The role of political parties in evolution of organized labor essay

The Role Of Political Parties In Evolution Of Organized Labor:-The Republican and Democratic Party Platforms for the Presidency after the civil war are in favor of oppressed peoples(labors). These were the first Party Platforms since the end of the Civil War. Republican Party (Abraham Lincoln) The Pledges of party favoring the labors:-Fourth:-It is due to the labor of the nation, that taxation should be equalized and reduced as rapidly as the national faith will permit. Sixth:-That the best policy to diminish our burden of debt, is to so improve our credit that capitalists will seek to loan us money at lower rates of interest than we now pay and must continue to pay so long as repudiation, partial or total, open or covert, is threatened or suspected. Seventh:-The Government of the United States should be administered with the strictest economy; and the corruptions which have been so shamefully nursed and fostered by Andrew Johnson call loudly for radical reform. Tenth:-Of all who were faithful in the trials of the late war, there were none entitled to more especial honor than the brave soldiers and seamen who endured the hardships of campaign and cruise, and imperiled their lives in the service of the country.

The bounties and pensions provided by law for these brave defenders of the nation, are obligations never to be forgotten. The widows and orphans of the gallant dead are the wards of the people—a sacred legacy bequeathed to the nation’s protecting care. Eleventh:-Foreign immigration, which in the past, has added so much to the wealth, development of resources, and increase of power to this nation—the asylum of the oppressed of all nations—should be fostered and encouraged by a liberal and just policy. Twelfth:-This Convention declares its sympathy with all the oppressed people which are struggling for their rights.

Democratic Party Platform:-First. Immediate restoration of all the States to their rights in the Union, under the Constitution, and of civil government to the American people. Third. Payment of the public debt of the United States as rapidly as practicable.

All moneys drawn from the people by taxation, except so much as is requisite for the necessities of the government, economically administered, being honestly applied to such payment, and where the obligations of the government do not expressly state upon their face, or the law under which they were issued does not provide, that they shall be paid in coin, they ought, in right and in justice, to be paid in the lawful money of the United States. Fourth. Equal taxation of every species of property, according to its real value, including government bonds and other public securities.

Fifth. One currency for the government and the people, the laborer and the office-holder, the pensioner and the soldier, the producer and the bond-holder. After the most solemn and unanimous pledge of both Houses of Congress to prosecute the war exclusively for the maintenance of the government and the preservation of the Union under the Constitution, it has repeatedly violated that most sacred pledge, under which alone was rallied that noble volunteer army which carried our flag to victory. Instead of restoring the Union, it has, so far as in its power, dissolved it, and subjected ten States, in time of profound peace, to military despotism and negro supremacy.

That our soldiers and sailors, who carried the flag of our country to victory against a most gallant and determined foe, must ever be gratefully remembered, and all the guarantees given in their favor must be faithfully carried into execution. Resolved, that these conventions sympathize cordially with the workingmen of the United States in their efforts to protect the rights and interests of the laboring classes of the country. Part of Speeches in favor of labor: Excerpt of Speeches given during the 1912 presidential campaign, by different candidates, given below might have led towards the evolution of labor organization all these presidential candidates appealed directly to working class voter, who proved pivotal to the outcome. Theodore Rousevelt: We propose to extend governmental power in order to secure the liberty of the wageworkers, of the men and women who toil in industry. To save the liberty not to oppress those who are weaker than himself. Woodrow Wilson: Wilson argued against a minimum wage for women workers and called for the end of business monopolies. Wilson said that the whole business of politics is to bring classes together upon a platform of accommodation and common interest. There are a great many questions, which the workingman may legitimately ask and quest until he gets a definite answer.

He declares that a very large amount of money which collected from the general taxpayer and into the pocket of particular classes that protect his manufacturers, but his concern is that so little of this money gets into the pockets of the laboring man and so large a proportion of it into the pockets of the employers.         I take it for granted, that if law established a minimum wage, the great majority of employers would take occasion to bring their wages scale as nearly as might be down to level of that minimum. In addition, it would be very awkward for the working man to resist that process successfully because if would be dangerous to strike against the authority in the Fedral government. William Howard Taft : Inequality of condition can be lessened and equality of opportunity can be promoted by improvement of our educational systems, the betterment of the laws to ensure the quick administration of justice, and by the prevention of acquisition of privilege without just compensation. 16th Amendment to the U.

