Labor Movement History

-- Labor Movement History (under construction)

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-- Early organizing efforts

       After the Revolution, New Jersey became one of the first states to emerge as an industrial center. The best-known project was that advanced by Alexander Hamilton to make Paterson a planned manufacturing center through harnessing the water power of its Great Falls, but industry at other sites also began to emerge. Workers who possessed skills were in the best position to seek higher wages and better working conditions, and accordingly some of the earliest movements to organize labor occurred in the 1830s among shoemakers in Newark, Paterson and Elizabeth; hatmakers in Orange and Newark; glassblowers in the Pinelands; and harness makers in Newark.

        Much of the activity followed the European model of the guild, organizing those with skills in a specific trade rather than all the employees of the employer. The trade-based focus also would soon create barriers to the unity of an employer's workforce; in textile factories, for example, skilled weavers were paid twice the amount of other laborers, building inevitable divisions among employees in pursuing their respective demands. Later in the 19th century, the trade approach would come into conflict with the effort to create unions which were based on seeking all employees of ever larger business entities to unite under a single union.

For most of the 19th century, New Jersey state government was controlled by business interests. Commencing in the 1830s, the transportation and shipping monopoly in the corridor from New York City to Philadelphia of the "Joint Companies," the combination of the Camden and Amboy Rail Road and Transportation Company and the Delaware and Raritan Company which operated the canal crossing the state, so dominated the government that the state derisively was called "the state of the Camden and Amboy." Toward the end of the century, the legislature enacted favorable laws to solicit corporate trusts and monopolies to establish their legal homes in the state to provide revenues allowing the state to avoid passing unpopular taxes. As with the Camden and Amboy earlier in the century, the maneuver again drew scorn, such as that from the famed journalist H.L. Mencken who labeled New Jersey as "the traitor state" for giving corporations a haven from regulation not allowed in her sister states.

- Paterson strikes of 1828 and 1835

       A notable exception to the trade system emerged in the harsh conditions of the silk factories of Paterson, where the workday began at 4:30 am, pay was $2 per week, and fines and even whips were employed to punish workers for mistakes or not working hard enough. In 1828, laborers, including many children, engaged in one of the first strikes after management rejected their demands for reduction of the work day from 13 and 1/2 to 12 hours and restoration of their traditional lunch hour. The walkout by millhands also resulted in the first sympathy strike, as skilled mechanics, carpenters and masons joined the protest to support the others, but the strike largely failed as workers were compelled to return to their jobs to meet their basic living needs.

       In 1835, following the prior year's landmark strike by mill workers in Lowell, Massachusetts, another strike in Paterson which began as a walkout at one mill expand to eventually see 2,000 workers at 20 mills refuse to work. In support of the strikers, an organization called the Paterson Association for the Protection of the Working Class was established, and contributions came from workers around the region, including Newark and New York City which allowed the strike to continue for nearly two months. In response, employers reduced hours, not to eleven as the strikers demanded, but to twelve on weekdays and nine on Saturday. The unilateral reduction broke the strike, and most of the workers returned to the mills, with strike leaders and their families permanently blacklisted from employment in Paterson. Despite the setbacks, the conflict between management and labor would continue well into the next century to make Paterson a focus of the national labor movement.

-- Emergence of trade unions

Trade unions recognized, however, that collective action through joining together could increase their negotiating leverage, which initially focused on demands for a ten-hour workday and higher wages. In Newark in 1836, a coalition of 16 trade unions formed the Newark Trades Union; trade unions in other cities like New Brunswick also emerged to join for collective action, sometimes helping each other out in disputes and strikes. A few of the early unions also provided, during a time when there was no government assistance, aid to their members and their families who became disabled by illness or injury or were otherwise unable to work. Both the Newark and New Brunswick groups became members of the National Trades Union established in 1834--the first national union. The national movement, however, soon collapsed along with many individual unions in the economic recession that lasted for almost seven years following the bank failures in the Panic of 1837.

New Jersey's industrial economy recovered in the 1850s, partly due to the growth of major manufacturing plants. In Paterson, three locomotive manufacturing companies--the Rogers Locomotive Works, Danforth and Cooke Company, and Grant Locomotive Company--collectively produced over 10,000 steam locomotive engines. Indeed, one of the Rogers locomotives was given the honor of meeting the locomotive from the west in 1869 on the Trans-Continental Railroad in Utah when the famous "Golden Spike" was driven.

