DBQ One

DOCUMENT ONE:

But in the decade following the railroad strike, unions grew rapidly. The most ambitious of these was the Knights of Labor. Founded in 1869, the Knights sought to build a comprehensive organization uniting workers of all races, genders, ethnicities, and occupations. The Knights were equally expansive in their objectives. They lobbied government for the eight-hour day and child labor restrictions. They also campaigned for the initiative and referendum—electoral processes through which common citizens could draft and vote upon laws. But most fundamentally, and most radically, they sought to build more cooperative labor-management relations; they envisioned industries governed by councils of workers and managers within genuinely democratic, and ultimately collectively owned enterprises. During the 1880s, the Knights grew rapidly. By 1885, the organization claimed 100,000 members. And in that year it experienced its greatest success. When the Wabash Railroad, one of the railroads within Jay Gould's Southwest System, tried to break a local union, the Knights walked out in sympathy. Within days, the entire Southwest System was paralyzed and the Wabash was forced to negotiate with its workers. Flush with victory, the Knights drew in thousands of new members; within a year, 750,000 workers were united under the comprehensive umbrella of the Knights of Labor. But to a certain extant, the Knights' rapid success was also the cause of their downfall. In 1886, tens of thousands of newly-joined workers initiated labor actions—but only occasionally were the other members willing to walk out in support. Even more damaging, when an eight-hour-day rally in Chicago's Haymarket Square turned violent, all supporters of the eight-hour day were blamed. Who threw the bomb that killed six policemen at Haymarket has never been clearly established. A group of anarchists—unaffiliated with the Knights—was eventually tried and convicted for organizing the ill-fated rally. But all labor organizations were found guilty by association. The Knights of Labor, because of their size and visibility, were condemned the most vehemently. Within a year of the Haymarket riot, the Knights' membership had been cut in half; within a decade, the Knights were all but extinct.²¹

DOCUMENT TWO:

The momentum that labor developed during the New Deal continued through World War II, when unions honored no-strike pledges to ensure that the production of vital war supplies—tanks, planes, bombs, even uniforms and food rations—was not interrupted. Now representing 35% of all workers, organized labor seemed to have the power to match that of employers and unions thought the future looked bright. But a series of strikes right after the war brought a backlash. The year 1946 saw the most strikes of any year in American history as auto, steel, rubber, and other workers pressured employers for increased pay and benefits. But labor's arrogance—and the hardships imposed on ordinary citizens by frequent strikes—brought a public backlash. A pro-business Republican Congress passed the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947, throwing cold water on many of the structural advantages labor had obtained during the New Deal. The new law banned the closed shop and let states dictate open-shop rules. In 1952, a plumber's union official named George Meany took over the presidency of the AFL, where he would remain the nation's top labor leader until 1978. Meany bragged that he had never walked a picket line or led a strike in his life. He was a bureaucrat. Reluctant to rock the boat, Meany oversaw a period of relatively peaceful coexistence between labor and management. At the center of the power-sharing arrangement was the collective bargaining system, a structured approach by which management and labor hammered out their differences. Union shop stewards enforced the details of labor contracts on the job. Workers who felt they had been treated unfairly could use a formal grievance process to seek redress. Seniority became an important worker right—managers could not dismiss workers arbitrarily, but had to give deference to those longest on the job. These arrangements brought peace but they also brought problems. While in the early days of the labor movement, labor-management disputes had mostly revolved around core issues of wages and hours, now collective bargaining swelled to incorporate a dizzying array of rules and procedures. What followed was a kind of bureaucratization of work; managers (and maybe workers too) lost the ability to be flexible, to innovate in the workplace. Over time, as market competition from overseas and from non-unionized plants heated up, unionized businesses found it harder and harder to adjust and compete. The relatively long period of labor-management accord—and some businesses' willingness to accept the collectively bargained bureaucratization of their operations—was based on the unusual prosperity of the postwar years. American businesses faced few viable competitors around the world (most of those competitors in Europe and Asia had been blown up in World War II and it took them a long time to get back on their feet). Spared from cutthroat competition, those businesses could afford to be generous with workers. In this healthy economy, big companies generally didn't compete with each other on labor costs; when one firm came to an agreement with a union, the rest typically followed suit. More and more union contracts contained "cost of living adjustments" (COLAs), which guaranteed automatic raises in the face of inflation. It was a "live-and-let-live" period. Workers received decent wages and plenty of "fringe benefits" like health insurance and vacations. Business enjoyed a lull in the long power struggle. But the problems that would lead to a general economic decline in the 1970s were already building.

DOCUMENT THREE:

DOCUMENT FOUR:

DOCUMENT FIVE:

At the start of the industrial Revolution there was no legislation about working conditions in mills, factories or othe industrial plants. They simply had not been needed before. As factories spread rapidly the owners of mills, mines and other forms of industry needed large numbers of workers and they didn't want to have to pay them a high wage. Children were the ideal employees therefore! They were cheap, weren't big nough or educated enoguh to argue or complain and were small enough to fit between tight fitting machinery that adults couldn't get between. Children soon ended up working in all types of industry.
You may wonder why these children were not at school, this is simply because education in the early 19th century was not compulsory and in the majority of cases schools were expensive to send a child to, so working class families couldn't afford to send children there. Parents were quite willing to let children work in mills and factories as it provided the family with a higher income: one consequence of this was a high birth rate.
Nowadays lots of children have Saturday jobs or part time work after school. They might work as shop assistants, have paper round or even work in creative jobs and design jobs. these jobs are carefully controlled and the government has made laws saying how long children can work for, what types of job they can and cannot do and what the minimum age for working is. Consider the evidence below to see how modern conditions compare with the working conditions of the early 19th century.

INTRODUCTORY/THESIS:
Big Business, the Federal Government, and the general public were resistant to the formation of Labor Unions because they knew that they would lose revenue if the Unions were formed. They would lose a lot of workers because if the workers weren't getting what they wanted, they would go on strike. The Big Businesses woud try to replace their workers, but the workers got progressively worse and worse. Big Business and the government would send in people to suppress what was going on, All in all, the Big Business leaders ended up losing most of what they had.