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Industrial Revolution
The Industrial Revolution was a period where major changes occurred in agriculture, transportation, economic policies and social structure. Each year new inventions and manufacturing processes added to the efficiency of machines and increased productivity. Organized labor unions fought for better wages, reasonable hours and safer working conditions. The labor movement led efforts to stop child labor, give health benefits and provide aid to workers who were injured or retired. -
Civil War
The Civil War started due to differences between the free and slave states. When Abraham Lincoln won election as the first Republican president on a platform pledging to keep slavery out of the territories, seven slave states in the South seceded and formed a new nation, the Confederate States of America. The Northern armies were victorious. Unions arose after the Civil War as one response to modern industrial economy. -
Great Southwest Railroad Strike
By the end of the 1800’s, the American railroad was expanding quickly. In 1886, the Knights of Labor struck against the Union Pacific and Missouri Pacific railroads, owned by robber baron Jay Gould. Hundreds of thousands of workers across five states refused to work, citing unsafe conditions and unfair hours and pay. The strike suffered from a lack of commitment from other railroad unions. Eventually the strike failed. -
Homestead Strike
The Homestead strike in Pennsylvania, pitted one of the most powerful new corporations, Carnegie Steel Company, against the nation’s strongest trade union, the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers. The Homestead strike was organized and purposeful, the type of strike which would mark the modern age of labor relations in the United States.The AA organized the independently-owned Pittsburgh Bessemer Steel Works in Homestead in 1881. -
Ludlow Massacre
The Ludlow Massacre was an attack by the Colorado National Guard and Colorado Fuel & Iron Company camp guards on a tent colony of 1,200 striking coal miners and their families at Ludlow, Colorado, on April 20, 1914. Two dozen people, including miners' wives and children, were killed. It was one of the most violent events in the labor movement and galvanized support for unionization. -
Steel Strike of 1919
Workers represented by the American Federation of Labor (AFL) organized a strike against the United States Steel Corporation as a result of poor working conditions, long hours, low wages, and corporate harassment regarding union involvement. The number of strikers quickly grew to 350,000, shutting down nearly half of the steel industry. The Great Steel Strike of 1919 proved to be a dismal failure for the steel workers. -
The Great Depression
The Great Depression (1929-39) was the deepest and longest-lasting economic downturn in the history of the Western industrialized world.consumer spending and investment dropped, causing steep declines in industrial output and rising levels of unemployment as failing companies laid off workers. By 1933, when the Great Depression reached its nadir, some 13 to 15 million Americans were unemployed and nearly half of the country’s banks had failed. -
The New Deal
In 1932 Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected by a landslide on a campaign promising a New Deal for the American people. Roosevelt worked quickly upon his election to deliver the New Deal, an unprecedented number of reforms addressing the catastrophic effects of the Great Depression. While they did not end the Depression, the New Deal’s experimental programs helped the American people immeasurably by taking care of their basic needs and giving them the dignity of work and hope. -
The Wagner Act
The Wagner Act is also referred to as the National Labor Relations Act of 1935. It's a federal labor law that protects the rights of employees.The Act provided that a company could lawfully agree to being any of the following: a closed shop, a union shop, an agency shop, and an open shop. It established the National Labor Relations Board and addressed relations between unions and employers in the private sector. -
The Taft-Hartley Act
The Taft-Hartley Act, also known as the Labor Management Relations Act is a United States federal law that restricts the activities and power of labor unions. This law outlawed all union (closed) shops. It made unions liable for damages resulting from jursidictional disputes among themselves. It also allowed the government to get injunctions to postpone serious srikes. -
Employee Free Choice Act
The Employee Free Choice Act makes it much easier for unions to enlist workers by simplifying the process by which workers can form a union. The law would also provide for stiffer penalties for employer violations of current labor laws. The Employee Free Choice Act will restore balance to the union election process by allowing workers to choose a union through simple majority sign-up or an election. whether workers can org