S. Constitution(Federal Income Tax): This amendment also favors labor indirectly because according to this income tax payee’s income should be more than $3000, but mostly labors income is not exceed $800. so this amendment also favors the labors. 19th Amendment to the U. S. Constitution (Women’s Right to Vote): With this amendment the woman got the right of vote. So the labor women’s right increased.

So political party had to consider the women labor. Statistics show the rapid transformation of the American economy in the postwar years: the improved railroad system, the increased output of iron and steel, the accelerated exploitation of natural resources, the multiplication of capital investment in industry, and the steady movement of immigrants into the cities and manufacturing centers. However, indices of industrial growth cannot measure the full impact of industrialization. It is statistics of production that really suggest the impact of industrial change on the producers and the laboring class. The American Labor Movement developed as a result of the citywide organizations that unhappy workers were establishing.

These men and women were determined to receive the rights and privileges they deserved as citizens of a free country. They refused to be treated like slaves, and work under unbearable conditions any longer. Workers joined together and realized that a group is much more powerful than an individual when protesting against intimidating companies. Workers realized the importance of economic and legal protection against the powerful employers who took advantage of them. (AFL-CIO American Federalist, 1)Knights of Labor: Knights of Labor formed in 1869 by Uriah Stephens and expanded rapidly under the leadership of Terrance Powdery, the Knights were an all-embracing organization committed to a cooperative society. Membership was open to all workers, whether they be skilled or unskilled, black or white, male or female. The Knights achieved a membership of nearly 750, 000 during the next few years, but the skilled and unskilled workers who had joined the Knights in hope of improvement in their hours and wages found themselves fragmented by the rift between skilled and unskilled workers. Skilled workers tired of labor activity on the part of unskilled workers who were easily replaced.

The Knights, an effective labor force, declined after the Haymarket Square riots. In the riot members of the Knights of Labor where accused of throwing a bomb which killed police officers. The Knights, already fragmented, where faced with enormous negative publicity, and eventually disbanded. American Federation of Labor: American Federation of Labor was founded by Samuel Gompers in 1886. He entered the cigar-making trade and became a leader of his local union and of the national Cigar Makers Union. A statement by the founders of the AFL expressed their belief in the need for more effective union organization. “ The various trades have been affected by the introduction of machinery, the subdivision of labor, the use of women’s and children’s labor and the lack of an apprentice system-so that the skilled trades were rapidly sinking to the level of pauper labor,” the AFL declared. “ To protect the skilled labor of America from being reduced to beggary and to sustain the standard of American workmanship and skill, the trades unions of America have been established.

” Thus the AFL was a federation that organized only unions of skilled workers. Populist orators Mary Lease build ties between the Farmer’s Alliance and the labor movement by mobilizing farmers to send wheat and corn to striking workers at Carnegie’s Homestead mill. Despite Gompers’s opposition, the 1892 AFL convention did endorse the Populist calls for initiative, referendum, and government ownership of the telephone and telegraph system as well as a campaign to increase trade unions activities. The combined Democratic-Populist ticket headed by William Jennings Bryan was a stepping stone towards the development of labor organizationsThe Pullman Strike in 1894, at the Pullman plant near Chicago, the American Railroad Union (not affiliated with the AFL and led by Eugene V. Debs, a leading American socialist) struck the company’s manufacturing plant and called for a boycott of the handling of Pullman’s sleeping and parlor cars on the nation’s railroads.

Within a week, 125, 000 railroad workers were engaged in a sympathy protest strike. The government swore in 3, 400 special deputies; later, at the request of the railroad association, President Cleveland moved in federal troops to break the strike-despite a plea by Gov. Aitgeld of Illinois that their presence was unnecessary. Finally, a sweeping federal court injunction forced an end to the sympathy strike, and many railroad workers were blacklisted. The strike illustrated the increasing tendency of the government to offer moral support and military force to break strikes. The injunction, issued usually and almost automatically by compliant judges on the request of government officials or corporations, became a prime legal weapon against union organizing and action. Anthracite coal miner’s strike in 1902: A better method of federal intervention occurred during a 1902 strike of anthracite coal miners, under the banner of the United Mine Workers.

