Labor Historiography
From its initial inception to the present, industrial relations and industrial effects created tensions and conflict. During the period of transition to the factory system, labor disputes, actions, and organization became a tangible reality. Despite the apparent strength of industrialization and the great power that companies exerted over their workers, many workers resisted attempts at the implementation of industrialized work practices and domination and control over their daily lives. While creating competition between native and foreign-born workers encouraged disorder in the workplace and discouraged unionization, companies enabled workers to develop a collective voice by eliminating the individualism so strongly associated with the skilled craftsman.
Over the years, the number of unions representing workers wishes and demands against company policies and practices increased. In general, during most labor protests, workers fought for the institution of union rules, wage increases, and control over working conditions.
Economic, political, and social conflicts between companies and employees have always existed. The conflicting interests of the two groups encouraged the development of at least two social movements, the industrialization and unionization of labor. During the nineteenth century, when industrialization developed, most industries eventually replaced the artisan method of individual production and piece payment with the daily set pay of the wage labor movement.
Because most industries and employers were determined to control work forces that were more unified and structured, they created company policies that required work to be completed on the company property with set times for the commencement of breaks and recess. They also regulated and standardized hours and pay rates. All of these changes followed the industrialization movement.
Workers responded to industrialization through protests, strikes, sabotage, and other forms of resistance. The end result of much union and protest activity was a standardization of work practices that benefitted both employers and employees. The conflict and solidarity associated with the development of these organizations both drew people together and apart as social classes connected to their positions of work. In the process, conflict and organization of labor transformed the work and social landscape of the country.
One characteristic of the industrial era is the formation of an industrialized work culture. One theory proposed by anthropologist June Nash (1989) is that the overriding goal of an industry is to create a unified work force, since this type of work force is much easier to control and understand than one composed of disparate ideas, values, and beliefs. To achieve this goal, corporations instituted policies to regulate their employees' habits and behavior inside and outside the work place, as is evident in many company towns.
Class relations were altered with changes in industry and industrial relations. From the 1870s until the beginning of the Second World War, a shift occurred in the organization of work and the structure of labor markets with more jobs reduced to common, semi-skilled labor. Control of the labor process was concentrated among foreman and their employers. Capital and production also became increasingly concentrated.
As operations grew in size from the 1870s to the 1920s, office work became a more important aspect of industries and operations. The position of supervisors, craftsmen, and foremen who became office workers maintaining, scheduling, and ordering the work day and work processes, also grew at this time. This shift in control and the hierarchy of control affected the dynamics of worker relations and conflicts.
Labor history is usually divided into two primary schools of thought: traditional, movement-based labor history and the “new” labor history. Changing theoretical approaches and analytical methods in labor history in the 1960s and 1970s prompted some scholars to expand labor history’s research areas. While studies by early labor historians are excellent accounts of the development of the labor movement as a united entity, they provide little information on the behavior and reasoning of workers and employers.
The traditional approach to labor history adopted a grand narrative form in which heroic workers and their unions marched, bent but not bowed, toward a better future, culminating in the New Deal and federal labor law reforms. However, this approach often neglected workers outside of both the small core of tradesmen unionized before 1935 and the expanded core of industrial, commercial, and municipal workers unionized since World War II.
Traditional labor history in the United States is grounded in economic history and traces its roots to John R. Commons’ Wisconsin School and George E. Barnett’s students at Johns Hopkins University. This tradition approaches the study of labor as a study of trade unionism and collective bargaining. Studies by these labor historians tend to focus on the institutional aspects of work, such as union history and development.
During the 1970s, many scholars, following in the groundbreaking footsteps of British historian E.P. Thompson, shifted their focus of study away from protests and institutions to examine the worker as an individual, not an aggregate. Thompson’s work examined the ways workers came to view themselves as a group. Subsequent works of the “new” labor history have moved toward the experiences of workers and away from the events acting on workers.
The new labor history, aware of the racial, ethnic, and gender politics of the 1960s and 1970s, tells a much wider range of stories by women and workers of color who never belonged to unions or who were neglected or discriminated against within unions. New themes arise in these studies that focus, not on the trade union as an institution, but on familial, communal, and cultural resources working people used to survive. Indeed, the new labor history often abandons the traditional narrative form, and, instead of telling stories about working people, its practitioners have adopted social science methods of analysis. Some historians bemoan the lack of synthesis in the new social history and attempt a new narrative in which the old progressive story is integrated with the stories of women and minorities.
At the same time, working people themselves, often unaware of the new labor history scholarship, continue to tell stories about their past and about places of historic importance. In particular, union officials have created an institutional memory of stories highlighting accomplishments of the founders. In some communities, unions have tales of suffering about those who paid the ultimate price for workers’ rights. In other communities, stories are hidden from history because recollection threatens local powers and mores.
The field of labor history itself is new. In the first half of the 20th century, labor history enjoyed little academic status. A sub-field of economics, it made virtually no impact on the historical profession until the 1960s, when a new generation of researchers began to place labor history in the wider context of social history.
This work made the field one of the most exciting areas in the American historical profession and made it possible to understand working people’s lives within the larger vistas opened up by the new social history. For example, Herbert Gutman extended the time line of labor history before the industrial revolution to include the lives and cultures of “pre-industrial” artisans and laborers, and he extended the scope of labor history to embrace African American struggles.
Younger historians, aroused by the social movements of the 1960s, eagerly followed the lead of these pioneering social historians, and three decades later scholars still produce illuminating studies of a range of working-class experiences. From this body of scholarship, historians have written essays that survey the research on major occupational groupings in manufacturing, extractive industries, and transportation.
Organizing study by occupational groups allows for an assessment of research by social historians who have studied a wide variety of working people: union and non-union, native and foreign-born, male and female, white and black, northern and southern, Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish. Beyond this occupational framework, which captures the diversity of working-class history, the following themes emerged.
First, working and moving were linked. The experience of working for wages meant moving from job to job and to different locations. Second, life was short for those in working-class industrial areas. Working for a living and dying young were also linked. Social and environmental approaches to labor history have been joined to capture familial and communal life shaped by environment. Third, playing and praying influenced cultural and social life among working people.
Recreational and religious activity did not concern labor historians until recently, when they realized that workers often used chapels, saloons, clubs, and ballparks as places to express values and even oppositional ideas [the working people themselves had known this all along]. Fourth, historians have taken a new interest in working-class intellectual life, recalling the critical importance of teaching and learning to workers and their organizations.
Fifth, organizing and struggling, the traditional concerns of labor history, are considered together. Union organizing, collective bargaining, striking, boycotting, and political activity have recently been studied in a wider social and cultural context. Workers are seen not only as economic beings, but also as family and community members, and as citizens and agents of democratic change. The struggle for workers’ rights extended far beyond the right to work eight hours, the right to join a free trade union, and the right to collective bargaining. It also involved a crusade to extend the Bill of Rights to working people.
In sum, these experiences suggested a new labor history that included, but went beyond, factories, mills, union halls, and strike scenes. But this new labor history tended towards an instinct for the capillary, a means of avoiding a larger narrative context in workers and their unions gradually lost the promise of a better future, as the New Deal and federal labor law reforms became increasingly irrelevant in the new global economy. The effort of historians to go beyond, factories, mills, union halls, and strike scenes permits ignoring the silent factories and mills, the empty union halls, and the strike scenes that are quite rare, and normally involve issues that are barely comprehensible to even a skilled labor lawyer.
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