Workers in the USA have not always enjoyed the same rights and privileges that they do today. Around the turn of the 18th century, in the early years of the republic, it was deemed a criminal offense for anyone to try to protest or improve their working conditions either by refusing to work or stopping others from working. The working day was generally accepted to be a daunting twelve hours, six days a week. With this in mind, how did unions get started in the USA?
The earliest incarnations of the worker’s unions were organizations of activists, which gathered together groups of workers to help educate them or to gain support for their own political causes and occupational guilds which brought together groups of craftsmen of a particular trade. These groups developed into the first labor unions. Many of these were regional and therefore limited in their reach. Despite publicizing certain goals like the shortening of the working day, these unions lacked much of the political leverage to facilitate change to working conditions.
This changed in the 1830s when a group of carpenters went on strike for higher wages supported by various other groups of tradesmen and won. This gave rise to the General Trades Union of New York, one of the first to encompass workers from various different trades and signified a positive change in the rights and opportunities of workers in the United States. At this time, groups of female workers also began to organize themselves into unions and work towards gaining improvements in their own working lives.
The National Labor Union (NLU), the first federation of unions in the US, was formed at the end of the American Civil War and negotiated the further reduction in the working week from 10 to the now standard 8 hours a day. It was succeeded by the first national worker’s union called the Order of the Knights of Labor started at the end of the 1860s. Their goal was to unite all workers who could be considered ‘producers’ nationwide and in doing so greatly increase their standing and power to negotiate.
Today, the American Federation of Labor (AFL), the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and the Change to Win Federation (CtW) are three of the main coalitions of unions within the United States, organizations representing a huge percentage of the workforce. They all stemmed from the efforts of the many organizations which preceded them and their goals are fundamentally the same as always. They exist to bring workers together, to give them a voice and to protect their rights.