Unions
Where are unionizing efforts focused today?
Please back your explanation with history and citations.
Unionization
"BROTHERHOOD WEEK IN CHICAGO," 1928
Chicago's historic reputation as a “labor town” is somewhat
misleading. Workers have built some of the strongest organizations
in the country, but unions have often struggled for life against
well-organized, militant employers, and racial and ethnic diversity
has shaped the movement's character as much as the dynamics of
social class. How do we explain the broader patterns of labor
organization in terms of the city's distinctive characteristics?
What factors contributed to the rise, changing character, and
decline of the movement, and what are its prospects at the dawning
of a new century?
UNION TAILOR SHOP, N.D.
With the shifting composition of its working-class population and
the diversity of its metropolitan economy, Chicago has presented
both enormous challenges and special advantages for labor
organizers. Heavy immigration from the mid-nineteenth century
through the early 1920s, and then again in the postwar era and
especially after the Immigration Act of 1965, required labor to
carry its message in diverse languages to people from vastly
different cultures. Likewise, the Great Migration of black
southerners, immigration from Mexico and other Latin American
nations, Puerto Rican migration, and the influx of East and South
Asian immigrants in the late twentieth century have forced
organizers to confront race issues for most of the movement's
history. Yet racial and ethnic minorities have often played key
roles in building and transforming the movement.
The city's largest employers in the late nineteenth and first half
of the twentieth century were building construction and maintenance
companies, railroads, and a range of manufacturing concerns
characterized by increasing concentration in a few large
firms—slaughtering and meatpacking, metalworking, garment
manufacturing, iron and steel production, lumber and woodworking,
electrical manufacturing, and a variety of food processing
factories. Chicago also built a large printing and publishing
industry and, as a corporate, legal, and medical center, claimed an
increasingly large population of white-collar and technical workers
beginning in the late nineteenth century. Such variety led to the
conventional wisdom that “anyone can make a living in Chicago,” but
it also required that any successful labor movement embrace a
diverse range of workers. Immigrants and workers of color often
have been more difficult to organize, not because of any intrinsic
qualities, but because they have tended to be among the least
skilled and the poorest paid—and as such particularly vulnerable in
periods of economic crisis and employers' offensives.
JOHN FITZPATRICK, N.D.
One of the Chicago movement's distinctions, then, was that well
into the mid-twentieth century it generated considerable power amid
this social, cultural, and occupational complexity. Another was the
movement's division between conservative and often corrupt
elements, concentrated disproportionately in the Building Trades
Council, and progressive, often radical elements. In the late
nineteenth century the radicals were represented above all by the
German-speaking Marxists; in the early twentieth century, by the
mainstream labor progressives around Chicago Federation of Labor
(CFL) president John Fitzpatrick; and in the Great Depression and
war years, by the activists involved in the creation of the new
Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) unions. Such
progressives provided the movement with an aggressive, innovative
leadership that helps to explain organized labor's relative success
in Chicago. They were particularly important in expanding the
movement to those otherwise left behind—women, the unskilled, and
racial minorities.
As elsewhere, skilled workers led the move to permanent
organization. In the 1850s and 1860s, printers, shipwrights and
caulkers, iron molders, machinists and blacksmiths, and others
established craft unions that were often linked to some of the
earliest national organizations. By the late 1860s Chicago workers
supported more than 20 unions aimed at higher wages and shorter
working hours; a lively newspaper, the Workingman's Advocate;
numerous producers' cooperatives; and a network of Eight Hour
Leagues which organized in municipal, state, and congressional
elections, winning both city and state eight-hour laws. As with
later legislative successes, however, the laws worked only where
unions were strong enough to enforce them, a rare scenario during
the 1873–77 depression.
Until the 1880s, the city's unskilled—Irish, Bohemian, and Polish
lumber shovers, brickyard workers, coal heavers, and construction
and track laborers—found their voice only sporadically, often in
violent strikes and riots, as in the 1877 railroad strike. The
“Great Upheaval” of the mid-1880s brought a dramatic expansion of
unionism among virtually all occupations, including craftsmen. The
big breakthrough, however, came in the organization of the Irish
and other unskilled workers in the ranks of the Knights of Labor,
by far the largest and most important late-nineteenth-century labor
reform movement. As craftsmen poured into the Knights' trade
assemblies and laborers into its mixed assemblies, the movement
grew from 2,300 in 1882 to more than 40,000 by 1886. Led by
Elizabeth Rodgers, the Knights also organized thousands of women.
Working together, the radical Central Labor Union's German and
Bohemian socialists and anarcho-syndicalists, the immigrant and
native-born craftsmen in the mainstream Trades and Labor Assembly,
and the Knights created perhaps the strongest and most radical
movement in the United States. They sponsored labor newspapers in
various languages, a vibrant cooperative movement, and a United
Labor Party which seemed poised to win control of the city
government. More than 40,000 joined a general strike for the
eight-hour day in May 1886, and throughout the world Chicago became
a great symbol of labor solidarity.
