{"id":727,"date":"2015-06-22T19:24:10","date_gmt":"2015-06-22T19:24:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/courses.candelalearning.com\/americanyawp\/?post_type=chapter&p=727"},"modified":"2015-06-22T19:24:10","modified_gmt":"2015-06-22T19:24:10","slug":"changes-in-labor-organization","status":"publish","type":"chapter","link":"https:\/\/courses.lumenlearning.com\/suny-ushistory1ay\/chapter\/changes-in-labor-organization\/","title":{"raw":"Changes in Labor Organization","rendered":"Changes in Labor Organization"},"content":{"raw":"While industrialization bypassed much of the American South, southern cotton production nevertheless nurtured industrialization in the Northeast and Midwest. The drive to produce cloth transformed the American system of labor. In the early republic, laborers in manufacturing might typically have been expected to work at every stage of production. \u00a0But a new system, \u201cpiece work,\u201d divided much of production into discrete steps performed by different workers. In this new system, merchants or investors sent or \u201cput-out\u201d materials to individuals and families to complete at home. These independent laborers then turned over the partially finished goods to the owner to be given to another laborer to finish.\r\n\r\nAs early as the 1790s, however, merchants in New England began experimenting with machines to replace the \u201cputting-out\u201d system. To effect this transition, merchants and factory owners relied on the theft of British technological knowledge to build the machines they needed. In 1789, for instance, a textile mill in Pawtucket, Rhode Island contracted twenty-one-year-old British immigrant Samuel Slater to build a yarn-spinning machine and then a carding machine because he had apprenticed in an English mill and was familiar with English machinery. The fruits of American industrial espionage peaked in 1813 when Francis Cabot Lowell and Paul Moody recreated the powered loom used in the mills of Manchester, England. Lowell had spent two years in Britain observing and touring mills in England. He committed the design of the powered loom to memory so that, no matter how many times British customs officials searched his luggage, he could smuggle England\u2019s industrial know-how into New England.\r\n\r\nLowell\u2019s contribution to American industrialism was not only technological, it was organizational. He helped reorganize and centralize the American manufacturing process. A new approach, the Waltham-Lowell System, created the textile mill that defined antebellum New England and American industrialism before the Civil War. The modern American textile mill was fully realized in the planned mill town of Lowell in 1821, four years after Lowell himself died. Powered by the Merrimack River in northern Massachusetts and operated by local farm girls, the mills of Lowell centralized the process of textile manufacturing under one roof. The modern American factory was born. Soon ten thousand workers labored in Lowell alone. Sarah Rice, who worked at the nearby Millbury factory, found it \u201ca noisy place\u201d that was \u201cmore confined than I like to be.\u201d Working conditions were harsh for the many desperate \u201cmill girls\u201d who operated the factories relentlessly from sun-up to sun-down. One worker complained that \u201ca large class of females are, and have been, destined to a state of servitude.\u201d Women struck. They lobbied for better working hours. But the lure of wages was too much. As another worker noted, \u201cvery many Ladies\u2026have given up millinery, dressmaking & school keeping for work in the mill.\u201d With a large supply of eager workers, Lowell\u2019s vision brought a rush of capital and entrepreneurs into New England and the first manufacturing boom in the new republic.\r\n
\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_506\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"1500\"]\"A<\/a> Winslow Homer, \u201cBell-Time,\u201d Harper\u2019s Weekly vol. XII (July 1868): p. 472, via Wikimedia<\/a>.[\/caption]\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\nThe market revolution shook other industries as well. Craftsmen began to understand that new markets increased the demand for their products. Some shoemakers, for instance, abandoned the traditional method of producing custom-built shoes at their home workshop and instead began producing larger quantities of shoes in ready-made sizes to be shipped to urban centers. Manufacturers wanting increased production abandoned the old personal approach of relying upon a single live-in apprentice for labor and instead hired unskilled wage laborers who did not have to be trained in all aspects of making shoes but could simply be assigned a single repeatable aspect of the task. Factories slowly replaced shops. The old paternalistic apprentice system, which involved long-term obligations between apprentice and master, gave way to a more impersonal and more flexible labor system in which unskilled laborers could be hired and fired as the market dictated. A writer in the New York Observer<\/i> in 1826 complained, \u201cThe master no longer lives among his apprentices [and] watches over their moral as well as mechanical improvement.