THÔNG TIN TÀI LIỆU
218 labor unions and labor movements in the United States political parties less salient, and workingmen’s parties never offered a serious challenge to the country’s dominant political parties In 1890 the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) was founded in Columbus, Ohio, and in the coming years spread its organizing drives throughout the coal mining districts of Pennsylvania, Kentucky, West Virginia, Illinois, Utah, Colorado, and beyond Affiliated with the AFL and associated with such legendary labor leaders as “Mother Mary” Jones and John L Lewis, the UMWA remained one of the nation’s most influential unions well into the 20th century The 1890s also saw two of the most storied events in modern U.S labor history: the 1892 Homestead Strike and the 1894 Pullman Strike Both involved entire communities in large company towns, pitched battles between strikers and company-hired armed guards, intervention of state militias and federal troops, and deaths on both sides Both also ended in defeat for the strikers, and both created a legacy of militancy and sacrifice that became emblazoned onto the collective consciousness of organized labor In this mounting conflict between labor and capital, the executive branch of government, at both state and federal levels, actively and consistently sided with business So, too, did the courts Emblematic here was the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, a law intended to break up monopolies and trusts by barring combinations in restraint of trade Instead of targeting business combinations, the courts used the law to weaken organized labor, essentially declaring strikes illegal if they interfered with interstate commerce, which virtually all could be interpreted to FURTHER ORGANIZATION By the 1890s, especially under the impact of the economic depression of 1893–98, the struggle between labor and capital as mediated by a partisan state was entering a new phase The very concept of trade or craft unionism, criticized for many years as too narrow a basis for organizing working people, was being increasingly challenged by an emergent industrial unionism, which focused not on individual crafts but on entire industries: steel, mining, construction, transportation, manufacturing, and others Epitomizing this industrial approach to organizing was the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, or Wobblies), founded in 1905 and committed to the vision of one big union that embraced all workers everywhere As organized labor’s tactics and strategies evolved, so too did business’s By the 1890s work was becom- ing increasingly homogenized and standardized, the labor process itself increasingly under the control and supervision of management—a trend that has generated an extensive scholarly debate on the question of the deskilling of labor with the rise of factories and mass production If the power of organized labor had grown substantially during the Second Industrial Revolution, the power of big capital had grown far more Overall, organized labor remained much weaker than business, its victories small and tenuous compared to the victories of the forces arrayed against it As the foregoing survey makes plain, the growth of organized labor during the period examined here was neither linear nor continuous Instead, it was marked by complex ebbs and flows, with periods of growth and advance punctuated by periods of retrenchment and decline There is a lack of scholarly consensus on how to conceptualize the history of organized labor during these years Still, many would agree that the period 1870–1930 comprises a coherent temporal unit that witnessed the formation of the modern U.S labor movement Earlier studies of labor history focused principally on organizations and institutions, exemplified by the Commons School of the 1910s–1930s and the work of Philip S Foner from the 1940s Around 1960, there emerged in Britain and North America a new labor history (alongside a new social history) that looked beyond formal institutions to examine workers’ struggles at the point of production and in the wider community, as well as women’s labor history, including unpaid and reproductive labor, and the role of family, culture, ideology, race, gender, and sexuality From the late 1980s labor studies emphasized languages of labor and discourses of worker protest, action, and culture Meanwhile, empirically dense scholarship in the tradition of E P Thompson and Herbert Gutman has remained a mainstay of the field Further reading: Fink, Leon Workingmen’s Democracy: The Knights of Labor and American Politics Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1983; Gutman, Herbert G Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America: Essays in American Working Class and Social History New York: Vintage, 1976; Kessler-Harris, Alice Out to Work: A History of WageEarning Women in the United States New York: Oxford University Press, 1982; Laurie, Bruce Artisans into Workers: Labor in Nineteenth-Century America New York: Noonday Press, 1989; Montgomery, David The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865–1925 New York: Cambridge University Press,
Ngày đăng: 29/10/2022, 22:05
Xem thêm: