Search

The Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress seeks to preserve personal papers and organizational records that document the course of America's national experience. Its more than 10,000 collections with more than 40,000,000 manuscript items touch upon every aspect of American history and culture. Collections containing labor-related material are considerable and constitute a major archive for labor history research. Some of the organizational records in the library includes the American Federation of Labor Letterbooks, American Friends Service Committee Work Camp Diary, Brotherhood of the Sleeping Car Porters, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, National Association of Railway Postal Clerks, National Child Labor Committee, National Consumers League, National Women's Trade Union League of America, and People's Legislative Service. Some of the personal papers included in the library are of Henry J. Allen, former governor of Kansas, Otto S. Beyer, a consulting engineer and labor-management relations specialist, Warren K. Billings, a labor militant, William E. Borah, a former U.S. Senator from Idaho, and Andrew Carnegie, a labor activist in the late 19th century.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to add information on which voices contributed to the scientific management narrative from Frederick Taylor’s 1915 death to the early 1930s with a focus on the role of labor union representatives. The strategy is to analyze the role of labor representatives as participants in Taylor Society meetings and publications. The research contributes to the management history literature by bolstering the picture of the Taylor Society as a liberal, pro-labor organization. The research also shows that the Taylor Society was an early proponent of the idea that assembling diverse groups for dialogue improves organizational problem-solving.Design/methodology/approach The research analyzes historical sources including all issues of the Society’s bulletin from 1914 to 1933 and unpublished material from the Morris Cooke papers and the papers in the Frederick Taylor archive at Stevens Institute of Technology.Findings Taylor Society leaders took a proactive view of encouraging labor voices to join managers and academics in society meetings. At the beginning, few labor leaders spoke at the society, and often, at least some of their comments were critical of scientific management. By 1925, labor participation increased with William Green, American Federation of Labor (AFL) president appearing several times. In addition, labor leaders became positively inclined toward having scientific management experts working in industrial settings. The labor leaders who participated at Taylor Society meetings in the late 1920s and early 1930s considered scientific management insights as useful for labor and wanted to cooperate with the researchers.Originality/value The paper augments a revisionist view of interwar scientific management as progressive and pro-labor, a contested point in the management history literature. The research also shows how the Taylor Society was an early proponent of the importance of diversity, at least in the areas of gender and socioeconomic status, for effective problem-solving. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"We are going to have to find some way to secure the approval of organized labor," warned Aubrey Williams, as he and Harry Hopkins began planning a work relief program in October, 1933. As the New Deal struggled to meet the winter's unemployment crisis, the two social workers knew they had to placate the American Federation of Labor, which had historically opposed government !made jobs. As the nation's largest single employer during the winter of 1933-34, the Civil Works Administration created jobs for four million Americans on "economically and socially desirable" public projects. Although half the applicants would come from relief rolls, the remainder would be among the self-sustaining unemployed, who could avoid a demeaning investigation and simply register at the local United States Employment Office. By reaching out to skilled artisans and even white collar workers and professionals, many out of work for the first time and too proud to accept charity, Hopkins intended to preserve skills and boost morale.