\u201d Masters-turned-employers now not only had fewer obligations to their workers, they had a lesser attachment. They no longer shared the bonds of their trade but were subsumed under a new class-based relationships: employers and employees, bosses and workers, capitalists and laborers. On the other hand, workers were freed from the long-term, paternalistic obligations of apprenticeship or the legal subjugation of indentured servitude. They could\u2014theoretically\u2014work when and where they wanted. When men or women made an agreement with an employer to work for wages, they were \u201cleft free to apportion among themselves their respective shares, untrammeled\u2026by unwise laws,\u201d as Reverend Alonzo Potter rosily proclaimed in 1840. But while the new labor system was celebrated throughout the northern United States as \u201cfree labor,\u201d it was simultaneously lamented by a growing powerless class of laborers.\r\n\r\nAs the northern United States rushed headlong toward commercialization and an early capitalist economy, many Americans grew uneasy with the growing gap between wealthy businessmen and impoverished wage laborers. Elites like Daniel Webster might defend their wealth and privilege by insisting that all workers could achieve \u201ca career of usefulness and enterprise\u201d if they were \u201cindustrious and sober,\u201d but labor activist Seth Luther countered that capitalism created \u201ca cruel system of extraction on the bodies and minds of the producing classes\u2026for no other object than to enable the \u2018rich\u2019 to \u2018take care of themselves\u2019 while the poor must work or starve.\u201d\r\n\r\nAmericans embarked upon their industrial revolution with the expectation that all men could start their careers as humble wage workers but later achieve positions of ownership and stability with hard work. Wage work had traditionally been looked-down upon as a state of dependence, suitable only as a temporary waypoint for young men without resources on their path toward the middle class and the economic success necessary to support a wife and children ensconced within the domestic sphere. Children\u2019s magazines \u2013 such as Juvenile Miscellany <\/i>and Parley\u2019s Magazine<\/i> \u2013 glorified the prospect of moving up the economic ladder. This \u201cfree labor ideology\u201d provided many Northerners with a keen sense of superiority over the slave economy of the southern states.\r\n\r\nBut the commercial economy often failed in its promise of social mobility. Depressions and downturns might destroy businesses and reduce owners to wage work, but even in times of prosperity unskilled workers might perpetually lack good wages and economic security and therefore had to forever depend upon supplemental income from their wives and young children.\r\n\r\nWage workers\u2014a population disproportionately composed of immigrants and poorer Americans\u2014faced low wages, long hours, and dangerous working conditions. Class conflict developed. Instead of the formal inequality of a master-servant contract, employer and employee entered a contract presumably as equals. But hierarchy was evident: employers had financial security and political power; employees faced uncertainty and powerlessness in the workplace. Dependent upon the whims of their employers, some workers turned to strikes and unions to pool their resources. In 1825 a group of journeymen in Boston formed a Carpenters\u2019 Union to protest their inability \u201cto maintain a family at the present time, with the wages which are now usually given.\u201d Working men organized unions to assert themselves and win both the respect and the resources due to a breadwinner and a citizen.\r\n\r\nFor the middle-class managers and civic leaders caught between workers and owners, unions enflamed a dangerous antagonism between employers and employees. They countered any claims of inherent class conflict with the ideology of social mobility. Middle-class owners and managers justified their economic privilege as the natural product of superior character traits, including their wide decision-making and hard work. There were not classes of capitalists and laborers in America, they said, there was simply a steady ladder carrying laborers upward into management and ownership. One group of master carpenters denounced their striking journeyman in 1825 with the claim that workers of \u201cindustrious and temperate habits, have, in their turn, become thriving and respectable Masters, and the great body of our Mechanics have been enabled to acquire property and respectability, with a just weight and influence in society.\u201d In an 1856 speech in Kalamazoo, Michigan, Abraham Lincoln had to assure his audience that the country\u2019s commercial transformation had not reduced American laborers to slavery. Southerners, he said \u201cinsist that their slaves are far better off than Northern freemen. What a mistaken view do these men have of Northern labourers! They think that men are always to remain labourers here \u2013 but there is no such class. The man who laboured for another last year, this year labours for himself. And next year he will hire others to labour for him.\u201d It was this essential belief that undergirded the northern commitment to \u201cfree labor\u201d and won the market revolution much widespread acceptance.","rendered":"

