There’s a lot of things that most of us take for granted: the eight-hour working day, child labour laws, overtime and workplace safety. But if you were to leave North America you would find that outside of western Europe and one or two other countries we are the exception not the rule.
”Where do you think these came from... generous and benevolent bosses?...
Utah Phillips: Fellow Workers
In Canada, United States, and Europe, the last couple of decades of the 19th century marked the real shift in economic life from agrarian to mass industry. The process had started before that, but it wasn’t until after the American Civil War that it really began to flourish. This was the time which saw the formation of most of the countries of Europe as we know them today, and the first real period of extended peace for most of the industrial world.
The invention of the steam engine had made the Atlantic crossing easier and international markets more accessible. When it was combined with the proliferation of rail across the United States and Canada, the domestic markets were now only days apart. For the United States the timing couldn’t have been better.
The Civil War had devastated the country in a lot of ways, but it had also hastened its industrialisation. Both sides had utilized the new technologies available during the war for the production of arms, the movement of troops, and for battles on the water. Rail lines had been laid for troops which now could be used for shipping, and the steel-hulled battleships had proved effective enough that steam and steel would soon be replacing wind and wood in the shipping industry.
But the work was dangerous and dirty. There were no rules governing how an employer treated the workers under his control. In a lot of cases conditions and jobs were little less then indentured slavery.
Small children were employed to go into the mines that were too tight for full-grown men. If you got sick you lost your job. If you were injured working you were doomed. There wasn’t even any guarantee that you’d get paid. Sometimes if you were unlucky enough you could end up owing your employer money.
If they supplied you with a shack to live in and gruel twice a day it would be docked from your wages. If you were being paid on a quota system and for some reason, anything from equipment failure to bad weather, you fell short of your mark, you wouldn’t get your full pay and couldn’t cover the cost of your board. It could take a person months to work out from under that debt. If you didn’t pay you could get arrested.
Article comments
1 - todd
I am no fan of unions by any stretch of the imagination, in as much as they rely upon coercion and violence to intimidate and force their will upon private property owners.
Having said that, some of the history of the means that the industrialists used to fight them would make some eye opening reading for most of today's history-challenged conservatives.
2 - Phillip Winn
Unions are what one might call a "necessary evil" in today's world. For the most part, they aren't needed. Except that, of course, if they didn't exists, they would soon be needed!
It's like a cold war -- companies tend to mostly treat workers reasonably well (relatively speaking) mostly because of the history of unions. Unions can't go away, because we might just return to the bad old days. In the meantime, the unions sometimes overstep and make demands out of bounds with market realities, cutting off their long-term future in order to satisfy short-term desires.
ANyway, that's my opinion.
3 - Mike Stevens
Unions were needed in a time when the government had yet to take up the cause of workers rights. However today in a regulated society where laws are in place to control the actions of employers with more than 15 employees, union are a scam.
No union leader represents union members, they represent the union. Union members are many times too uninformed to realize that the "union Rights" they enjoy are actually supported by goverment regulations.
I for one don't need anyone to represent me or my interests in my workplace. Especially if that person is paid 100 times my annual salary. Union leaders are no different that corporate executives. Their goal is to increase income and line their pockets.
Unions take from those in their ranks with the least to give. If union leaders really were about the workers, they would work for a living wage and donate their time for the cause.
A union is not a charity. A charity works for the good of the people it puports to help. The money from a charity goes to the people needing the help. When you go to the local Salvation Army they don't make you pay for assistance. A union make you pay them to help you get "representation".
Union prey directly on the people they claim to represent. At least corporations give their workers a check, Unions take the checks from the workers.
Who is really the evil one?
4 - Nancy
Corporations are still at it: paying out obscenely generous bonuses & salaries to already-overcompensated executives while cutting thousands of jobs & denuding workers of basic benefits in order to line their own pockets at the expense of their labor. Current case in point: US Air, which negotiated severe cuts in benefits, & lied & threatened their way out of having to pay retirement on thousands of workers - shifting it onto the taxpaying public (i.e., the same workers they've just screwed) - and then turning around and insisting they "need" to pay out huge salaries, benefits, bonuses, & options to the executives so they'll stay to run the company. For what? so they can continue to run it into the ground? Further case in point: the executives of a large corporation that recent sold off their stock in their own company just before it lost value. Not as badly as Enron, but the same scenario; but they couldn't be prosecuted, for technical reasons. And then there are the noble souls who ran Enron, WorldCom, Adelphia, and the other megacorporations involved in corporate scandal recently. Corporate greed & corruption allowed them to run wild & destroy hundreds of thousands of their workers' lives, jobs, holdings, investments, retirements. Where are they? Well...Bernie Ebbers MAY go to jail...or he may not. It's still up in the air. Either way, he got to keep enough money for a generous retirement (something his workers didn't get to do), and a comfortable existance meanwhile complete w/house & cars for him & his wife who shared his ill-gotten gains - again, something his employees didn't have a choice about. The two assholes who used their corporation as a private piggy bank also MAY possibly go to jail ... or they may not, since they can appeal forever & remain out for years. They also got to keep houses, cars, property, funds to enable them to live, if not quite on the scale they used to, certainly better then any of the employees whose lives they ruined. Corporations have even descended to murder, and it hasn't been that uncommon, in order to keep their fat fists firmly on the money bags & retain the power to starve their labor as they saw fit...and not just in the 19th century, either. I could go on and on and on, but there isn't enough room & my bp is already over limit.
Companies only treat workers well because they are forced to, because the laws generally mandate that they do so, laws to which these same corporations were dragged, kicking & screaming, virtually at gunpoint, by federal prosecution at the behest of congress, which did so only because congressmen are very good at knowing when to throw a former bankroll & erstwhile supporter to the wolves to save themselves. And these in turn were pressured only because of public outrage & the courage & desperation of workers who had finally had enough. They are at it again, little by little, creeping back to regain the power to abuse in newer, more insidious ways, and blustering & protesting their "innocence" when caught with their hands blatantly in the til, as it were, a la Walmart caught employing illegals to clean their stores - because illegals don't dare to complain, and have to take what little Walmart deigned to dole out to them, as it does it's other rank & file workers.
Corporations are NEVER going to relax their campaign to abuse & cheat, & workers - including the public at large - can not afford to relax fighting corporations' hypocrisy & vulpine greed.
5 - Mike Stevens
Nancy,
Please get informed. Wal-Mart didn't employ the alien workers, a contractor who had hiring responsibility did the hiring.
Wal-Mart fired the contractor upon notification.
6 - billy
"Unions were needed in a time when the government had yet to take up the cause of workers rights."
since george bush and his followers hate the workers of america and love enron, unions are more needed than ever. and now with booming latino worker population they will again rise and kick anti-worker gop idiots out of office.