More than 100, 000 miners in northeastern Pennsylvania called a strike on May 12, and kept the mines closed all that summer. When the mine owners refused a UMW proposal for arbitration, President Theodore Roosevelt intervened on Oct. 3, and on Oct. 16 appointed a commission of mediation and arbitration. Five days later the miners returned to their jobs, and five months later, the Presidential Commission awarded them a 10 percent wage increase and shorter workdays-but not the formal union recognition they had sought. In 1911 a fire broke out at the Triangle Shirtwaist Co.

on New York’s lower east side. About 150 employees almost all of them young women-perished when the fire swept through the upper floors of the loft building in which they worked. Many burned to death; others jumped and died. Why so large a casualty list? The safety exits on the burning floors had been securely locked, allegedly to prevent “ loss of goods.” New York and the country were aroused by the tragedy. A state factory investigation committee headed by Frances Perkins (she was to become Franklin Roosevelt’s secretary of labor in 1933, the first woman cabinet member in history) paved the way for many long needed reforms in industrial safety and fire prevention measures. Another of the historic industrial conflicts prior to World War I occurred in 1912 in the textile mills of Lawrence, Mass.

It was led not by an AFL union but by the radical Industrial Workers of the World-the IWW, or the Wobblies, as they were generally known -an organization in frequent verbal and physical conflict with the AFL and its affiliates. The strike in Lawrence started when the mill owners, responding to a state legislature action reducing the workweek from 54 to 52, coldly and without prior notice cut the pay rates by a 31/2 percent. The move produced predictable results: a strike of 50, 000 textile workers; arrests; fiery statements by the IWW leaders; police and militia attacks on peaceful meetings; and broad public support for the strikers. Some 400 children of strikers were “ adopted” by sympathizers. When women strikers and their children were attacked at the railroad station by the police after authorities had decided no more youngsters could leave town, an enraged public protest finally forced the mill owners not only to restore the pay cuts but to increase the workers’ wages to more realistic levels.

Congress, at the urging of the AFL, created a separate U. S. Department of Labor with a legislative mandate to protect and extend the rights of wage earners. A Children’s Bureau, with a major concern to protect the victims of job exploitation, was created. The LaFollette Seaman’s Act required urgently needed improvements in the working conditions on ships of the U.

S. merchant marine. Of crucial importance, the Clayton Act of 1914 made explicit the legal concept that “ the labor of a human being is not a commodity or article of commerce” and hence not subject to the Sherman Act provisions which had been the legal basis for injunctions against union organization. Clayton gave legalized strikes and boycotts and peaceful picketing, and dramatically limited the use of injunctions in labor disputes. Little wonder that AFL President Gompers hailed the Clayton Act as a “ magna carta.” C.

I. O: In November 1935, John L. Lewis announced the creation of the CIO, the Committee for Industrial Organization, composed of about a dozen leaders of AFL unions, to carry on the effort for industrial unionism.

Lewis, born in Iowa in 1880 of Welsh immigrant parents, went to work in the coal mines and became president of the Mine Workers in 192.  Industrial Unions are unions that organize an entire industry regardless of skill. In short they where unions of unskilled workers. An orator of remarkable virtuosity, Lewis voiced increasingly bitter attacks on his colleagues on the AFL Executive Council. In 1936, the various CIO unions were expelled from the Federation. In 1938 John L. Lewis and 518 other delegates to a constitutional convention assembled in Pittsburgh to bury the three-year-old Committee for Industrial Organization.

and became the Congress of Industrial Organizations. In any event, the CIO began a remarkably successful series of organizing campaigns, and over the next few years, brought industrial unionism to large sectors of basic American industry. At the same time, the unions remaining in the AFL registered even more substantial gains in membership. During World War 11, the AFL and CIO, while preserving areas of disagreement, began to find more substantial bases for working together on problems affecting all workers. In time, many of the old antagonisms had died out and the old issues had been resolved. The stage was set for merger of the two labor groups.

They were reunited into the AFL-CIO at a convention in New York opening on Dec. 5, 1955. John Lewis was undismayed by C. I.

O.’s poor showing in last fortnight’s elections. After sometime Federal Judge William Clark recently dusted off Mayor Hague by specifically enjoining him to let C. I.

O. organizers (and other dissenters from the established Hague order) speak, solicit members, carry placards and otherwise exercise their Constitutional rights in Jersey City. Politico Lewis declared it high time to throw all Hagues out of the Democratic Party, to arrange a genuinely liberal political alignment of CIO in 1940. When a convention delegate offered a Roosevelt-Third-Term resolution such as has become routine at conventions of C.

I. O. affiliates Chairman Lewis squelched him. Thus Mr. Lewis had left wide open the question of C. I.

O. allegiance in 1940. The convention then went on record against all amendments to the Wagner Act, and against diversion of Federal funds from social services to Rearmament (but did not oppose Rearmament as such). It demanded more Relief, more Housing, more and better Planning in the name of greater production, greater employment, and greater consumer purchasing power. Peace Without Pieces. C. I.

