Labor Conditions in the Early Nineteenth Century
Workplaces in the industrialized North in the early nineteenth century were notoriously crowded and dangerous, offering low pay and no job security. Factory work was extremely difficult, requiring 12-hour shifts in unsanitary and unsafe conditions. Between 1830 and 1850, the notion of the "sweatshop" emerged as a specific type of workshop in which a middleman, the "sweater," directed others in garment production under arduous conditions. The workplaces created for the sweating system comprised anywhere from a few to more than one hundred workers. To improve these conditions, workers' organizations and trade unions fought for reforms during the early days of the labor movement in the United States.
Early Labor Reform Movements
The first local trade unions in the United States formed in the late eighteenth century. In 1794, Philadelphia shoemakers organized the Federal Society of Journeymen Cordwainers (a reference to cordovan leather) in an effort to secure stable wages. After striking for higher wages, in 1806, eight union leaders were brought to trial and accused of conspiring to increase their pay rates. The defendants were found guilty in a Philadelphia court, a decision that established labor unions as illegal conspiracies. However, the ruling was overturned in a landmark legal decision issued by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court in March, 1842. In Commonwealth v. Hunt, a case concerning a strike organized by the Boston Journeymen Bootmakers' Society, Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw ruled that unions were legal organizations.
Early Leaders
In 1821, the young women employed by the Boston Manufacturing Company in Waltham went on strike for two days when their wages were cut. In 1824, workers in Pawtucket struck to protest reduced pay rates and longer hours (which were a result of employers' cutting back the amount of time allowed for meals). In 1825, female textile workers formed the United Tailoresses of New York to protest the long hours and harsh conditions in garment factories in New York City. Similar strikes occurred at Lowell and in other mill towns such as Dover, New Hampshire, where the women employed by the Cocheco Manufacturing Company ceased working in December 1828 after their wages were reduced.
In the 1830s, female mill operatives in Lowell formed the Lowell Factory Girls Association to organize strike activities in the face of wage cuts, and later established the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association to protest the 12-hour workday. Even though strikes were rarely successful and workers usually were forced to accept reduced wages and increased hours, work stoppages as a form of labor protest represented the beginnings of the labor movement in the United States.
While women spearheaded much of the early labor movement in the United States, children were actively involved as well. In 1835, children employed in the silk mills in Paterson, New Jersey, initiated an unsuccessful strike for an 11-hour day.
New York City shirtwaist workers on strike, taking a lunch break
Women in the garment industry were among the earliest labor activists in the United States.
The Mechanics' Union
In 1827, The Mechanics' Union of Trade Associations formed as a proxy of the united crafts in Philadelphia, with the primary goal of reducing the 12-hour work day. Carpenters, representing the union, led a strike for the 10-hour day in June 1827. Union members ran numerous candidates for local offices while forging coalitions with other organizations that supported educational reforms and economic regulations favorable to Philadelphia's workers.
In 1837, dozens of industries achieved a victory when the City of Philadelphia passed legislation prohibiting businesses from employing workers for more than 10 hours a day. Unfortunately, soon after the 10-hour workday legislation, the nation experienced the Panic of 1837, and the subsequent rise in unemployment crippled the Mechanics' Union.
"To the Mechanics and Working-Men of the Fifth Ward"
This promotional tract issued by the Mechanics' Union of Trade Associations condemns working conditions in Philadelphia.
The Working Men's Party
In Philadelphia, New York, and Boston—all cities that experienced dizzying industrial growth during the nineteenth century—workers united to form political parties. Thomas Skidmore from Connecticut was the outspoken organizer of the Working Men’s Party, which lodged a radical protest against the exploitation of workers that accompanied industrialization. Skidmore argued that inequality originated in the unequal distribution of property through inheritance laws. In his 1829 treatise, "The Rights of Man to Property," Skidmore called for the abolition of inheritance and the redistribution of property. The Working Men’s Party also advocated the end of imprisonment for debt. Skidmore’s vision of radical equality extended to all; women and men, no matter their race, should be allowed to vote and receive property, he believed. Skidmore died in 1832 when a cholera epidemic swept New York City, but the state of New York did away with imprisonment for debt in the same year.
Immigration
Worker activism became less common in the late 1840s and 1850s. As German and Irish immigrants poured into the United States in the decades preceding the Civil War, native-born laborers found themselves competing for jobs with new arrivals who were exploited into working longer hours for less pay. In Lowell, Massachusetts, for example, the daughters of New England farmers encountered competition from the daughters of Irish farmers suffering the effects of the potato famine; these immigrant women were willing to work for far less and to endure worse conditions than native-born women were, and American manufacturers took advantage of this to keep wages low. American men and women with families to support grudgingly accepted low wages in order to keep their jobs. As work became increasingly deskilled, no worker was irreplaceable, and no one’s job was safe.