Labor history of the United States

The labor history of the United States describes the history of organized labor, US labor law, and more general history of working people, in the United States.

Quotes

• The US has an unusually violent labor history, well into the twentieth century.
  • Noam Chomsky and Marv Waterstone, Consequences of Capitalism: Manufacturing Discontent and Resistance (2021), p. 90

• American labor was strongest when the threat of communism was greatest. The apogee of America's welfare state, with all its limitations, was coterminous with the height of the Cold War. The dismantling of the welfare state and the labor movement, meanwhile, marched in tandem with communism's collapse.
  • Gary Gerstle, The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era, Oxford University Press (2022) p. 12

• The United States had the bloodiest labor wars of any industrialized nation. Hundreds of workers were killed. Thousands were wounded. Tens of thousands were blacklisted. Radical union organizers such as Joe Hill were executed on trumped up murder charges, imprisoned like Eugene V. Debs, or driven, like Haywood, into exile. Militant unions were outlawed. During the Palmer Raids on November 17, 1919, carried out on the second anniversary of the Russian Revolution, more than ten thousand alleged Communists, Socialists and anarchists were arrested. Many were held for long periods without trial. Thousands of foreign-born emigrés, such as Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman and Mollie Steimer, were arrested, imprisoned and ultimately deported. Socialist publications, such as Appeal to Reason and The Masses, were shut down.
  • Chris Hedges, "Strike, Strike, Strike." Scheerpost, September 19, 2022.

• The wildcat strike holds a particular place in the history and theory of the labour movement, as well as today reaction to the bosses and the government during the coronavirus pandemic. [...] The great advance of American workers in the 1930s that led to the founding of the Congress to Industrial Organizations and a vast expansion of the American Federation of Labor derived from just such wildcat strikes in the rubber plants, the auto industry, among electrical workers and many others. Workers walked out by the thousands, some occupied their plants, while others created mass picket lines, fought scabs and police. Wildcat strikes spread during the Depression decade like a virus through the United States, drawing in small industrial shops and retail workers. A similar thing happened in the 1960s and 1970s with teachers and public employees who walked out in illegal strikes to found their unions. Rank-and-file upheavals also transformed the United Mine Workers in the 1970s and shook up other unions as well.
  • Dan La Botz, Wildcat strikes across the US as pandemic spreads, 1 April 2020, Red Flag

See also

• Labor movement
• Strike action

External links

• Labor History Links
• United Farm Workers official site
• Blair Community Center and Museum to help preserve and understand the largest labor uprising in US history—the Battle of Blair Mountain.