A number of factors explain the destruction of this movement.
First, a series of crushing defeats, particularly among the
unskilled in the stockyards and elsewhere, reversed the movement's
expansion. Second, internal conflicts, especially within the
Knights of Labor, eviscerated the movement's vitality. Finally, the
radical socialist and anarchist wing, especially strong in Chicago
and a key to the organization of unskilled immigrants, was
decimated in the political repression following the events at
Haymarket Square in 1886. By 1887 many of the radicals were in
prison, blacklisted, or dead, while the Knights had shrunk to
17,000 members.
A new movement emerged in the 1890s. While the Knights lost 75
percent of their membership between 1886 and 1887 and the
revolutionary organizations were badly disrupted, many of the craft
unions survived. The new American Railway Union emerged to organize
both skilled and unskilled in the early 1890s. Greater federation
through the formation of the Building Trades Council (1890) and the
Chicago Federation of Labor (CFL, 1896) brought more planning and
coordination and an era of effective sympathy strikes. Thus, the
movement emerged from the historic defeat of the Pullman Boycott in
1894 and the depression of the 1890s with renewed strength. At the
turn of the century, organization spread once again to the less
skilled—in the stockyards and steel plants, in machine shops, in
candy, garment, and box factories, among scrubwomen, waitresses,
and teachers. By the end of 1903, 245,000, more than half of the
city's workers, were affiliated with the CFL, including 35,000
women in 26 different occupations. Strikes mushroomed amid new
calls for a shorter workday. Federation leaders claimed that theirs
was the “best organized city in the world.”
GARMENT WORKERS' STRIKE, 1910
Yet much of this movement, particularly among the unskilled, had
been destroyed by 1905. In the building and metal trades, among
transport owners and garment manufacturers, and elsewhere,
well-organized employers declared their establishments open shops
and waged war on the city's unions. Spectacular lockouts in the
midst of heavy unemployment in 1904 weakened organization among the
skilled and extinguished it among immigrant laborers in meatpacking
and other factories around the city. Except for the clothing and
garment industry, where strikes in 1909 and 1910 led to the
expansion of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU)
and the foundation of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America
(ACWA) in 1910, new organization was minimal until World War
I.
The CFL attracted national attention again from 1917 to 1919,
spawning successful national organizing drives in both steel and
meatpacking and launching the Cook County Labor Party, the linchpin
for the national labor party movement of the postwar years. Again,
a combination of mainline progressives around CFL president John
Fitzpatrick and secretary Edward Nockels with syndicalists and
other radicals associated with William Z. Foster provided much of
the leadership for these movements, and they made special efforts
to integrate immigrant and African American laborers. Political
repression in the form of the Red Scare (1919–1922), however, along
with unemployment, the Race Riot of 1919, and a powerful employers'
open-shop drive employing court injunctions, lockouts, and
blacklists, shattered the movement. While organization persisted
under fire throughout the 1920s in the building trades, among other
craftsmen, and on the railroads, most of the breakthroughs among
the unskilled in basic industries were eradicated by 1922, and
political innovation stagnated for most of the next decade.
One important community of workers was largely absent from this
movement even at its height. While it reached out to unskilled
immigrant women as well as men, Chicago's labor movement largely
excluded or segregated African Americans. There were important
exceptions, as in the garment and meatpacking industries, but on
the eve of World War I, more than a third of the CFL's constituent
unions excluded blacks entirely or segregated them into Jim Crow
locals. Many other unions practiced more subtle forms of
discrimination. The cynicism among black workers that grew from
such experiences created a serious problem once the massive
migration of the war years and the 1920s created a large black
labor force in meatpacking, steel, and elsewhere. The ultimate
destruction of promising organizations in basic industry during the
1919–1922 era can be explained largely in terms of postwar
unemployment and another aggressive open-shop campaign, but the
unions' unsuccessful efforts to integrate the black migrants helps
to account for the relative weakness of Chicago unions during the
1920s and the early Depression years. Industrial organization
emerged in meatpacking, steel, agricultural machinery
manufacturing, and elsewhere only in the late 1930s and during
World War II, when the new CIO unions stressed civil rights in
strenuous organizing campaigns among African Americans, Mexicans,
and other minority workers. In turn, these workers provided some of
the strongest bases of support for the new industrial unions. Yet
some building trade unions continued to discriminate long after the
civil rights legislation of the mid-1960s and were forced to
integrate only through federal government pressure and protests
from the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists and other local
groups.
