unskilled labor

Examples of unskilled labor in the following topics:

• Immigrant Labor

  • Many of the economic gains in the United States during the nineteenth century were made possible by immigrant labor.
  • Immigrants of the nineteenth century flocked to urban destinations, making up the bulk of the U.S. industrial labor pool.
  • These new sources of labor profoundly influenced the emergence of the steel, coal, automobile, textile, and garment industries, increasing production and enabling the United States to leap into the front ranks of the world's economies.
  • The Irish provided mostly unskilled labor in factories, textile mills, and large infrastructure projects such as canals and railroads.
  • The Irish provided a ready source of unskilled labor needed to lay railroad tracks and dig canals.

• Modern Management

  • His redesign increased the speed of factory machines and the productivity of factories while undercutting the need for skilled labor.
  • Factories became an assemblage of unskilled laborers performing simple and repetitive tasks under the direction of skilled foremen and engineers.
  • The number of unskilled and skilled workers increased as their wage rates grew.

• Toward Free Labor

  • The labor-intensive cash crop of tobacco was farmed in the American South by indentured laborers in the 17th and 18th centuries.
  • In modern terms, the shipowner was acting as an contractor, hiring out his laborers.
  • Relative labor costs changed, with an increase in real income in Europe and England.
  • By the turn of the 17th century, unskilled labor positions were often filled by African slaves and skilled service positions were still filled by white indentured servants.
  • Thereafter, Africans began to replace indentured servants in both skilled and unskilled positions.

• Progressivism for Whites Only

  • According to critics, Wilson believed that slavery was wrong on economic labor grounds, rather than for moral reasons.
  • In its first years, the AFL admitted nearly every laboring group without discrimination.
  • Samuel Gompers, founder of the AFL, opened the Federation to radical and socialist workers and to some semiskilled and unskilled workers.
  • Generally the AFL viewed women and black workers as competition, strikebreakers, or an unskilled labor reserve that kept wages low.
  • By the outbreak of World War I, the AFL vigorously opposed unrestricted immigration and capitalized on the fears of white workers who believed that an influx of unskilled immigrants would flood the labor market and lower wages.

• Tenants, Sharecroppers, and Migrants

  • The transforming of the West in the late nineteenth century relied on various types of laborers–-tenants, sharecroppers, and migrants.
  • Prior to restrictions against the slave trade, agriculture in the United States was largely dependent on slave labor; contrary to popular myth, slavery, while more prominent in the Southern plantation system, was used in both the North and South as a way of supplying labor to agriculture.
  • There were many sources for cheap labor.
  • Other sources of cheap agricultural labor during this time were found in unskilled European immigrants, whom, unlike Chinese, Mexican, or Filipino laborers, were not brought to the United States to work specifically as cheap laborers but were hired to work in agriculture nonetheless.
  • The experiences of migrant laborers in agriculture during this period varied.

• The Great Steel Strike

  • Between September 1919 and January 1920, labor unions (such as the AA and AFL), organized a strike that would ultimately be unsuccessful.
  • The American Federation of Labor (AFL) began organizing unskilled iron and steel workers into federal unions in 1901.
  • Samuel Gompers and other AFL leaders held a nativist view of the unskilled immigrants working in steel plants.
  • Between 30,000 and 40,000 unskilled African-American and Mexican American workers were brought to work in the mills.

• The Diversity of Workers

  • The American Federation of Labor (AFL) offered more support to white men than to women and non-whites.
  • Gompers opened the AFL to radical and socialist workers and to some semiskilled and unskilled workers.
  • In response, most women workers remained outside the labor movement.
  • The Knights strongly supported the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the Contract Labor Law of 1885, as did many other labor groups, although the group did accept most others, including skilled and unskilled women of any profession.
  • Examine the diversity of workers within the American Federation of Labor

• A New Direction for Unions

  • The act also created the National Labor Relations Board, which was to guarantee the rights included in NLRA (as opposed to merely negotiating labor disputes) and organize labor unions representation elections.
  • NLRA remains the landmark legislation of federal labor law that established the increasingly powerful position of organized labor during Roosevelt's presidency.
  • Consequently, in the context of labor legislation and labor unions discussed in this module, the term "worker" refers mostly to industrial workers.
  • This model excluded the so-called unskilled workers, employed most commonly in mass production.
  • Above all, the new form of organization finally opened the door to mainstream organized labor to black workers, who usually occupied unskilled industrial jobs (excluded from the AFL's form of organization).

• The Knights of Labor and the "Conditions Essential to Liberty"

  • The Knights of Labor transitioned from a fraternal organization to a labor union that promoted the uplift of the workingman.
  • The Knights of Labor was the largest and one of the most important American labor organizations of the 1880s.
  • They also called for legislation to end child and convict labor .
  • The Knights strongly supported the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the Contract Labor Law of 1885, as did many other labor groups, although the group did accept most others, including skilled and unskilled women of any profession.
  • Two years later, members of the Socialist Labor Party left the Knights to found the Socialist Trade and Labor Alliance as a Marxist rival.

• The Idea of Economic Citizenship

  • Labor unions, especially the American Federation of Labor (AFL) grew rapidly in the early Twentieth century, and had a progressive agenda as well.
  • The unions wanted restrictions on judges who intervened in labor disputes, usually on the side of the employer.
  • The level of immigration grew steadily after 1896, with most new arrivals being unskilled workers from eastern and southern Europe, who found jobs working in the steel mills, slaughterhouses, and construction crews in the mill towns and industrial cities.
  • Indeed, the labor unions aggressively promoted restrictions on immigration beginning in the 1880s, especially restrictions on Chinese and other Asians.
  • The basic fear was that large numbers of unskilled, low-paid workers would defeat the union's efforts to raise wages through collective bargaining.