What would Gompers and Haywood think of the NLRA?
The National Labor Relations Act was proposed by the Democratic Senator Robert F. Wagner of New York in 1933 and enacted by Congress on July 5, 1935. The National Labor Relations Act (according to U-S-History.com “National Labor Relations Act”) “required employers to acknowledge labor unions that were favored by a majority of their work forces.” Essentially, the National Labor Relations Act established collective bargaining rights for employees, however there were certain limitations and regulations required. Viewed by some as the “Magna Carta of American labor”, others believe the implementation of this law may have been pushed along “to help stave off…potentially revolutionary…labor unrest” (“National Labor Relations Act”). Both Samuel Gompers and Bill Haywood are important figures in the labor movement, but I believe that they would have opposing viewpoints on the NLRA.
Samuel Gompers (according to “Samuel Gompers” from U-S-History.com) was the son of poor Jewish immigrants from Holland to England and followed his father’s profession of cigar making. He became active in the trade and was the first registered member of the Cigarmarker’s International Union in 1864. He worked his way up the union ladder, being elected president of his union’s local 144 in NYC in 1864 and later elected president of the American Federation of Labor from 1886 until his death in 1924. He was politically conservative and shied away from anything socialist, as he “accepted capitalism as the natural method of organizing production” (“Samuel Gompers”, U-S-History.com). I believe that Samuel Gompers would have tentatively supported this bill because although he worked more towards economic reform than ...
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In 1921 Lewis was denied the presidency of the American Federation of Labor when Samuel Gompers was elected over him. During the following year, he would disagree with labor activist, Jones, over whether or not to set a date for the Kansas coal workers to strike against the “Industrial Slave Law”, which was intended to stop coal labors from striking. The UMWA fell from 500,000 to less than 100,000 in the 1930s, due to growing numbers of unemployment. In 1935, the Congress for Industrial Organization was form when Lewis and several other unions joined together. Lewis then became president...
Between 1875 and 1891, wages rose from 169.2 to 172.5 and hours declined from 9.9 to 9.4 per day, indicating that the usage of unions attracted the attention of the heads of industry and caused for less work time and better compensation overall (DOC A). Peaceful labor forces, such as the American Federation of Labor (AFL) in 1886 by Samuel Gompers, demonstrated a different approach to the battle for better work conditions. Rather than violent riots, Gompers and other members of the group instead seeked to
Labor leader and advocate of legislative labor reform, Samuel Gompers was globally recognized for being a cornerstone in the sustaining legacy that is the American Federation of Labor. Gompers was born to a Jewish working class couple in London on the 27th of January in 1850. His childhood was short lived, for he was forced to mature early on. After only four years of receiving an elementary school education, Gompers was taken in and apprenticed to a shoemaker at the age of ten. He would quickly switch off trades and become apprenticed to a cigar maker in the east end of London; Gompers would continue with the cigar trade for a quarter of a century.
Modern democratic ideas were sprouting in America, especially within the organized labor movement from 1875 to 1900. During this period, blue-collar industrial Americans sought to abate their plight through the formal use of collective bargaining and the voice of the masses; seeking to use their strength in numbers against the pocket-heavy trusts. America’s rise in Unions can be traced back to 1792, when workers in Philadelphia formed America’s first union which instituted the avant garde method collective bargaining. It is because of these grass roots that America’s organized labor has continued to grow to this day, however not unchallenged. The challenges unions face today stem directly from the challenges faced in 1875. The organized labor movement from 1875 to 1900 is to blame for the problems unions face today as early labor unions crucified themselves politically, alienated themselves socially and failed to increase the socio-economic position of the worker, and in many cases only succeeded in worsening such positions.
Among many other new acts to help give recovery to the economy, the NIRA was born. The National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) was created by Roosevelt to see to the needs of industry, trade unions, and even the consumer, promoting cooperation among corporations while also establishing codes for fair competition between industries. Most importantly, the purpose of the NIRA was the put people back to work and fight the Great Depression. As Roosevelt saw it, the NIRA helped everyone involved in a business right down to the consumer. With this, he set men to work to set his plan into motion and to get it down on paper. With several men working on the project, there were bound to be slightly different ideas about how the act should work, so two separate groups of administration officials came up with two different drafts for the act. Roosevelt put the two groups together to work on one proposal that shared the ideas of both side and by May 15th, the bill was ready to be seen by Congress (Industrial Recovery: Reviving the Heart of America). After the Senate made its decision, the NIRA was signed on June 16th, 1933 and was split into two parts.
