and establish a dictatorship where the government would eventually disappear and everyone would live equally

…..BUT NEITHER REALLY CAUGHT ON

• Wealthy• Saw it as a threat to their fortunes

• Politicians• Saw it as a threat to public order

• Most Americans• Saw it as a threat to deeply rooted American values of

private property, free enterprise and individual liberty

….BUT UNION LABORS DID

• Early Labor Unions• Construction and manufacturing

• NTU – National Trade Union• Lasted only a few years • Resurfaced after the Civil War

• Labor Unions were meant to help out in hard times but became an avenue for expressing worker’s demands to employers• Shorter workdays, higher wages, and better working

conditions

KOL

• Knights of Labor• Philadelphia 1869• Goal: All working men and Women, skilled or unskilled into

one union

• Terence Powderly Leadership• Equal pay for equal work• 8 hour workday• End to child labor

• Preferred not to strike• One strike helped them avoid a pay cut and soar to 700,000 members –

others ended in violence with no success• 1890’s weak

AFL

• American Federation of Labor• 1886

• Samuel Gompers• Craft Union – skilled workers• Specific to each trade

• Found ways to exclude African Americans and Women (believed they would drive wages down)

HOW THEY DIFFER

KoL

• Anyone worker• Allowed Women and

AA• Relied on Political

activity and education

AFL

• Skilled Workers• Excluded Women and

AA• Relied on economic

pressure (strikes and Boycotts)

HOW TO GET AHEAD

• Collective bargaining - a process in which workers negotiate as a group with employers

• *still a tactic used today – look at school districts!!

• Another tactic to help with CB – ‘closed shop’ a workplace in which only union members worked

IWW

• Industrial Workers of the World• a.k.a. wobblies• unskilled laborers• Radical (many socialists)• Violent strikes

EMPLOYERS REACTIONS TO UNIONS

• Feared if they paid workers more, their cost would go up and they would be less competitive in the market

• 1. forbidding union meetings• 2. firing union organizers• 3. forcing new employees to sign “yellow dog”

contracts – promising never to join a union or strike• 4. refusing to bargain collectively when strikes did

occur• 5. refusing to recognize unions as their workers’

legitimate representative