Labor Unions

Elsewhere during this period there emerged labor unions, which the Chartists in England organized on a trade basis along the lines of the collapsed medieval guilds. Other labor organizers argued that workers should organize themselves by broader industries rather than trade.

Originally, all unionizing was illegal in the United States as a form of “conspiracy” of workers to raise their wages by trying to bargain as a group. This changed with the 1842 landmark case of Commonwealth v. Hunt, in which the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled that “labor combinations” (or workers offering labor as a group) were legal provided that they has a legal purpose and used legal means to achieve their goals.

The National Labor Union, founded in 1866, was the first U.S. national labor federation, but it dissolved in 1872. Around that time also, the regional Order of the Knights of St. Crispin was founded in the northeast in 1867 and had 50,000 members by 1870. The Knights of Labor, focused on the railways, organized in 1869. The Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions, eventually called the American Federation of Labor, began in 1881 under the leadership of Samuel Gompers. The Western Federation of Miners was established in 1893.

Many unions leaders in the 19th century were socialists, some were anarchists, or anarcho-syndicalists (unions were sometimes called syndicates). In the 20th century, there occurred a shift, as we shall see.