While industrialization bypassed much of the American South, southern cotton production nevertheless nurtured industrialization in the Northeast and Midwest. The drive to produce cloth transformed the American system of labor. In the early republic, laborers in manufacturing might typically have been expected to work at every stage of production. \u00a0But a new system, \u201cpiece work,\u201d divided much of production into discrete steps performed by different workers. In this new system, merchants or investors sent or \u201cput-out\u201d materials to individuals and families to complete at home. These independent laborers then turned over the partially finished goods to the owner to be given to another laborer to finish.<\/p>\n

As early as the 1790s, however, merchants in New England began experimenting with machines to replace the \u201cputting-out\u201d system. To effect this transition, merchants and factory owners relied on the theft of British technological knowledge to build the machines they needed. In 1789, for instance, a textile mill in Pawtucket, Rhode Island contracted twenty-one-year-old British immigrant Samuel Slater to build a yarn-spinning machine and then a carding machine because he had apprenticed in an English mill and was familiar with English machinery. The fruits of American industrial espionage peaked in 1813 when Francis Cabot Lowell and Paul Moody recreated the powered loom used in the mills of Manchester, England. Lowell had spent two years in Britain observing and touring mills in England. He committed the design of the powered loom to memory so that, no matter how many times British customs officials searched his luggage, he could smuggle England\u2019s industrial know-how into New England.<\/p>\n

Lowell\u2019s contribution to American industrialism was not only technological, it was organizational. He helped reorganize and centralize the American manufacturing process. A new approach, the Waltham-Lowell System, created the textile mill that defined antebellum New England and American industrialism before the Civil War. The modern American textile mill was fully realized in the planned mill town of Lowell in 1821, four years after Lowell himself died. Powered by the Merrimack River in northern Massachusetts and operated by local farm girls, the mills of Lowell centralized the process of textile manufacturing under one roof. The modern American factory was born. Soon ten thousand workers labored in Lowell alone. Sarah Rice, who worked at the nearby Millbury factory, found it \u201ca noisy place\u201d that was \u201cmore confined than I like to be.\u201d Working conditions were harsh for the many desperate \u201cmill girls\u201d who operated the factories relentlessly from sun-up to sun-down. One worker complained that \u201ca large class of females are, and have been, destined to a state of servitude.\u201d Women struck. They lobbied for better working hours. But the lure of wages was too much. As another worker noted, \u201cvery many Ladies\u2026have given up millinery, dressmaking & school keeping for work in the mill.\u201d With a large supply of eager workers, Lowell\u2019s vision brought a rush of capital and entrepreneurs into New England and the first manufacturing boom in the new republic.<\/p>\n

\n
\"A<\/a><\/p>\n

Winslow Homer, \u201cBell-Time,\u201d Harper\u2019s Weekly vol. XII (July 1868): p. 472, via Wikimedia<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

The market revolution shook other industries as well. Craftsmen began to understand that new markets increased the demand for their products. Some shoemakers, for instance, abandoned the traditional method of producing custom-built shoes at their home workshop and instead began producing larger quantities of shoes in ready-made sizes to be shipped to urban centers. Manufacturers wanting increased production abandoned the old personal approach of relying upon a single live-in apprentice for labor and instead hired unskilled wage laborers who did not have to be trained in all aspects of making shoes but could simply be assigned a single repeatable aspect of the task. Factories slowly replaced shops. The old paternalistic apprentice system, which involved long-term obligations between apprentice and master, gave way to a more impersonal and more flexible labor system in which unskilled laborers could be hired and fired as the market dictated. A writer in the New York Observer<\/i> in 1826 complained, \u201cThe master no longer lives among his apprentices [and] watches over their moral as well as mechanical improvement.\u201d Masters-turned-employers now not only had fewer obligations to their workers, they had a lesser attachment. They no longer shared the bonds of their trade but were subsumed under a new class-based relationships: employers and employees, bosses and workers, capitalists and laborers. On the other hand, workers were freed from the long-term, paternalistic obligations of apprenticeship or the legal subjugation of indentured servitude. They could\u2014theoretically\u2014work when and where they wanted. When men or women made an agreement with an employer to work for wages, they were \u201cleft free to apportion among themselves their respective shares, untrammeled\u2026by unwise laws,\u201d as Reverend Alonzo Potter rosily proclaimed in 1840. But while the new labor system was celebrated throughout the northern United States as \u201cfree labor,\u201d it was simultaneously lamented by a growing powerless class of laborers.<\/p>\n

