American Federation of Labor
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The American Federation of Labor (AFL) was one of the first federations of labor unions in the United States. It was founded in Columbus, Ohio in 1886 by Samuel Gompers as a reorganization of its predecessor, the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions. Gompers was the president of the AFL until his death in 1924.
The AFL was the largest union grouping in the United States for the first half of the twentieth century, even after the creation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) by unions that left the AFL in 1938 over its opposition to organizing mass production industries. While the union was founded and dominated by craft unions throughout the first fifty years of its existence, many of its craft union affiliates turned to organizing on an industrial basis to meet the challenge from the CIO in the 1940s.
The AFL also personified a conservative "pure and simple unionism" that contrasted with the more radical aims of unions such as the Industrial Workers of the World. The AFL's "business unionism" favored pursuit of workers' immediate demands, rather than challenging the rights of owners under capitalism, and took a pragmatic, and often pessimistic, view of politics that favored tactical support for particular politicians over formation of a party devoted to workers' interests.
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[edit] Early years
The AFL was formed in large part because of the dissatisfaction of many trade union leaders with the Knights of Labor, an organization that contained many trade unions and which had played a leading role in some of the largest strikes of the era, but whose leadership had supported several rival unions that had bargained for lower wages and provided strikebreakers during other unions' strikes. The new AFL distinguished itself from the Knights by emphasizing the autonomy of each trade union affiliated with it and limiting membership to workers and organizations made up of workers, unlike the Knights, who also admitted employers as members.
The AFL grew steadily in the late nineteenth century while the Knights disappeared. Although Gompers at first advocated something like industrial unionism, he retreated from that in the face of opposition from the craft unions that made up most of the AFL. That emphasis on craft unionism also made it difficult for the AFL to put its egalitarian principles into practice: while the AFL did not exclude workers on the basis of their race or nationality, and refused to grant charters to those unions that formally excluded African-Americans, its emphasis on representing skilled workers excluded most blacks.
However, in 1895, that policy of egalitarianism also gave way when the AFL admitted the International Association of Machinists, a merger of one organization which the AFL had previously refused to admit and the rival union it had chartered, even though the new union also discriminated against black workers. The AFL sanctioned creation of segregated locals within its affiliates and many affiliated unions, particularly in the construction and railroad industries, actively excluded black workers altogether from both union membership and employment in the industries they had organized.
The AFL actively supported legislation, such as literacy tests, that would reduce unskilled immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe.
In 1901, the AFL under Samuel Gompers lobbied Congress to reauthorize the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act in a pamphlet entitled "Some reasons for Chinese exclusion. Meat vs. rice. American manhood against Asiatic coolieism. Which shall survive?" The AFL also began one of the first organized labor boycotts when they began putting white stickers on the cigars made by unionized, white cigar rollers to discourage consumers from purchasing cigars rolled by Chinese workers.
[edit] Expansion and retreat
The AFL was left as the only major national union body with the demise of the Knights of Labor in the 1890s. It subsequently brought in a number of unions formed on industrial union lines, including the United Mine Workers, International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union and the United Brewery Workers. Even so, the craft unions within the AFL maintained power within the Federation.
The AFL made efforts in its early years to assist its affiliates in organizing: it advanced funds or provided organizers or, in some cases, such as the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters and the American Federation of Musicians, helped form the union. The AFL also used its influence, including refusal of charters or expulsion, to heal splits within affiliated unions, to force separate unions seeking to represent the same or closely related jurisdictions to merge, or to mediate disputes between rival factions that both claimed to represent the leadership of an affiliated union or one seeking affiliation. The AFL also chartered "federal unions", local unions not affiliated with any international union, in those fields in which no affiliate claimed jurisdiction.
The AFL faced its first major reversal in the first decade of the twentieth century, when employers launched an open shop movement designed to drive unions out of construction and other organized industries, such as mining and longshore. At the same time, employers discovered the efficacy of labor injunctions, first used with great effect by the Cleveland administration during the Pullman strike in 1894. While the AFL sought to outlaw "yellow dog" contracts, to limit the courts' power to impose "government by injunction" and to obtain exemption from the anti-trust laws that were being used to criminalize labor organizing, the courts reversed what few legislative successes the labor movement won.
The AFL vigorously opposed dual unionism and the Industrial Workers of the World, which was created in 1905 as an alternative to the AFL. Rather than accommodating capitalism, it sought to overthrow it. The IWW was never a significant threat to the AFL. While the AFL vigorously supported the national war effort in World War I, the IWW tried to impede the war effort and was broken by criminal prosecution.