The early years of the American Newspaper Guild were filled with intense internal conflict as well as determined resistance from publishers. Starting in 1933, Guild members engaged in a vigorous debate about whether the organization should be a professional society or a trade union wielding the threat of a strike. Faced with publisher opposition and frustrated by government labor-management mechanisms, the Guild affiliated with the American Federation of Labor in 1936 and a year later joined the more militant Congress of Industrial Organizations, launching a campaign to organize commercial employees. Many journalists who opposed the Guild were alienated by leftist leadership in national offices during the late 1930s and in prominent local offices until the late 1940s. This article uses archival records and contemporary accounts to examine the growth of the Guild, a pioneering white-collar union that faced numerous obstacles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As large employers of labor and owners of businesses that conveyed information about organized labor to a wide audience, publishers were intimately connected to the labor movement during the 1930s and 1940s. Publishers such as William Randolph Hearst were condemned for controlling a press determined to fight unionism. Newspaper owners, however, were business operators, journalists, and community leaders and these broad interests led to the creation of diverse content on organized labor in the nation's newspapers. For some publishers, civic and professional motivations encouraged an effort to remain neutral or to offer balance in reporting and commentary. Other publishers expressed support for unions, if only to claim market share. Regardless of personal views on unions, many publishers showed an honest respect for the line between opinion and news. This article examines the complex response of publishers to the growth of unions in American life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"THE soundest approach to the problem of labor-management cooperation," says Mr. Watt, "is that which relies upon the democratic system of self-government by the democratically chosen representatives of organized wage earners and organized business". Legislation from Olympus can never be a substitute. To the question of how self-government can best be stimulated and most safely regulated, this article is devoted. Mr. Wart joined the Painters and Paper-hangers Union in 1913. Perhaps more than any other man in the American labor movement today, he has seen the operation of unionism from the local to the international level. As International Representative of the American Federation of Labor and a Labor member of the War Labor Board, he is in close touch with the problems of workers here and abroad. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The opposition of the American Federation of Labor to minimum wage legislation, is due largely to a failure to distinguish between a legal minimum wage which is meant to be merely a subsistence wage and a union minimum wage which is usually a standard wage aiming to provide more than a minimum necessary for existence. The legal minimum wage is applied in the sweated trades in England, and in the few states in this country in which it has been recently enacted aims to secure a subsistence wage for those who are earning less than the minimum amount necessary to support life. In other words, it comes to the aid of those whom the union apparently has so far been unable to organize or, having organized, has been unable to gain for them a living wage. It does not interfere in the least with the union attempting to secure more than a minimum for those of the workers who, through higher skill or through ability to force concessions from the employers, can secure bettor terms. In the Dress and Waist industry, for example, there are the minimum union rates, and a considerable proportion of the women are earning still higher rates of wages. It is manifest that no wage board under a minimum wage law would award such rates of wages at this time.

The article discusses scholarship on the role of the Communist Party (CPUSA) and the Pro-Soviet Left (PSL) in the history of labor-liberalism in the U.S., focusing on the work of historian Eric Arnesen. The author examines Arnesen's critique of neo revisionsts' depiction of the role of the CPUSA in the civil rights movement and argues that the American Federation of Labour (AFL) and Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) would probably not have achieved the success they did in the post-war decades if they were associated with the CPUSA and PSL. Other topics include the role of anti-communism in marginalizing the causes of the labor-liberal left, the attitudes of revisionist and neo revisionist historians towards Soviet Communism, and the CIO's decision to separate from the PSL.

Three important pieces of airline legislation were enacted in the 1930s: Decision 83 of the National Labor Board, which was incorporated into the Air Mail Act of 1934 and granted airline pilots a federally protected pay formula; Title II of the 1936 Railway Labor Act, which granted airline employees the right to bargain collectively; and The Civil Aeronautics Act , passed by Congress in 1938, which subjected the commercial airline industry-both air mail and passenger carriage-to economic regulation. The Air Line Pilots' Association (ALPA), during the first eight years of its existence (1931-38), benefited from the interaction between the state and private industry, and benefited considerably. Applied to the union movement in general, this observation is shared by the majority of historians, political scientists, and other New Deal scholars writing today. In describing the events that led to ALPA's ultimate victory, the role played by David L. Behncke, president of the Association, figures prominently. Launching a nationwide legislative campaign almost singlehandedly, Behncke undertook the fullest efforts to link the fate of the airline unions to the expanding power of the state.

In a 2005 effort to reinvigorate new-member organizing efforts, seven unions split from the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) to form a new union federation, Change to Win. Using ten years of data from the National Labor Relations Board and the National Mediation Board and a difference-in-difference estimator, the author estimates the effect of Change to Win policies on whether a union won its certification election and the number and percentage of workers successfully organized. The results indicate no statistically significant difference in organizing success following Change to Win’s implementation of new organizing strategies and practices, relative to the AFL-CIO. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article focuses on the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and the child-labor legislation in the U.S. One of the lesser-known legislative activities of AFL during the first quarter of the century was its involvement in what amounted to a nation-wide campaign for child-labor legislation. While AFL was quite active legislatively throughout the first half-century or so of its existence, child-labor legislation represents a significant episode for several reasons. First, AFL either decided or was forced to shift its tactics and thinking several times. Second, quite in contrast with most of its legislative efforts, the Federation accomplished absolutely nothing in this case. Finally, in pursuing its child-labor goals, AFL got involved in a cooperative effort with a variety of non-labor groups who were also attempting to effect legislative change in the area. The paper describes the Federation's attempts to obtain some type of federal or state statutes limiting hours of work as well as measures limiting the employment of and providing minimum wages for children.