As the northern United States rushed headlong toward commercialization and an early capitalist economy, many Americans grew uneasy with the growing gap between wealthy businessmen and impoverished wage laborers. Elites like Daniel Webster might defend their wealth and privilege by insisting that all workers could achieve \u201ca career of usefulness and enterprise\u201d if they were \u201cindustrious and sober,\u201d but labor activist Seth Luther countered that capitalism created \u201ca cruel system of extraction on the bodies and minds of the producing classes\u2026for no other object than to enable the \u2018rich\u2019 to \u2018take care of themselves\u2019 while the poor must work or starve.\u201d<\/p>\n

Americans embarked upon their industrial revolution with the expectation that all men could start their careers as humble wage workers but later achieve positions of ownership and stability with hard work. Wage work had traditionally been looked-down upon as a state of dependence, suitable only as a temporary waypoint for young men without resources on their path toward the middle class and the economic success necessary to support a wife and children ensconced within the domestic sphere. Children\u2019s magazines \u2013 such as Juvenile Miscellany <\/i>and Parley\u2019s Magazine<\/i> \u2013 glorified the prospect of moving up the economic ladder. This \u201cfree labor ideology\u201d provided many Northerners with a keen sense of superiority over the slave economy of the southern states.<\/p>\n

But the commercial economy often failed in its promise of social mobility. Depressions and downturns might destroy businesses and reduce owners to wage work, but even in times of prosperity unskilled workers might perpetually lack good wages and economic security and therefore had to forever depend upon supplemental income from their wives and young children.<\/p>\n

Wage workers\u2014a population disproportionately composed of immigrants and poorer Americans\u2014faced low wages, long hours, and dangerous working conditions. Class conflict developed. Instead of the formal inequality of a master-servant contract, employer and employee entered a contract presumably as equals. But hierarchy was evident: employers had financial security and political power; employees faced uncertainty and powerlessness in the workplace. Dependent upon the whims of their employers, some workers turned to strikes and unions to pool their resources. In 1825 a group of journeymen in Boston formed a Carpenters\u2019 Union to protest their inability \u201cto maintain a family at the present time, with the wages which are now usually given.\u201d Working men organized unions to assert themselves and win both the respect and the resources due to a breadwinner and a citizen.<\/p>\n

For the middle-class managers and civic leaders caught between workers and owners, unions enflamed a dangerous antagonism between employers and employees. They countered any claims of inherent class conflict with the ideology of social mobility. Middle-class owners and managers justified their economic privilege as the natural product of superior character traits, including their wide decision-making and hard work. There were not classes of capitalists and laborers in America, they said, there was simply a steady ladder carrying laborers upward into management and ownership. One group of master carpenters denounced their striking journeyman in 1825 with the claim that workers of \u201cindustrious and temperate habits, have, in their turn, become thriving and respectable Masters, and the great body of our Mechanics have been enabled to acquire property and respectability, with a just weight and influence in society.\u201d In an 1856 speech in Kalamazoo, Michigan, Abraham Lincoln had to assure his audience that the country\u2019s commercial transformation had not reduced American laborers to slavery. Southerners, he said \u201cinsist that their slaves are far better off than Northern freemen. What a mistaken view do these men have of Northern labourers! They think that men are always to remain labourers here \u2013 but there is no such class. The man who laboured for another last year, this year labours for himself. And next year he will hire others to labour for him.\u201d It was this essential belief that undergirded the northern commitment to \u201cfree labor\u201d and won the market revolution much widespread acceptance.<\/p>\n\n\t\t\t

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Candela Citations<\/h3>\n\t\t\t\t\t
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CC licensed content, Shared previously<\/div>