O. started in 1935 as a rump committee of eight A. F. of L. union presidents, shortly burgeoned into a combination committee of individuals and association of unions apart from the Federation. For that purpose they fitted into the new C. I. O.

jigsaw are such diverse unions as Mr. Lewis’ essentially conservative United Mine Workers, Sidney Hillman’s liberal Amalgamated Clothing Workers, Harry Bridges’ radical International Longshoremen ; Warehousemen, Joe Curran’s turbulent National Maritime Union. Their common, immediate aim, to organize the mass production industries, holds them soundly together, but there are dissents within the whole. Having profanely put Mr. Bridges in his place, John L. Lewis informed the delegates that their constitution was a democratic document, ordered them to adopt it forthwith. They did.

Its chief provisions gave each of C. I. O.’s 41 affiliates a member of the international executive board, empowered that board to investigate any “ situation”‘ in any affiliate but left punitive action against member unions to annual or special C. I. O. conventions.

Motor Trouble. One such situation that Mr. Lewis recently had to handle without constitutional sanction was a rift in the United Automobile Workers of America. Now firmly in control of C. I. O’s Vice Chairmen Hillman and Philip Murray, impoverished U.

A. W. last fortnight borrowed $50, 000 from Mr. Lewis’ United Miners. Lewis, Hillman. Murray and C. I.

O. Headquarters Director John Brophy as “ symbols of unity.” U. A. W. President Homer Martin, who heartily dislikes all four, had to avow the utmost esteem for them (and they for him).

He also exuded esteem for his fellow officers, who half hoped that Mr. Martin would fulfill his recent threats to resign. Ford Motor Co: At the Ford Motor Co.

, only automaker not yet brought under U. A. W. contract. Mr. Martin has been dickering privately with Ford’s Harry Bennett.

In denouncing anti-union employers he conspicuously avoided mention of the Ford company. Others were not so coy, and C. I. O. pledged itself to boycott Ford products unless or until Henry Ford signs up. Press has sinned often and greatly against U. S.

Labor Mr. Lewis’ dinner was ruined by baldish Morris Watson, vice president of C. I. O.’s American Newspaper Guild. After that they feel sorry and declared that document did not mean what it said.

Vice Presidents Miner Philip Murray, whose stature as No. 2 man in C. I.

O. and probable successor to John Lewis has steadily increased; wise, adroit Sidney Hillman, to whom Mr. Murray absentmindedly referred as “ second vice president.

” Secretary Shy, brilliant James Barren Carey, 27, whose United Electrical, Radio ; Machine Workers have one of the most vigorous and biggest of the younger C. I. O. unions. Mr.

Lewis, who considers little Mr. Carey the best of C. I. O.’s youngsters, maneuvered his election as a salute to them.

Mr. Carey thereupon dashed home to Manhattan, where his wife was expecting a baby. Negros and Political parties: At the time of Franklin Roosevelt and the new deal, the majority of Negroes maintained their allegiance to the Republican Party. Between the end of Re-construction and the First World War (in 1880 and between 1908 and 1912) persons in the Negro community advised cooperation with Democratic Party.

Negroes divide their vote in order to obtain the best political advantage. Reference: 1. (The Republican and Democratic Party Platforms for the Presidency)http://www. presidency. ucsb.

edu/showplatforms. php? platindex= R1868http://www. presidency. ucsb.

edu/showplatforms. php? platindex= D18682. (1912 Speeches by Political Party)http://historymatters. gmu. edu/d/5722http://historymatters. gmu. edu/d/5723/http://historymatters.

gmu. edu/d/57243. (16th Amendment to Constitution)http://www. ourdocuments.

gov/doc. php? doc= 57&page= transcript4. (19th Amendment to Constitution)http://www. ourdocuments. gov/doc.

php? doc= 63&page= transcript5. ( The American Federation of Labor)http://historymatters. gmu.

edu/d/53596. (The Congress of Industrial Organizations)http://www. time. com/time/magazine/article/0, 9171, 771188-1, 00.

html7. (Domesticity and Equal Rights in the Knights of Labor)http://links. jstor. org/sici? sici= 0021-8723%28198309%2970%3A2%3C323%3ALTWDAE%3E2. 0.

CO%3B2-G8. (The Negro and the Democratic Party)http://links. jstor. org/sici? sici= 0885-6818%28195632%2917%3A2%3C173%3ATNATDP%3E2. 0. CO%3B2-9