The story of Chicago's building trade unions represents many of the
strengths and weaknesses of Chicago labor. Strong craft
organizations flourished in a decentralized industry where
technological limits and a series of building booms created a
persistent demand for skilled manual labor. By the end of the
nineteenth century more than a score of unions had federated into a
powerful Building Trades Council (BTC), which coordinated a complex
range of work rules and crippling sympathetic strikes on sites
throughout the city. Federated contractors copied the model,
launching lockouts in 1900 and 1921, but union control persisted.
In some trades, union power came along with graft and collusion.
Most building trades became closely allied with the emerging
Democratic political machine and several with organized crime.
Throughout most of the twentieth century, conservative leaders from
the building trades excluded women and minorities from their
lucrative apprenticeship programs and dueled with progressive
elements in the CFL.
REPUBLIC STEEL STRIKE, 1937
The initiative for the new CIO unions of the late 1930s and the
World War II era lay in some of the older and more progressive AFL
unions, notably the ILGWU and ACWA, which had completely organized
the clothing industry by the mid 1930s; and among radical
rank-and-file organizations, notably affiliates of the Communist
Trade Union Unity League, in steel, farm implement, furniture, and
electrical manufacturing and in meatpacking and other food
processing plants. By 1939, the Packing House Workers Organizing
Committee (PWOC, later the United Packinghouse Workers of
America—CIO [UPWA]) had organized the giant Armour plant and built
a membership of 7,550, or about 40 percent of the Chicago
industry's workers. As in packing, the Steel Workers' Organizing
Committee (SWOC, later the United Steel Workers of America—CIO
[USWA]) had one major breakthrough in the late 1930s—U.S. Steel and
its subsidiaries in 1937. In May of that year, however, SWOC faced
a major setback in its campaign to organize the independent “Little
Steel” firms when police killed 10 workers and wounded dozens of
others in the “Memorial Day Massacre” at Republic Steel. This
violence and a return of unemployment in the period from 1937 to
1939 slowed the organizing, and SWOC ended the 1930s with a
membership of less than 21,000, about one-third of the region's
steelworkers. Other CIO beachheads were established when the Farm
Equipment Workers (FE) won representation rights at the giant
International Harvester plant (6,300 workers) and the United
Electrical Workers (UE) won contracts in a number of electrical
manufacturing plants.
As late as the beginning of the Second World War, Chicago's labor
movement was still dominated by the AFL unions, which had a 1939
membership of over 330,000 compared to the CIO's 60,000. The new
industrial unions benefited, however, from a massive increase in
defense production and federal policies that facilitated union
formation and expansion during World War II. USWA District 31 grew
from 18,000 in 1940 to 100,000 in 1945 and the UPWA, FE, and UE all
experienced comparable expansion, as did the ILGWU and ACWA.
Following a massive strike wave in 1946–47 involving more than 2.5
million workdays lost, labor relations stabilized, but union
fortunes remained uneven in the postwar period. Mayor Richard J.
Daley's tenure (1955–1976) is often thought of as a golden age for
organized labor, and, in fact, with the economy booming and
collective bargaining largely accepted by employers, most unions
thrived. The politically well-connected building trades prospered
most. In the midst of a sustained boom in building construction,
construction journeymen enjoyed a 250 percent increase in real
wages between 1945 and 1980. Signs of trouble emerged as early as
the late 1950s, however, with the gradual decline of manufacturing
employment, a trend that accelerated in the next two decades.
Moreover, the high-wage, unionized manufacturing industries were
declining just as large numbers of African Americans and Latinos
were entering the city's labor force. Major strikes reemerged in
the late 1960s and 1970s, and the labor movement was clearly in
decline by the time of Daley's death in 1976.
In the same years, however, changes in state law and in Chicago's
occupational structure and the racial and ethnic composition of its
population led to a dramatic transformation. As older
manufacturing-based unions like the UPWA, USWA, and the garment
workers' unions declined as a result of technological change and
low-wage competition abroad, government and service workers created
a new movement. Public employees poured into the American
Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), and
health care and service workers, into the Service Employees
International Union (SEIU). These industries included large numbers
of women, African Americans, and Latinos. By 1980 nearly half of
all Chicago truck drivers were black or Latino, while minority
representation in the Teamsters warehouse and other locals tended
to be much higher. In the same years, SEIU Local 73, with 18,000
health care workers, became the largest AFL-CIO local union in the
state.
Women have been active in the city's labor movement at least since
the formation of the Chicago Working Women's Union (CWWU) in the
mid-1870s and were instrumental in efforts to organize the clothing
trades and other industries with substantial female labor forces.
The growing proportion of women in the labor force after World War
II, however, together with the shift in the city's occupational
work structure from industrial to service and clerical jobs, the
rise of feminism over the past three decades, and the subsequent
struggles for women's rights, all have created a larger and more
important role for women in the local movement during the second
half of the twentieth century. Chicago activists have also played
important roles in the national movement. A long legacy of women's
activism—from the CWWU, through the Knights and the Women's Trade
Union League, to CIO industrial unions and early efforts to
organize clerical and service workers—made Chicago the natural
birthplace of the National Coalition of Labor Union Women (CLUW) in
1974. CLUW has pursued not only better wages and working conditions
but also broader social issues and the special needs of working
women, including child care.
