Effectiveness of labor union actions, 1875–1900

Between the years 1875 and 1900, the United States was shaken by the efforts of social reformers. Foremost among these were labor unions, which fought against trusts and big businesses for workers’ rights. Overall, although anti-union tactics and resistance from the public oftentimes stifled their efforts, the unions’ success was limited in improving the position of workers.

One of the leading aggressors facing union activists was resistance in the media and from the general public. Some believed that the efforts of unions were apparently hopeless, as evidenced in a July 1877 editorial in The New York Times. Others, like Thomas Nast in his 1878 Harper’s Weekly cartoon, felt that unions and communism would ultimately kill capital and effectively bite the hand that feeds it. Still others, as shown in the January 1887 cartoon in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated, felt that all the different organizations working to improve workers’ conditions, like socialists, anarchists and the unions, were in fact ruining the hopes of workers by fighting amongst one another. In addition, following the Homestead Strike in July 1892, the NY Times printed a list of those killed in the skirmishes surrounding that strike. This list would have surely inspired an anti-strike sentiment in readers, hurting the union jihad.

Another enemy of the unions were the strategies employed by corporations to crush unionism, like yellow contracts; which forbade workers from joining unions, as seen in a Western Union contract from 1883; and black lists, which inhibited the ability of former union agitators from finding future employment. Also, the federal government failed to come to the workers’ aid. In the In re Debs decision of 1895, the Supreme Court gave the green light to court injunctions to prevent the hindrance of interstate commerce at the hands of unions after the Pullman Strike, which Mr. Debs himself organized in 1894.

The next antagonist to the union cause was the specter of technological advances. As a machinist testified in 1883, thanks to machines, 100 men could do in 1883 what it took 400 or 500 men to do in 1868. These advances made the talents of many workers obsolete when compared to the industrious machines. As Samuel Gompers testified in 1899, as improvements in the methods of productions and distribution are made, workers need to periodically strike to ensure that the improvements do not all go to the employer and the injuries to the employees.

However, despite these numerous enemies and setbacks to their movement, labor unions celebrated some limited success on improving workers’ conditions. As seen in the Historical Statistics of the United States, average wages overall did increase slightly between 1875 and 1891, and the average daily hours of workers did, in fact, drop by 30 minutes. However, these advances in the workers’ rights crusade were not huge improvements. By no standards were these changes revolutionary, and it should be noted that in the years following major union strikes, wages actually decreased, meaning that union actions in some ways actually hurt laborers, and not their employers, the intended target.

So, despite the antagonism that surrounded them in the form of the media, big business, the general public and the government, the labor unions were able to achieve a limited level of success in improving the working conditions of laborers between 1875 and 1900. However, although some moderate improvements were made, some of the actions performed by union activists were actually detrimental to the workers they tried to help, in the form of wage cuts following major strikes. The end result of these setbacks and advances show that, although unions took a few steps back for workers’ rights, they made powerful strides in the right direction for better working conditions nationwide.