The Need for Labor Unions originality and creativity were stifled in the factory system less value is placed on manual skills workers are expendable in the depersonalized world of the corporation directors work to please stockholders, not employees machines displace workers wage earners are handicapped by a glutted labor market

Union Disadvantages employers pool wealth to employ lawyers, the press, and politicians to support their side corporations import strikebreakers to violently end work stoppages federal courts headed by conservative judges side with big business employers use “lockouts,” “yellow-dog contracts” and “black lists” to target leaders company towns sink workers into perpetual debt the middle-class public sees strikes as socialist and unpatriotic

Early Development National Labor Union ( ) included 600,000 skilled, unskilled, and farmers excluded the Chinese made only nominal efforts to include women and blacks agitated for the arbitration of industrial disputes and the 8-hour workday derailed by the devastating depression of the 1870s

Knights of Labor Black delegate Frank J. Farrell introduces Terence V. Powderly, head of the Knights of Labor, at the organization's 1886 convention. The Knights were unusual in accepting both black and female workers. (Library of Congress) Knights of Labor ( ) began as a secret society went public to forestall reprisals by employers (1881)

Management and Labor This cartoon, from Puck, April 7, 1886, shows Terence Powderly, in the center, advocating the position of the Knights of Labor on arbitration. The Knights urged that labor and management (identified here as "capital") should settle their differences this way, rather than by striking. Note how the cartoonist has depicted labor and management as of equal size, and given both of them a large weapon; management's club is labeled "monopoly" and labor's hammer is called "strikes." In fact, labor and management were rarely equally matched when it came to labor disputes in the late nineteenth century. Knights of Labor ( ) campaigned for social and economic reform pushed for codes of safety and health Knights become involved in series of May Day strikes (1886) Haymarket Square episode undermines the group (May 4, 1886)

American Federation of Labor (AF of L) high-class craft unionists – less vulnerable to strikebreakers – formed their own union brainchild of Samuel Gompers, president of the organization ( ) an association of self-governing national unions that bonded on overall strategy used the boycott and walkout to fight for better wages, hours, conditions, and the closed shop public attitudes began to change towards the group by 1900 (Congress made Labor Day a legal holiday in 1894)