Related Research Articles
Strike action, also called labor strike, labour strike and industrial action in British English, or simply strike, is a work stoppage caused by the mass refusal of employees to work. A strike usually takes place in response to employee grievances. Strikes became common during the Industrial Revolution, when mass labor became important in factories and mines. As striking became a more common practice, governments were often pushed to act. When government intervention occurred, it was rarely neutral or amicable. Early strikes were often deemed unlawful conspiracies or anti-competitive cartel action and many were subject to massive legal repression by state police, federal military power, and federal courts. Many Western nations legalized striking under certain conditions in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
The nature and power of organized labor in the United States is the outcome of historical tensions among counter-acting forces involving workplace rights, wages, working hours, political expression, labor laws, and other working conditions. Organized unions and their umbrella labor federations such as the AFL–CIO and citywide federations have competed, evolved, merged, and split against a backdrop of changing values and priorities, and periodic federal government intervention.
The United States textile workers' strike of 1934, colloquially known later as The Uprising of '34 was the largest textile strike in the labor history of the United States, involving 400,000 textile workers from New England, the Mid-Atlantic states and the U.S. Southern states, lasting twenty-two days.
The Lawrence Textile Strike, also known as the Bread and Roses Strike, was a strike of immigrant workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts, in 1912 led by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Prompted by a two-hour pay cut corresponding to a new law shortening the workweek for women, the strike spread rapidly through the town, growing to more than twenty thousand workers and involving nearly every mill in Lawrence. On January 1, 1912, the Massachusetts government enforced a law that cut mill workers' hours in a single work week from 56 hours, to 54 hours. Ten days later, they found out that pay had been reduced along with the cut in hours.
The following is a timeline of labor history, organizing & conflicts, from the early 1600s to present.
Commonwealth v. Pullis, 3 Doc. Hist. 59 (1806), was a US labor law case, and the first reported case arising from a labor strike in the United States. It decided that striking workers were illegal conspirators.
William Heighton was an English-American shoemaker who became the leader of the Philadelphia Working Man's Party.
The Order of the Knights of St. Crispin was an American labor union of shoe workers formed in Wisconsin in 1867. It soon reached a membership of 50,000 or more, largely in the Northeast. However it was poorly organized and faded away by 1874. They fought to prevent innovation, including the introduction of new machinery, and worked to keep immigrant labor out of the workforce.
The Lowell mill girls were young female workers who came to work in textile mills in Lowell, Massachusetts during the Industrial Revolution in the United States. The workers initially recruited by the corporations were daughters of New England farmers, typically between the ages of 15 and 35. By 1840, at the height of the Textile Revolution, the Lowell textile mills had recruited over 8,000 workers, with women making up nearly three-quarters of the mill workforce.
Labor relations or labor studies is a field of study that can have different meanings depending on the context in which it is used. In an international context, it is a subfield of labor history that studies the human relations with regard to work in its broadest sense and how this connects to questions of social inequality. It explicitly encompasses unregulated, historical, and non-Western forms of labor. Here, labor relations define "for or with whom one works and under what rules. These rules determine the type of work, type and amount of remuneration, working hours, degrees of physical and psychological strain, as well as the degree of freedom and autonomy associated with the work." More specifically in a North American and strictly modern context, labor relations is the study and practice of managing unionized employment situations. In academia, labor relations is frequently a sub-area within industrial relations, though scholars from many disciplines including economics, sociology, history, law, and political science also study labor unions and labor movements. In practice, labor relations is frequently a subarea within human resource management. Courses in labor relations typically cover labor history, labor law, union organizing, bargaining, contract administration, and important contemporary topics.
The Memphis sanitation strike began on February 12, 1968, in response to the deaths of sanitation workers Echol Cole and Robert Walker. The deaths served as a breaking point for more than 1,300 African American men from the Memphis Department of Public Works as they demanded higher wages, time and a half overtime, dues check-off, safety measures, and pay for the rainy days when they were told to go home.
The Everett Mills are a group of buildings consisting of the Everett and Stone Mills in Lawrence, Massachusetts. A former cotton textile mill, it was the site of the start of the Bread and Roses strike in 1912 and the one time workplace of Robert Frost.
The Daughters of St. Crispin was an American labor union of female shoemakers, founded in Lynn, Massachusetts on July 28, 1869, and was the first national women's labor union in the United States.
The Voice of Industry was a worker-run newspaper published between 1845 and 1848, at the height of the American Industrial Revolution. The Voice was centrally concerned with the dramatic social changes wrought by the Industrial Revolution, as workers came to depend on corporations for a wage.
The Los Angeles Garment Workers strike of 1933 is considered to be one of the most influential strikes in Los Angeles after the passing of the New Deal. The strike is known for being one of the first strikes where Mexican immigrant workers played a prominent role. The garment workers strike occurred in the fall of 1933 in the downtown Garment District in Los Angeles, California. Leaders of the strike, including Rose Pesotta and other members of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU), organized the strike to be culturally orientated in order to include Mexican immigrant workers to fight for union recognition in the garment industry.
The Fight for $15 is an American political movement advocating for the minimum wage to be raised to USD$15 per hour. The federal minimum wage was last set at $7.25 per hour in 2009. The movement has involved strikes by child care, home healthcare, airport, gas station, convenience store, and fast food workers for increased wages and the right to form a labor union. The "Fight for $15" movement started in 2012, in response to workers' inability to cover their costs on such a low salary, as well as the stressful work conditions of many of the service jobs which pay the minimum wage.
The labour movement is the collective organisation of working people to further their shared political and economic interests. It consists of the trade union or labour union movement, as well as political parties of labour. It can be considered an instance of class conflict.
The New York Shipbuilding strike was a strike that occurred in the Port of Camden, New Jersey, in the spring of 1934 by the New York Shipbuilding Company. Around 3,100 men took part in the 7-week action, centered at the company's Camden, New Jersey construction yard.
The 2016 Verizon workers' strike was a labor action in the United States involving about 40,000 Verizon Communications landline and Verizon Fios workers. The strike, which began April 13, was organized by trade unions International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers and the Communications Workers of America, and represents the biggest labor action in the United States since the Verizon strike of 2011 when 45,000 workers walked out. Picket lines were established along the East Coast of the United States, from Virginia to Massachusetts. A tentative agreement to end the strike was announced Friday, May 27.
The National Federation of Women Workers (NFWW) was a trade union in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland active in the first part of the 20th century. Instrumental in winning women workers the right to a minimum wage for the first time, the NFWW broke down barriers for women's membership in trade unions in general.
References
- ↑ The Boot and Shoe Workers' Union, Historical Encyclopedia of American Labor, 2004.
- 1 2 3 "The Great New England Shoemakers Strike of 1860". New England Historical Society. Retrieved 22 October 2016.
- ↑ "1860 Showmakers Strike in Lynn". Massachusetts AFL-CIO. Archived from the original on 16 August 2016. Retrieved 22 October 2016.
- ↑ James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom , p. 191.