[edit] Conflicts between affiliated unions
From the outset the unions affiliated with the AFL found themselves in conflict when both unions claimed jurisdiction over the sames group of workers: both the Brewers and the Teamsters claimed to represent beer truck drivers, both the Machinists and the International Typographical Union represented certain printroom employees, and the Machinists claimed the right to represent some of the employees whom the fledgling union known as the "Carriage, Wagon and Automobile Workers Union" sought to organize — even though it had not made any actual efforts to organize or bargain for those employees. In some cases the AFL mediated the dispute, usually favoring the larger or more influential union — which might change over time, as the continuing jurisdictional battles between the Brewers and the Teamsters showed. In other cases the AFL expelled the offending union, as it did in 1913 in the case of the Carriage, Wagon and Automobile Workers Union, which quickly disappeared.
These jurisdictional disputes were most frequent in the building trades, where a number of different unions might claim the right to have work assigned to their members. The craft unions in this industry organized their own department within the AFL in 1908, despite the reservations of Gompers and other leaders about creation of a separate body within the AFL that might function as a federation within a federation. While those fears were partly borne out in practice, as the Building Trades Department did acquire a great deal of practical power gained through resolving jurisdictional disputes between affiliates, the danger that it might serve as the basis for schism never materialized.
Other affiliates within the AFL formed other departments: the Metal Trades Department, which engaged in some organizing of its own, primarily in shipbuilding, where unions such as the Pipefitters, Machinists and Iron Workers joined together through local metal workers' councils to represent a diverse group of workers, and the Railway Employees Department, which dealt with both jurisdictional disputes between affiliates and pursued a common legislative agenda for all of them. Even that sort of structure did not prevent AFL unions from finding themselves in conflict on political issues: the International Seamen's Union, for example, opposed passage of a law applying to workers engaged in interstate transport that railway unions supported. The AFL was forced to bridge these differences on an ad hoc basis.
The AFL also encouraged the formation of local labor bodies, primarily central labor councils in major metropolitan areas, in which all of the affiliates could participate. These local labor councils acquired a great deal of influence in some cases: as an example, the Chicago Central Labor Council spearheaded efforts to organize packinghouse and steel workers during and immediately after World War I. Local building trades councils also became powerful in some areas: the San Francisco Building Trades Council, led by a Carpenters official, P.H. "Pinhead" McCarthy, not only dominated the local labor council but helped elect McCarthy mayor of San Francisco in 1909. In a very few cases early in the AFL's history state and local bodies defied AFL policy or chose to disaffiliate over policy disputes.
[edit] Political activities
While the organization was founded by socialists such as Gompers and Peter J. McGuire, it quickly became more conservative. The AFL adopted a philosophy of "business unionism" that sought to establish stable labor organizations, based on enduring craft distinctions, that would avoid the volatility of groups such as the Knights of Labor, whose membership and power rose and fell mightily with business downturns and political victories and defeats. This business unionist approach focused on skilled workers' immediate job-related interests, while ignoring larger political issues.
The AFL showed no interest in supporting a labor party and found itself in conflict with the socialist organizations of the day. It resolved very early in its existence in 1894 not to affiliate itself with any political party — a decision to distance itself from the Socialist Labor Party headed by Daniel De Leon.
In some respects the AFL leadership took a pragmatic view toward politicians, following Gompers' slogan to "reward your friends and punish your enemies," without regard to party affiliation. Over time, after repeated disappointments with the failure of labor's legislative efforts to protect workers' rights, which the courts had struck down as unconstitutional, Gompers became almost anti-political, opposing some forms of protective legislation, such as limitations on working hours, because they would detract from the efforts of unions to obtain those same benefits through collective bargaining.
The AFL concentrated its political efforts during the last decades of the Gompers administration instead on securing freedom from state control of unions — in particular an end to the court's use of labor injunctions to block union's right to organize or strike, or what opponents termed "government by injunction", and the application of the anti-trust laws to criminalize labor's use of picketing, boycotts and strikes to support workers' demands. The AFL thought that it had achieved the latter result by the passage of the Clayton Act in 1914 — which Gompers referred to as "Labor's Magna Carta" — only to be disappointed again by the Supreme Court's narrow reading of the Act in Duplex Printing Press Co. v. Deering, , in which it ruled that the Act codified the federal courts' existing power to issue injunctions, rather than limiting it, and that it the phrase "between an employer and employees" contained in the first paragraph of the amendment only referred to cases involving an employer and its own employees, leaving the courts free to punish unions for striking in sympathy with the demands of another employer's employees or engaging in boycotts of secondary employers in order to win a strike against the primary employer.
