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The United Mine Workers of America is a North American labor union best known for representing coal miners. Today, the Union also represents health care workers, truck drivers, manufacturing workers and public employees in the United States and Canada. Although its main focus has always been on workers and their rights, the UMW of today also advocates for better roads, schools, and universal health care. By 2014, coal mining had largely shifted to open pit mines in Wyoming, and there were only 60,000 active coal miners. The UMW was left with 35,000 members, of whom 20,000 were coal miners, chiefly in underground mines in Kentucky and West Virginia. However it was responsible for pensions and medical benefits for 40,000 retired miners, and for 50,000 spouses and dependents.
The United Farm Workers of America, or more commonly just United Farm Workers (UFW), is a labor union for farmworkers in the United States. It originated from the merger of two workers' rights organizations, the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC) led by organizer Larry Itliong, and the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA) led by César Chávez and Dolores Huerta. They became allied and transformed from workers' rights organizations into a union as a result of a series of strikes in 1965, when the mostly Filipino farmworkers of the AWOC in Delano, California, initiated a grape strike, and the NFWA went on strike in support. As a result of the commonality in goals and methods, the NFWA and the AWOC formed the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee on August 22, 1966. This organization was accepted into the AFL-CIO in 1972 and changed its name to the United Farm Workers Union.
The American Federation of Labor (AFL) was a national federation of labor unions in the United States founded in Columbus, Ohio, in December 1886 by an alliance of craft unions disaffected from the Knights of Labor, a national labor union. Samuel Gompers was elected the full-time president at its founding convention and reelected every year, except one, until his death in 1924. He became the major spokesperson for the union movement.
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. Beginning in the 1930s, unions became important allies of the Democratic Party. Some historians question why a Labor Party did not emerge in the United States, in contrast to Western Europe.
The textile workers' strike of 1934 was the largest strike in the labor history of the United States at the time, involving 400,000 textile workers from New England, the Mid-Atlantic states and the U.S. Southern states, lasting twenty-two days.
The Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (ACWA) was a United States labor union known for its support for "social unionism" and progressive political causes. Led by Sidney Hillman for its first thirty years, it helped found the Congress of Industrial Organizations. It merged with the Textile Workers Union of America (TWUA) in 1976 to form the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union (ACTWU), which merged with the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union in 1995 to create the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees (UNITE). UNITE merged in 2004 with the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Union (HERE) in 2004 to create a new union known as UNITE HERE. After a bitter internal dispute in 2009, the majority of the UNITE side of the union, along with some of the disgruntled HERE locals left UNITE HERE, and formed a new union named Workers United, led by former UNITE president Bruce Raynor.
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.
The Textile Workers Union of America (TWUA) was an industrial union of textile workers established through the Congress of Industrial Organizations in 1939 and merged with the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America to become the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union (ACTWU) in 1976. It waged a decades-long campaign to organize J.P. Stevens and other Southern textile manufacturers that achieved some successes.
Operation Dixie was the name of the post-World War II campaign by the Congress of Industrial Organizations to unionize industry in the Southern United States, particularly the textile industry. Launched in the spring of 1946, the campaign ran in 12 Southern states and was undertaken as part of a dual effort to consolidate wage gains won by the trade union movement in the Northern United States by raising wage levels in the South while simultaneously transforming the conservative politics of the region, thereby allowing the trade union agenda to win on a national scale.
Timeline of trade union history
Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU) is a labor union in the United States. Founded in 1937, the RWDSU represents about 60,000 workers in a wide range of industries, including but not limited to retail, grocery stores, poultry processing, dairy processing, cereal processing, soda bottlers, bakeries, health care, hotels, manufacturing, public sector workers like crossing guards, sanitation, and highway workers, warehouses, building services, and distribution.
The United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing, and Allied Workers of America (UCAPAWA) was a labor union formed in 1937 and incorporated large numbers of Mexican, black, Asian, and Anglo food processing workers under its banner. The founders envisioned a national decentralized labor organization with power flowing from the bottom up. Although it was short-lived, the UCAPAWA influenced the lives of many workers and had a major impact for both women and minority workers in the union.