There were several specific labor unions and strikes that affected the general public. In 1866, the National Labor Union was formed. Their main goal was the 8-hour work day. The National Labor Union did have some setbacks in achieving this goal; one in partic...
The rise of industrialization and laissez faire were key constituents in the rise of labor unions; businesses were given more breathing room and had more influence in the economics than the government. Citizens were feuding the need to obtain better working hours, reasonable wages, and safer working conditions; this was mainly prompted by industrialization. The three most prominent labor unions in this time period were the American Railway labor(1890s), Knights of Labor (mid-1880s) and the National Labor Union (1866); they pushed forward forward
Union affiliation was first seen in the 1600’s when the roots of the United States were just being planted with skilled trade groups such as artisans, laborers, goldsmiths and printers. Over the next two hundred years, unions developed their desires for higher wages through the use of strikes and protests. The nation’s progress spurred the need for more labor and so began the Industrial Revolution. During the Revolution, many union members began to witness the power that employers had and as a result decided to make use of the concept of power in numbers. The National Labor Union formed in 1866 and worked to persuade congress to set a Federal eight-hour workday, which applied to government employees (Miller). Many large unions formed following in the NLU’s footsteps and uni...
The FLSA began on a Saturday, June 25, 1938, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed 121 bills, one of them being the landmark law in the Nation's social and economic development the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 ( Grossman, 1978). This law did not come easy, wage-hour and child-labor laws had made their way to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1918 in Hammer v. Dagenhart in which the Court by one vote held unconstitutional a Federal child-labor law. Similarly in Adkins v. Children's Hospital in 1923, the Court voided the District of Columbia law that set minimum wages for women, during the 1930's the Court's action on other social legislation was even more devastating (Grossman, 1978). Then came the New Deal Promise in 1933, President Roosevelt's idea of suspending antitrust laws so that industries could enforce fair-traded codes resulting in less competition and higher wages; It was known as the National Industrial Recovery Act (NRA) ( Grossman, 1978). The President set out "to raise wages, create employment, and thus restore business," the Nation's employers signed more than 2.
A more successful collective bargaining union was known as the American Federation of Labor (AFL) founded by Samuel Gompers in 1886. This organization focused on practical issues that involved craft unionization of skilled workers. The craft workers were successful in organizing because unlike the unskilled workers they could not be replaced easily. This union bargained for thing such as 8 hour work days, higher wages did not deal with social reforms. Women’s wages were not considered because the AFL dealt
To begin, we need to look towards the first recorded instance of a labor union in the United States, a union known as the Federal Society of Journeymen Cordwainers (http://www.lovkoandking.com/federal-society-of-journeymen-cordwainers---commonwealth-v-pullis.html). In 1794, a group of cordwainers, shoemakers, in Philadelphia banded together to form the United States’ first form of organized labor union through a series of strikes....
The National Labor Union and the Knights of Labor were founded in 1866. Employer resistance, public distrust and internal conflict, caused the union to experience a reduction in membership. As our country became ...
The American Federation of Labor was an association of trade unions starting 1886, rising out of an earlier Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions founded in 1881. The AFL's president, Samuel Gompers, was convinced that unions open to workers of all types of skills within a given industry,called industrial unions,were too undisciplined to withstand the tactics that both government and management had used to break American unions in the past. The answer, was craft unions, each limited to the skilled workers in a single trade. According to Gompers's "pure and simple unionism," labor should not waste its energies fighting capitalism; I ts sole task was to hammer out the best arrangement it could under the existing system, using strikes, boycotts, and negotiations to win better work conditions, higher wages, and union recognition.
U.S. Senate, Testimony of Samuel Gompers, August 1883, Report of the Committee of the Senate upon the Relations between Labor and Capital (Washington, D.C., 1885), 1:365-70.] 6 November 2004. .
Montgomery, David. The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865-1925. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987.