[ A complete list of the ways labor changed American history would
be immeasurably long—but, for Labor Day, here are three of the top
ways unions helped American workers.] [[link removed]]

PORTSIDE LABOR

BEYOND LABOR DAY: 3 WAYS UNIONS HAVE HELPED AMERICAN WORKERS  
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Peter Cole
August 30, 2019
TIME [[link removed]]

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_ A complete list of the ways labor changed American history would be
immeasurably long—but, for Labor Day, here are three of the top ways
unions helped American workers. _

A 1934 Labor Day parade in Gastonia, N.C., Bettman/Getty Images

 

Bumper stickers aren’t known for being the most trustworthy sources
of historical fact, but the one that proclaims that weekends are
“brought to you by the labor movement” gets it exactly right. If
anything, it doesn’t go far enough.

Indeed, employers and elected leaders did not implement the five-day
workweek out of the goodness of their hearts. Rather, workers and
their unions agitated lobbied, organized, struck and voted for decades
to achieve these gains. As Frederick Douglass, the legendary African
American activist, once declared
[[link removed]]:
“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never
will.”

A complete list of the ways labor changed American history would be
immeasurably long—but, for Labor Day, here are three of the top ways
unions helped American workers:

Unions help win the 8-hour day

When the industrial revolution commenced in the early 19th century,
industrial workers toiled as long as farmers did: from sunup until
sundown. Ten-, 12-, and even 14-hour days were common in mills and
factories as well as printshops, restaurants and retail stores.

The first, halting efforts by workers to demand a shorter workday
began in the 1860s. After a generation of fits and starts, in 1886, a
nationwide movement arose that culminated on May 1
[[link removed]] when hundreds of
thousands of workers stayed away from work to push employers for
eight-hour days. These efforts largely failed.

So, too, when union workers of Andrew Carnegie’s monopolistic steel
company were defeated in 1892 at “Bloody Homestead
[[link removed]]”
(just outside of Pittsburgh), the steel industry instituted 12-hour
days, seven days a week. Every other week, steelworkers were compelled
to make the hated “long turn,” a 24-hour shift.

Only in the 1930s did the tide turn for workers. With Franklin D.
Roosevelt in the White House, allies in Congress, and the first female
cabinet member in Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, a series of
reforms were implemented. In 1938, Congress passed the Fair Labor
Standards Act [[link removed]] that
established the eight-hour day and five-day week for wage-workers. But
don’t solely thank the politicians. As FDR once told
[[link removed]] union
and civil-rights leader A. Philip Randolph, he agreed with the labor
movement’s ideas, but he needed the activists to “go out and make
me do it.”

Unions promote equality

The American working class has always been more ethnically and
racially diverse than the middle and upper classes. Just consider who
does the most dangerous, dirtiest and lowest-paid work. When the
transcontinental railroad lines started being built in the 1860s,
guess who laid the track? Chinese contract laborers, Mexican
Americans, Irish immigrants and recently emancipated African
Americans. Fast forward to the early 20th century, who worked in the
nation’s factories and mills? Croats and Jews, Norwegians and
Italians—essentially European immigrants and their children. Even
today, those who pick the nation’s fruits, grains and vegetables
are overwhelmingly immigrants of color
[[link removed]].

Workers fought for themselves, but they could not succeed
individually. They needed organizational heft. African Americans,
Mexican Americans and other minorities formed civil-rights
organizations but also joined unions. In the World War I
era, Philadelphia dockworkers
[[link removed]] joined the radical
Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), in part because they were
one-third African American, one-third Irish and Irish American, and
one-third Eastern European immigrant. In that generation, there might
not have been a more inclusive organization in all the nation. When
the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) formed in 1935, it
started organizing millions of African Americans, Mexican Americans,
women, “white ethnics” and others traditionally denied inclusion
in unions and the middle class.

The United Auto Workers helped bankroll the legendary March on
Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963. Cesar Chavez and Dolores
Huerta—perhaps the most revered Mexican American leaders to this
day—led the United Farm Workers of America. Martin Luther King Jr.
regularly advised black workers to unionize and was murdered while
helping sanitation workers in Memphis win a strike and contract.

It should go without saying that the labor movement, in a nation that
has yet to live up to its ideal of equality, also has engaged in
racism, sexism and xenophobia. But on the whole, and particularly in
recent decades, the diversity of the labor movement has set an example
other national organizations could learn from— and has taken steps
to make sure workers are protected regardless of race
[[link removed]], sex
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religion, nationality or legal status.
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Unions fight for safer workplaces

Once upon a time, millions of children toiled long hours in factories,
mills and mines. Once upon a time, miners and other industrial workers
died by the thousands every year — 23,000 in 1913 alone
[[link removed]]. Once upon a
time, workers in the country’s nuclear power plants were exposed to
huge doses of radioactive materials. What changed?

Unions pushed employers and government officials to make workplaces
safer.

While progress also came through union contracts, most American
workers never have been unionized, so public policy is the key vehicle
for labor protections. Across the so-called New Deal era, the 1930s
into the 1970s, a succession of laws sought to make American
workplaces safer. The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 abolished child
labor. The Occupational Safety and Health Act and Mining Enforcement
and Safety Act, both passed in 1970, resulted in huge improvements to
workplace safety. In particular, the Oil, Chemical & Atomic Workers
Union, led by Tony Mazzocchi and along with the widely-known
activist Karen Silkwood [[link removed]],
was a powerful force in the struggle for workplace safety and passage
of these landmark laws. In 2017, only 5,147 workers died
[[link removed]] on the job even
though the U.S. population had increased more than threefold in the
prior hundred years.

Unions are still working

Despite such tremendous gains, many American workers are overworked
[[link removed]] and arguably
underpaid
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Compared to workers in other industrialized countries, American
workers toil far more hours and receive far fewer days off. The World
Economic Forum
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that U.S. workers, on average, labor 1,783 hours a year—compared to
1,363 hours for German or 1,470 hours for French workers. According to
the American Time Use Survey (ATUS
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in 2018 men with full-time jobs labored 8.99 hours a day and women
8.56 hours, though most women also perform several hours a day of
unpaid household labor.

Not coincidentally, the reversal of American workers’ gains has
happened alongside an enormous decline
[[link removed]] in
unions. Membership peaked around 33% in the mid-1950s and was about
20% in 1983. Starting in the 1980s, what has been a steady decline
looks more like jumping off a cliff.

With declining worker power has come a dramatic rise in wealth
inequality
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now at heights last seen in the 1920s—that is, before the major
growth in unions in the 1930s and 1940s.

So, sure, thank a unionist for the fact that children don’t work
down in the mines, for the creation of minimum wage and overtime laws,
the eight-hour day and the 40-hour week, workplace safety, health
insurance, paid vacations and the possibility of a retirement lived in
dignity. But also consider the help American workers could still use
today.

_Peter Cole [[link removed]] is a
Professor of History at Western Illinois University and a Research
Associate at the Society, Work and Development Institute at the
University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa. __He is the author
of _Dockworker Power: Race, Technology & Unions in Durban and the San
Francisco Bay Area _and_Wobblies on the Waterfront: Interracial
Unionism in Progressive Era Philadelphia.

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