The challenges facing Chicago labor are those facing workers
throughout the United States—and the same ones they have faced in
the past. Will unions be able to integrate wage earners from vastly
different backgrounds on the basis of class solidarity? Can they
develop new forms of organization and protest better suited to the
technological and occupational facts of the twenty-first century
than the old craft or industrial unions and the traditional strike?
Answers to these questions will emerge within the context of
Chicago's historic reputation as a labor town, its progressive
political heritage, and the striking diversity of its working-class
population.
The Union Advantage: Facts and Figures
Being a member of a union can have a direct impact on the quality of life for you and your family.
In the United States in 2009, 13.7 percent--over 15 million--of all wage and salary workers were represented by a union. This number is up from 13.3 percent in 2007.
A report released by the Bureau of National Affairs shows SEIU has organized the most workers of any union so far in 2010. In 2008, nearly a quarter of all American workers that formed unions joined SEIU.
Our members know that by working together, we can improve both
the quality of services we provide and the communities in which we
live.
Here's a snapshot of the "union difference" across the
American workforce, highlighting facts from research
recently conducted by the Center for American Progress, The Bureau
of Labor Statistics, UC Berkeley Labor Center, Labor Project for
Working Families, the Center for Economic and Policy Research and
the Employee Benefits Research Institute.
Workers' Pay Is Higher When They're In A Union
The median weekly earnings of union workers are 28 percent higher than non-union workers.
According to a January 2011 Bureau of Labor Statistics report, workers who belong to a union typically earn higher pay than non-union workers doing the same kind of job. Although it varies based on sector and occupation,the overall averages are striking.
$917 = Median weekly earnings in 2010 of union members.
$717 = Median weekly earnings in 2010 of non-union workers.
That's a yearly difference in salary of $10,400 for union members vs. non-union members.
Union members earn an average of $4.95 more per hour - which equates to a yearly difference of $10,300.
Although it varies based on sector and occupation, the union difference for workers across the board is undeniable.
For workers employed in the public sector:
For workers employed in the private sector:
Union workers in many healthcare fields also earn higher salaries than their non-union counterparts:
Greater Access to Healthcare Coverage; Lower Cost
In 2009, 92 percent of union employees in the U.S. had access to health care benefits, compared to only 68 percent of non-union workers.
The union advantage is even greater when you compare the percentages of union vs. non-union workers receiving specific benefits:
Union workers nationwide are 28.2 percent more likely to be covered by employer-provided health insurance.
Union workers also pay less out of pocket for their insurance than non-unionized workers do.
Non-union workers pay much more for their insurance:
Paid Leave
A More Secure Retirement
Unions Where are unionizing efforts focused today? Do you agree with unions? Why or why not?...
Unions Where are unionizing efforts focused today? Do you agree with unions? Why or why not? Please back your explanation with history and citations.
Work with Labor Unions Answer the following questions in paragraph format. Do you agree with unionization within organizations? Why or why not? List the advantages and disadvantages of unions to the employee and the company. Of the list of bargaining issues, which would be most important to you and why? What are the advantages of a grievance process? What disadvantages do you see with a formalized grievance process?
6. Why are unions today weaker than they used to be? B) Do you think workers are better off with unions organized across markets like they are in Europe (as in everyone in particular professions are automatically part of that union, guaranteeing negotiations for all workers of the same filed across markets)? Answer:
. ******NEW ANSWER NEVER USED BEFORE**** Discuss the role of unions in the history of American labor. Are unions today good, bad, or needed for companies? Defend your position.discuss how Continuous Improvement is impacting healthcare, banking, retail and/or government. Merger of Lean and Six Sigma are interesting topics you can explore here. PLEASE ANSWER THROUGHLY COPY AND PASTE NOT ATTACHMENT PLEASE ANSWER WITH A RESPONSE NEVER USED BEFORE
do you agree with government about death penalty? why do you agree or disagree ?
Do you agree or disagree and why? (MV) The implications of access to healthcare delivery are the increased use of resources newly available to those who had little or no preventive care prior to obtaining insurance. Moreover, moral hazard remains a serious problem when gatekeeping efforts are not pursued.
In c Do you agree, and why or why not?
Discuss the following: How do labor unions help employees? Organizations? The economy? How do labor unions hurt employees? Organizations? The economy? How do you think that labor unions will fit into future jobs in America? In a post of 400 words. Please write in your own words.
What is the legal obligation of a corporation? Do you agree with this? Why or why not?
Do you agree with the sentiment: "Fundamentals, and forget the rest". Why or why not?