The AFL's pessimistic attitude towards politics did not, on the other hand, prevent affiliated unions from pursuing their own agendas. Construction unions supported legislation that governed entry of contractors into the industry and protected workers' rights to pay, railroad and mass production industries sought workplace safety legislation, and unions generally agitated for the passage of workers' compensation statutes.
Unions, including the AFL itself, also welcomed governmental intervention in favor of collective bargaining during World War I, when unions in the packinghouse industry were able to form due to governmental pressure on the largest employers to recognize the unions rather than face a strike. The AFL endorsed the 1924 Presidential campaign of Robert M. La Follette, Sr., as did the railroad unions' Conference for Progressive Political Action and the Socialist Party. The campaign failed to establish a permanent Progressive Party. Thereafter, the Federation embraced the Democratic Party from that point forward, even though many of its leaders remained Republicans.
At the same time, some unions within the AFL had participated in the formation of the National Civic Federation, a group led by more forward-looking employers who sought to avoid the violent conflicts figured in the largest labor disputes of the turn of the century by fostering collective bargaining on the one hand and the promotion of "responsible" unionism on the other. Labor's participation in this federation, at first tentative, created internal division within the AFL, as socialists, who believed the only way to help workers was to destroy capitalism, denounced any cooperation with capitalists. The AFL nonetheless continued its association with it, even after the National Civic Federation became much less important after 1915.
The AFL relaxed its rigid policy concerning labor protective legislation after the death of Gompers. Even so, it remained cautious: its proposals for unemployment benefits made in the late 1920s were too modest to have any practical value, as the Great Depression soon showed. The impetus for the major federal labor laws of the 1930s came from the New Deal, which wanted to build up a counterweight to business. The enormous growth of membership came after Congress passed the Wagner Act in 1935, and the new National Labor Relations Board took an aggressively pro-union position. The AFL stood apart from the mass strikes led by John L. Lewis of the United Mine Workers and other left unions such as the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America. The splitoff of the CIO after 1937 posed a major threat and the AFL responded with its own massive organizing drived that kept its membership totals 50% higher than the CIO. In 1940 John L. Lewis of the CIO endorsed the Republican candidate, weakening the political impact of organized labor. The AFL retained close ties to the big city machines, and to the New Deal through the 1940s. Its membership surged during the war and it held most of its new members. The AFL was not able to block the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, which restored the balance between labor and management. In 1955 the AFL and CIO reunited as the AFL-CIO under George Meany.
[edit] Presidents of the American Federation of Labor, 1886-1955
- Samuel Gompers 1886-1894
- John McBride 1894-1895
- Samuel Gompers 1895-1924
- William Green 1924-1952
- George Meany 1952-1955 (afterwards President of the AFL-CIO)
[edit] See also
[edit] References
[edit] Primary sources
- American Federation of Labor. Some reasons for Chinese exclusion. Meat vs. rice. American manhood against Asiatic coolieism. Which shall survive? Washington, DC: American Federation of Labor, 1901.
- Gompers, Samuel. Seventy Years of Life and Labor: An Autobiography (1925)
[edit] Secondary sources
- Brooks, George W., Milton Derber, David A. McCabe, Philip Taft. Interpreting the Labor Movement (1952)
- Commons, John R. History of Labour in the United States - Vol. 2 1860-1896 (1918)
- Dubofsky, Melvyn and Warren Van Tine. John L. Lewis: A Biography (1986)
- Dubofsky, Melvyn and Dulles, Foster Rhea (2004). Labor in America: A History. Harlan Davidson; 7th edition. ISBN 0-88295-998-0.
- Foner, Philip. History of the Labor Movement in the United States. New York: International Publishers, 1975. ISBN 0-7178-0092-X, view from the far left.
- Galenson, Walter. The CIO Challenge to the AFL: A History of the American Labor Movement, 1935-1941 (1960)
- Greene, Julie . Pure and Simple Politics: The American Federation of Labor and Political Activism, 1881-1917 (1998)
- Karson, Marc. American Labor Unions and Politics, 1900-1918 (1958)
- Lee, R. Alton. Truman and Taft-Hartley: A Question of Mandate (1966)
- McCartin, Joseph A. ’Labor's Great War: The Struggle for Industrial Democracy and the Origins of Modern American Labor Relations, 1912-1921 (1997)
- Mandel, Bernard. Samuel Gompers: A Biography (1963)
- Orth, Samuel P. The Armies of Labor: A Chronicle of the Organized Wage-Earners (1919)
- Taft, Philip. The A.F. of L. in the Time of Gompers. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1957.
- Taft, Philip. The A.F. of L. from the Death of Gompers to the Merger. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1959.