The United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing, and Allied Workers of America union (UCAPAWA) changed its name to Food, Tobacco, Agricultural, and Allied Workers (FTA) in 1944. The FTA sought to further organize cannery units and realized the best way to do this would be through organizing women and immigrant workers and in 1945 started finding success to these ends. The FTA started to experience problems when the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT) began interfering in its organizing efforts. The IBT was affiliated with the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and the FTA was affiliated with its rival, the radical, Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). The IBT union was more conservative in regards to women and immigrant workers. It did not have much interest in integrating them into the union. It was far more concerned with making sweetheart deals and collecting union dues. This willingness to maintain the status quo made the IBT a favorite among California Processors and growers. This meant that they signed more contracts with processors and growers than the FTA, which ultimately undermined the more radical FTA union. The Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 further damaged the FTA. This act stated that American labor unions could not have communist ties and the FTA had many. Because of this act many of the organizers either left the union or were deported. It was at this time that the FTA as a whole was expelled from the CIO. This put the IBT in the center of the California cannery industry and it remained there for the next two decades.
Emil Rieve was an American labor leader. He was president of the Textile Workers Union of America (TWUA) from 1939 to 1956, a vice president of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) from 1939 to 1955, and a vice president of the AFL-CIO from 1955 to 1960.
Lucy Randolph Mason was a 20th-century American labor activist and suffragette. She was involved in the union movement, the consumer movement and the civil rights movement in the mid-20th century.
The 1926 Passaic textile strike was a work stoppage by over 15,000 woolen mill workers in and around Passaic, New Jersey, over wage issues in several factories in the vicinity. Conducted in its initial phase by a "United Front Committee" organized by the Trade Union Educational League of the Workers (Communist) Party, the strike began on January 25, 1926, and officially ended only on March 1, 1927, when the final mill being picketed signed a contract with the striking workers. It was the first Communist-led work stoppage in the United States. The event was memorialized by a seven reel silent movie intended to generate sympathy and funds for the striking workers.
The Little Steel strike was a 1937 labor strike by the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and its branch the Steel Workers Organizing Committee (SWOC), against a number of smaller steel producing companies, principally Republic Steel, Inland Steel, and Youngstown Sheet and Tube Company. The strike affected a total of thirty different mills belonging to the three companies, which employed 80,000 workers. The strike, which was one of the most violent labor disputes of the 1930s, ended without the strikers achieving their principal goal, recognition by the companies of the union as the bargaining agent for the workers.
The Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) was a federation of unions that organized workers in industrial unions in the United States and Canada from 1935 to 1955. Created in 1935 by John L. Lewis, who was a part of the United Mine Workers (UMW), it was originally called the Committee for Industrial Organization but changed its name in 1938 when it broke away from the American Federation of Labor (AFL). It also changed names because it was not successful with organizing unskilled workers with the AFL.
Larus and Brother Company (1877–1968) was a diversified tobacco company headquartered in Richmond, Virginia. The company manufactured pipe tobacco, cigarettes, and charcoal. It also operated local radio and television stations.
The Atlanta washerwomen strike of 1881 was a labor strike in Atlanta involving washerwomen. Beginning in July 1881, the strike was carried out primarily by African American women who argued for increased wages and greater autonomy in their work. The strike ended in August with some success for the strikers.
References
- ↑ "African American National Biography". Harvard University. Retrieved 14 February 2020.
- ↑ Eaton, Alice Knox (2013). "Harris, Louise "Mamma"". Oxford Index. doi:10.1093/acref/9780195301731.013.36468. ISBN 9780195301731 . Retrieved 14 February 2020.
- 1 2 3 4 5 6 "Black Women Raise Their Voices in the Tobacco Industry". American Postal Workers Union. 2019-05-28. Retrieved 2020-02-07.
- 1 2 Trotter, Joe William (2001). The African American Experience. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. pp. 469. ISBN 0-395-75654-5. OCLC 49611398 – via Internet Archive.
- ↑ Feldstein, Ruth (1993). "Labor Movement". In Hine, Darlene Clark (ed.). Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia. Brooklyn, New York: Carlson Publishing Inc. pp. 686. ISBN 0926019619. OCLC 1028865717 – via Internet Archive.
- ↑ Janiewski, Dolores (1987). "Seeking 'a New Day and a New Way': Black Workers and Unions in the Southern Tobacco Industry". In Groneman, Carol; Norton, Mary Beth (eds.). "To Toil the Livelong Day": America's Women at Work, 1780-1980. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. p. 173. ISBN 978-0-8014-9452-9.
- ↑ Giddings, Paula (1988). When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America. Toronto: Bantam. pp. 233. ISBN 0553342258. OCLC 1036964016 – via Internet Archive.
- ↑ Foner, Philip S.; Lewis, Ronald L., eds. (1983). The Black Worker from the Founding of the CIO to the AFL-CIO Merger 1936-1955. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. pp. 124–126. ISBN 0-87722-136-7. OCLC 3730662.