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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.
Shoemaking is the process of making footwear.
Rose Schneiderman was a Polish-born American labor organizer and feminist, and one of the most prominent female labor union leaders. As a member of the New York Women's Trade Union League, she drew attention to unsafe workplace conditions, following the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911, and as a suffragist she helped to pass the New York state referendum of 1917 that gave women the right to vote. Schneiderman was also a founding member of the American Civil Liberties Union and served on the National Recovery Administration's Labor Advisory Board under President Franklin D. Roosevelt. She is credited with coining the phrase "Bread and Roses," to indicate a worker's right to something higher than subsistence living.
The Women's Trade Union League (WTUL) (1903–1950) was a U.S. organization of both working class and more well-off women to support the efforts of women to organize labor unions and to eliminate sweatshop conditions. The WTUL played an important role in supporting the massive strikes in the first two decades of the twentieth century that established the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union and Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America and in campaigning for women's suffrage among men and women workers.
Leonora O’Reilly was an American feminist, suffragist, and trade union organizer. O'Reilly was born in New York state, raised in the Lower East Side of New York City. She was born into a working-class family and left school at the age of eleven to begin working as a seamstress. Leonora O’Reilly’s parents were Irish immigrants escaping the Great Famine; her father, John, was a printer and a grocer and died while Leonora was the age of one, forcing her mother, Winifred Rooney O’Reilly, to work more hours as a garment worker in order to support Leonora and her younger brother.
Clara Lemlich Shavelson was a leader of the Uprising of 20,000, the massive strike of shirtwaist workers in New York's garment industry in 1909, where she spoke in Yiddish and called for action. Later blacklisted from the industry for her labor union work, she became a member of the Communist Party USA and a consumer activist. In her last years as a nursing home resident she helped to organize the staff.
The following is a timeline of labor history, organizing & conflicts, from the early 1600s to present.
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.
These are References for Labor unions in the United States.
The New York shirtwaist strike of 1909, also known as the Uprising of the 20,000, was a labour strike primarily involving Jewish women working in New York shirtwaist factories. It was the largest strike by female American workers up to that date. Led by Clara Lemlich and the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union, and supported by the National Women's Trade Union League of America (NWTUL), the strike began in November 1909.
Fanny Baker Ames was an American philanthropist and women's rights activist.
Mary Anderson was a Swedish-born American labor activist and an advocate for women in the workplace. A feminist, she rallied support to ratify many new laws to support women and equal rights. Throughout her lifetime, Anderson held a large range of roles, rising from a factory worker to the Director of the Women's Bureau in the United States Department of Labor. Anderson's work to protect the rights of women in the workplace made no small impact on the lives of working women across the country.
Eva McDonald Valesh was an American journalist and labor rights activist. Valesh was an activist for, and reported on conditions of laborers in Minnesota's garment factories. She was also a speaker for the Knights of Labor movement and the National Farmer's Alliance.
The North Adams strike was a strike in 1870 by shoe workers of the Order of the Knights of St. Crispin, against Calvin T. Sampson's Shoe factory, in North Adams, Massachusetts. The strike itself was broken when the factory superintendent, George W. Chase, fired the Irish workers, replacing them with newly employed seventy-five Chinese men from California. Bringing national attention to North Adams, the event started a nation-wide trend of bringing in scab labor and helped perpetuate the concept of immigrants coming to the United States to steal jobs, which led to much hostility towards Chinese immigrants across the nation.
The New England Shoemakers Strike of 1860 or Lynn Shoeworkers Strike began on February 22, 1860 with 3,000 shoemakers walking off their jobs in Lynn, Massachusetts. It ended in April with modest gains for shoemakers, including pay increases and owner recognition of some labor unions. Approximately 20,000 workers went on strike across New England which made it the largest mass walkout in American history prior to the Civil War.
Jane "Jennie" Collins (1828–1887) was an American labor reformer, humanitarian, and suffragist. Orphaned as a child, she supported herself at 14 by working in the cotton mills, and later as a domestic and a seamstress. She was active in the abolitionist and labor movements, volunteered in military hospitals during the Civil War, and founded a charity for poor working women in Boston. In 1870, at the invitation of Susan B. Anthony, she addressed the National Woman Suffrage Association convention in Washington. The following year, she became one of the first working-class women in the United States to publish a volume of her own writings: Nature's Aristocracy; Or, Battles and Wounds in Time of Peace. A Plea for the Oppressed.
Theresa Serber Malkiel was an American labor activist, suffragist, and educator. She was the first woman to rise from factory work to leadership in the Socialist party. Her 1910 novel, The Diary of a Shirtwaist Striker, is credited with helping to reform New York state labor laws. As head of the Woman's National Committee of the Socialist Party of America (SPA), she established an annual National Woman's Day which was the precursor to International Women's Day. In 1911, while on a speaking tour of the American South, she called attention to the problem of white supremacism within the party. She spent her later years promoting adult education for women workers.
Women during the Reconstruction era following the US Civil War, from 1863 to 1877, acted as the heads of their households due to the involvement of men in the war, and presided over their farm and family members throughout the country. Following the war, there was a great surge for education among women and to coincide with this, a great need for women to find paid employment. As the educational opportunity began involving women, illiteracy declined and women were able to attain education. Soon after, many women became newspaper editors and journalists and began being more heavily involved within the community and local and national politics. Women began increasing their efforts towards suffrage and influencing public policy. African American women were also heavily involved in suffrage and with their involvement in the Methodist Episcopal Church South and the Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU).
Charles Henry Litchman was an American politician and labor unionist.
References
- 1 2 3 4 Kathryn Cullen-DuPont (14 May 2014). Encyclopedia of Women's History in America. Infobase Publishing. p. 60. ISBN 978-1-4381-1033-2.
- 1 2 National Women's Trade Union League of America (1912). Life and labor, Volume 2. Cornell University.
- 1 2 3 Lamphier, Peg A.; Welch, Rosanne (2017-01-23). Women in American History: A Social, Political, and Cultural Encyclopedia and Document Collection [4 volumes]. ABC-CLIO. p. 202. ISBN 9781610696036.
- 1 2 Blewett, Mary H. (1990-01-01). Men, Women, and Work: Class, Gender, and Protest in the New England Shoe Industry, 1780-1910. University of Illinois Press. p. 190. ISBN 9780252061424.
- ↑ Neill, Charles Patrick (1910). Report on condition of woman and child wage-earners in the United States. 1910: United States. Bureau of Labor. p. 110.
Daughters of St. Crispin.
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