Fifty years ago the labor economist and historian Louis Levine (Lorwin) explained the origins of the radical unionism and syndicalism which the Lawrence textile strike of 1912 had brought to the American nation's attention. Rather than viewing American syndicalism as the product of a few inspired individuals or as a sudden decision to imitate French ideas and methods, Levine insisted that working-class radicalism could only be understood by a proper examination of United States economic and political developments. Unfortunately, in the half century since Levine's seminal article, too few historians have chosen to investigate his hypothesis. The field has been left to labor economists more concerned with the nature of industrial relations and the internal history of individual trade unions than with the dynamics of historical change. This paper will apply the historical method and research into unused or seldom used documents to analyze the forces which impelled the working class in a part of the American West to adopt socialism and syndicalism.

This article presents information on the constitutional power of the chief officer in American labor unions. It is informed that the chief officer in American trade unions frequently exercises extensive powers. Usually it is his duty to exercise general supervision over the affairs of the union, to sign documents and charters, preside over the executive board meetings, help edit the official journal, preside over conventions of the union, and appoint the committees during such conventions. In an attempt to determine the amount of constitutional power possessed by the chief executive, three divisions have been set up: unions in which the chief executive possessed routine power, moderate power, and considerable power. Thirteen out of 74 unions affiliated with the American Federation of Labor grant their chief executives only routine power over the members and subordinate affiliates. The International President and Secretary Treasurer of the bakery workers' union is explicitly directed to abide by the decisions of the general executive board.

Exceptionalism has long defined our understanding of the rise of progres- sive politics in the early twentieth-century United States. While industrialized Euro- pean nations blazed the path of social democracy, in the United States, it is argued, "progressivism" merely legitimized middle-class cultural hegemony, social engineering, and the subversion of working-class power. In this era, however, social reform was a distinctly state-led phenomenon, only rarely taken up by the federal Congress. As such, by analyzing labor protest at the level of the state—in this case, Washington—a different interpretation emerges. American "progressivism" was neither exceptionally repressive nor of little interest to labor. In fact, espousing a language of progress, the common good, and the duty of the state to promote "social harmony," Washington workers actively drew on "progressive" ideas in their struggles to tame the excesses of industrial capitalism. This ideology of "labor progressivism" became the foundation for unprecedented working-class power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The evolution and current state of relations between the labor movement and the Negro community are the subject of this study. The author, after tracing early strains in these relations, examines the period of rapprochement during the era of the CIO, which, in turn, was succeeded by increasing tensions following the AFL-CIO merger. Despite these tensions, the author concludes that Negro unionists are not likely to withdraw from the labor movement, and that the latter can be expected to undertake an increasingly vigorous policy of eliminating discrimination in its ranks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the welder's search for recognition as a craftsman and discusses the problems, labor movement and the U.S. government policy which are involved. Jurisdictional disputes arose between blacksmiths and boilermakers in the American Federation of Labor (AFL) involving welders and the welding process. In 1929, the United Welders of America tried to get a charter from the AFL but did not succeed. In 1936 and in 1941, resolutions were proposed for a separate organization of welders. In 1942, the Railway Employees Department and the AFL agreed that no union will get exclusive control over welding.

It is well known that the total membership of American Federation of Labor unions plummeted from 4,093,000 members in 1920 to but 2,745,300 members in 1930. Nor is there any dearth of analyses of this membership catastrophe. Independent researchers have probed the economic, social, and political milieu of the time and have listed several obstacles to a growing, virile unionism in the 1920's. Among the obstacles listed are: (1) the substantial increase in real wages which workingmen enjoyed; (2) unprecedented employer hostility to unionism (in such forms as resort to strikebreaking, use of yellow-dog contracts, formation of company unions, and the development of schemes of welfare capitalism); (3) adverse court decisions, injunctions, and few laws favorable to labor; (4) the antiradical hysteria which swept the United States after World War I; (5) technological changes and shifts in industrial location; (6) and the policies and leadership of the AFL itself. There has not, however, been any over-all description and evaluation of the variety of policies and alignments devised by the AFL national office and individual labor leaders in a fruitless effort to create an atmosphere more friendly to unionism and membership expansion. It is hoped that this article at least partially satisfies this need. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the author states in his introductory paragraph, the influence of the Catholic Church on American labor needs considerable exploration. The article is an attempt to fill, at least in part, this void in the history of the American labor movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]