In 1851, the New Jersey legislature enacted a law establishing ten hours as the maximum workday and prohibiting work by children under ten years of age. The law, however, lacked any enforcement powers, and its approval was followed by employers reducing wages and widely ignoring the child labor protections.

Uriah Stephens depicted in section of lithograph with other Knights of Labor leaders published in 1886 by Kurz & Allison. Image: Library of Congress/Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia

- Knights of Labor

A native of Cape May born in 1821, Uriah Smith Stephens, moved to Philadelphia in 1845, becoming a tailor and a member of the Garment Cutters’ Association of Philadelphia. In 1869, after the dissolution of the Garment Cutters, Stephens led nine garment workers to found the Knights of Labor, an organization intended to include all those who worked with their hands and which grew to become a national union with a longer life and larger membership than the National Trades Union.

The Knights promoted the educational and cultural uplift of the worker and demanded the eight-hour day, but some factions advocated a more aggressive stance of worker control or socialist management by government. In some cases it acted as a labor union negotiating with employers, in others as a fraternal society with secret rituals binding its members. It was never well organized, however, and was divided internally among conflicting goals of its leaders. At its peak in 1886 it numbered some 800,000 members, with over 40,000 in New Jersey, where 90% of its members were in Essex, Hudson and Passaic counties. But after leading a few failed strikes and the adverse public reaction to the violence of the Haymarket Riot in Chicago in May 1886 (see below), the Knights quickly fell from favor and lost most of its membership.

Great Railroad Strike of 1877

In 1877, a strike shut down railroads in much of the east and as far west as St. Louis. It began on July 14 in West Virginia after Baltimore & Ohio workers making more than a dollar a day had their wages cut 10%--the third cut in the depression which followed the Panic of 1873--at about the same time management declared payment of a 10% dividend to shareholders.

The walkout quickly spread to other lines, and some forty Pennsylvania National Guardsmen and civilians were killed in violent clashes in Pittsburgh which also saw the destruction of over 100 locomotives and 1,200 passenger cars. In Chicago, federal troops called out to force an end to the strike killed 30 workers and wounded over 100.
Additional deaths occurred in Scranton, Reading, Baltimore and St. Louis.

On July 24 in New Jersey, firemen and brakemen struck the Jersey Central, and they were soon joined by workers at the Lackawanna, the Delaware & Hudson and the Lehigh Valley. Anticipating similar violence to that which had broken out in Pennsylvania, Governor Joseph Bedle dispatched the state militia to Jersey City and Phillipsburg, the principal rail entry points to the state. In Jersey City, Bedle personally took command of the soldiers and dispatched Civil War General William Sewell to lead those at Phillipsburg.

Despite the show of force, 1,500 strikers in Jersey City attempted to stop trains coming through the City, including throwing bricks and paving stones at a moving train driven by a strike-breaking engineer. Bedle had some of the men arrested for inciting a riot, but they were later acquitted at trial. After some six weeks, the strike in New Jersey and the other states eventually ended when President Rutherford Hayes ordered federal troops to supplement state militias, local police and private detectives hired by the railroads in areas of the greatest violence. The New Jersey lines returned to service and after he completed his term as governor, Bedle was retained as legal counsel for the Delaware, Lackawanna, and Western.

- Federation of Trades & Labor Unions of New Jersey

       In 1879, the Federation of Trades & Labor Unions of New Jersey was established, with its initial efforts focused on factory safety, such as enacting laws mandating fire escapes and improved ventilation at workplaces. Two years later, the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions of the United States and Canada was founded, another attempt to create a national labor federation--an idea which previously had been endorsed by an editorial calling for a new single national organization published in April 1881 by the New Jersey socialist newspaper the Paterson Home-Journal.

       Although the early 1880s were an extremely active period for the establishment of unions both nationally and in New Jersey, a political backlash against organized labor followed the Haymarket Riot in Chicago on May 4, 1886. During a labor demonstration calling for an eight-hour day, a bomb was thrown and police opened fire on the crowd, resulting in the deaths of seven policemen and four civilians. In the next year, four anarchists were convicted and executed for the deaths after what was viewed as an unfair trial which failed to link them to the throwing of the bomb. Although its involvement in the riot could not be proved, The Knights of Labor was largely blamed for the violence, and many locals left the organization.

   - American Federation of Labor

       Several disaffected unions formerly aligned with the Knights of labor joined the newly formed American Federation of Labor founded in 1886 by Samuel Gompers, the head of the Cigarmakers' International Union based in New York City.
Gompers's new AFL, which pledged to pursue a less confrontational strategy to avoid the potential for violence which had led to anti-labor activism following the Haymarket Riot, largely absorbed the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions and in 1891 the New Jersey Federation was granted a charter by the AFL. Like the national organization, the trade-based focus followed by the state AFL would provoke tensions with those unions seeking to organize fast-growing industries with ever-larger workforces regardless of the trades or skills of their workers.

