Weekends.
The 10-hour, 6-day workweek was a hard-fought struggle.
So was the 8-hour, 5-day workweek.
Thank the labor movement.
Students at Medford High School in the 1960s were barely exposed to the American labor movement. I can testify to that. I took every history and economics course offered. and the story of the hours and conditions of labor wasn't part of the curriculum.
I can understand why. The subject is economic conflict within a society, and the Cold War was underway with the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. We considered the Cold War an ideological battle between freedom and collectivism. The American labor movement would be a touchy area. The arguments advanced by the labor movement could sound "communistic" or "socialistic." Slavery was bad--the textbooks were clear on that. So was communism. It was safest for schools to describe labor markets in America as their happy and peaceful alternative. We had a system of free contracts between employers and workers, everyone paid what the invisible hand of the free market determined, everyone getting prosperous together. Since everybody got along and agreed the American system was best, there wasn't much "history" to tell.
Shorter workweeks and safer working conditions are now matters of law. Norms and expectations changed and legislatures responded. This happened in a context of Americans seeing what unions had negotiated for their workers, and they wanted it for themselves. Industrial settings were the vanguard for change. Better pay, hours, and working conditions required organizing and collective action by workers. Worker groups led strikes. Factory owners fought back with strikebreakers. Some strikes led to violence. People were killed. 
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The weekend didn't just happen. People fought for it.
7 comments:
Back in the day, management was willing to kill to prevent workers from organizing, but they formed unions anyway because it was the only way they could improve intolerable working conditions. Unless workers organized, management had all the power.
In the ‘70s I lived in Alaska and was in the Teamsters union, led at the time by Jesse Carr. I’ve always remembered his bargaining motto: “When you’ve got ‘em by the balls, their hearts will follow.”
While I was there, the University of Alaska, Anchorage and Anchorage Community College shared a common campus. There was a movement among the faculty to organize. The community college formed a union, but the University professors formed a ‘professional organization.’ The main difference was the union came to consensus and engaged in collective bargaining, but the professional organization didn’t. As a result, the community college faculty made more money.
The labor movement was a product of the Industrial Revolution, which began with Medieval relationships between factory workers and the early tycoons, who emulated royalty. They applied agrarian standards to mass production that led to intolerable working conditions, justified by class prejudice. It generated enormous wealth, and inequality that continues to this day, perhaps the fundamental driving force of our politics.
The labor movements were counter to the established order. People of wealth and ambition used their positions to expand power and wealth off the backs of their workers. Whether the job was mining, logging, making steel, manufacturing or trades like plumbing, stevedore, driving a wagon (truck); all were long soul wrenching jobs. As a worker aged their health and stamina waned. Injury and death was common. Protests about working conditions were met with force and many workers lost their lives protesting conditions. When Karl Marx wrote about a workers revolt he never imagined it would take hold in an agrarian society like Russia. Lenin's tilt into authoritarianism frightened the industrial nations, the main thrust of Marxism, seeing the workers organizing as a threat to more than their business but also to the political order.
The labor movement was not a peaceful movement. Workers movements succeeded by making their working conditions public and withholding their labor. Unfortunately, since President Reagan's strike breaking, the US has experienced a decline in the percentage of workers in a union and a decline in workers real earning capacity while concurrently an astronomical rise in CEO compensation.
Today I celebrate the accomplishments of my fellow union members but caution we may be in a last-mans (persons) club if we don't balance the political power arrayed against unionizing. At present, our society is gravitating to a 24/7 lifestyle and a gig economy working from home where working conditions and hours are not regulated. Gig-type work and telecommuting are too easily exploited. New rules are needed. But today I fly the flag, picnic with my neighbors and enjoy what I have. Thank you fellow workers.
Labor Day is my favorite federal holiday.
I am a 4th generation union man (ATSF) and have seen the beauty and the ugliness of the movement up front. The movie F.I.S.T with Stallone is a good view from the bottom up.
Strange bedfellows, redux! I too was several years in the Teamsters, in the ‘80s. In school as at work I rooted with labor because to me that meant defiant, principled underdogs like Eugene Debs and Big Bill Haywood and, yes, Jimmy Hoffa.
For years now, after labor’s fundamental victories had been won via strife then by collective bargaining—hours, workplace safety, etc.—the costly shift to public sector unions has ensued. “Labor” itself is no longer the emphasis, so much so that I fear that career criminals, the chronic homeless, and even the unemployed themselves will be explicitly unionized after a fashion.
I went to vocational high school in the early 1970s in Massachusetts and trained to be a licensed electrician. My neighbor was a union (IBEW) electrician and it provided a comfortable living for his family on a single income. I thought that was a sweet deal and would be satisfied with that. I finally passed all the tests and got my license, but the IBEW would not have me. It was a private club that tried to control skilled labor supply by limiting membership. But the trade schools kept pumping us out, flooding the market with skilled, ambitious young workers who were willing to work for two thirds the union rate. Non-union contractors could underbid union contractors – which shrunk the union pie of work. It seemed obvious to me that getting to that middle-class life on non-union wages was going to be longer haul.
I moved to California and found that the Union would not have me there either. It wasn’t personal; I simply was not from the “tribe”. So, I got my contractor’s license and with funding from a stealth owner, started small jobs that grew to larger jobs. The trouble was that the union had a lock on skilled labor which limited growth, so I enticed a bunch of my non-union electrician buddies from the east coast with union wages. They eagerly came.
These larger projects caught the eye of the local IBEW business agent who began picketing our jobs, and personally threatened my employees and me with violence. It reached a peak where several of my jobs were sabotaged and our job trailers set fire. I was out of my depth. Remember, I was just a young guy trying to make a living with my trade, and all I wanted was a job. I did not see unions as my friend.
A court-order put an end to the picketing and the project owners added measures of security. More non-union contractors started up and, like the Massachusetts story, the union share of the work shrank. My company grew beyond my managerial abilities, and the “stealth owner” hired an experienced manager who could grow the business (a good thing) and we parted ways. That was over 40 years ago.
Imagine what might have happened if the unions had gotten us to organize instead of lock us out? I think that’s what’s happening now. The IBEW is now hungry for willing entrants and skilled talent. Ironically, the buyers of that company I started 40 years ago proudly announced they have recently signed an agreement with the IBEW. I should call and congratulate them.
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