Leon Abbett, Governor 1884-1887 and 1890-1893. Image: NJ State Archives

- Leon Abbett: the "Great Commoner"


       A notable exception to the period of corporate rule was the election of Democrat Leon Abbett as governor, who in the time when governors were not able to run in successive elections, served two separate three-year terms from 1884 to 1887 and again from 1890 to 1893. A Hudson County lawyer, Abbett had become known for his representation of labor interests in strikes and other disputes, often without charging a fee. After his election to the legislature in 1863, Abbett successfully pushed legislation which required employers to pay employees with cash, rather than in paper scrip or company merchandise. He also sponsored a law giving a lien for back wages to employees of the bankrupt Jersey Central Railroad, thus allowing them a preference over other creditors.

      When he was elected governor in 1883, Abbett first took on the railroads, overcoming strong opposition to end their exemption from state and local taxation. He also signed laws restricting the work hours of children and women and ending the state's use of prisoners to make products on contract for private employers.

        When he returned to private practice in the period between his two terms, he successfully defended those charged in the Jersey City rock throwing incident in the 1887 railroad strike. While campaigning for his second term, he also proposed prohibiting the hiring of private detectives as strikebreakers, a practice used by shipping companies during another 1877 strike by longshoremen which shut down shipping in the Port of New York and sparked violence in Jersey City and Bayonne.

       Over the course of his two terms, Abbett signed several other labor measures, including establishing an arbitration process to resolve disputes; repealing conspiracy statutes that had been used against strikes; requiring employers to report workplace deaths; mandating the installation of fire escapes and improved ventilation in factories; limiting the employment of children in dangerous jobs; and greatly expanding the state agency responsible for inspecting workplace safety. Importantly, the first law requiring children to attend school was approved by Abbett, substantially reducing the thousands of children employed in factories and other workplaces. In the first year of his second term, Abbett also successfully mediated settlement of the strike in Newark at the Clark Thread Mills Company.

Interior views of Clark's Thread Co. founded 1865 in Newark, and one of nation's largest producers of thread shown in drawings published in Scientific American in 1889. Image: NewJerseyAlmanac.com

- Clark Thread Mills Strike of 1890

While at a lesser level than the violence of the Haymarket Riot, New Jersey also saw clashes between police and strikers in the Clark Thread Mills Strike of 1890. With its products branded under the trademark of "O.N.T." (standing for "Our New Thread"), the company had become one of Newark's largest employers after its founding in 1864 by the brothers George and William Clark, members of a family who previously had established a similar business in Scotland. The company grew rapidly, soon adding plants in East Newark, Kearny and Rhode Island, by producing a six-cord, soft-finished thread developed by George which was the first suitable for use in the sewing machine, which had been invented by Elias Howe in 1846 but which could not handle the wiry and uneven thread then available for hand sewing.

In December 1890, spinners at the plants in Newark and Kearny stopped work in. protest of the company's firing of 40 workers, including long-time employee leaders, who had been let go simply for expressing their grievances. The company refused to discuss the firings and announced it was indefinitely closing the plant to install new machinery, putting 3,000 employees out of work just before the Christmas season. It also declared that it was slashing women's bi-weekly wages from $15 to $5.

On November 29, 1892, the Federation of Trades & Labor Unions of New Jersey was granted a charter of affiliation with Samuel Gompers’ American Federation of Labor. Gompers and his AFL unions vigorously fought the IWW in the U.S. and in Latin America, as a disruptive dual union that tried harder to destroy capitalism than to help workers. He cooperated with widespread government arrests of union leaders for the IWW's militant opposition to the World War. Despite

Under Governor Woodrow Wilson, the New Jersey State Federation of Labor was able to pass the nation’s first effective workmen’s compensation law. Other pro-union measures successfully advocated by the Federation included legalizing the right to organize and bargain collectively, raising wages and shortening work hours, banning child labor, and increasing workplace health and safety laws.

Under Governor Woodrow Wilson, the New Jersey State Federation of Labor was able to pass the nation’s first effective workmen’s compensation law. And the Federation continued winning victories, including legalizing the right to organize and bargain collectively, raising wages and shortening work hours, banning child labor, and increasing workplace health and safety laws.

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