When Trade Unions Clashed with Employers

By Patrick Allitt, Emory University

There were violent encounters between employers and unions during the great economic depression of the early 1890s. Employers tried everything they could to prevent unions from forming. One of the ways was hiring an ethnically diverse workforce to make it very difficult for men to talk with one another. This also ensured that they didn’t feel a ready community of interest because of their ethnic and linguistic differences.

Hiring Strikebreakers

A way in which employers fought back against unionization was by blacklisting, that is, by identifying people who were playing a prominent role as union leaders or strike leaders, and making sure that they couldn’t work in any of the associated factories.

Whenever they could, they would hire strikebreakers. If the regular workforce went out, they’d bring in strikebreakers, especially if it was unskilled work. African Americans were often employed as strikebreakers.

Racism inhibited black membership of many of the unions, and quite often, ‘birds of passage’ were used as strikebreakers. That is, people who intended to be in America for only a short period of time, and would take work wherever they could find it because their motive was to get some money together and then go back to the home country.

Using Private Detectives

Another weapon of the employers was to use private detectives to find out what the leadership was doing, to use court injunctions and, if necessary, to use state militiamen against strikers.

The owners of businesses could usually rely on the sympathy of judges and the sympathy of congressmen, because they came from the same social class and background, and there was a ready community of interest among the leading citizens of every town, who tended to be the forces of law and order and the employers.

This is a transcript from the video series A History of the United States, 2nd Edition. Watch it now, on Wondrium.

Homestead Strike of 1892

A steelworkers’ union was defeated in the Homestead Strike of 1892. At one of the Carnegie factories at Homestead, the factories were being managed by a man named Henry Clay Frick, while Carnegie himself was away in Scotland. There’d been a long negotiation between the union and the management, with the management refusing to recognize the union’s rights to negotiate, and finally the workers were locked out.

The employers then brought in boatloads of Pinkerton detectives who specialized in strikebreaking. The strikers fired at them from the riverside, and a pitched battle took place between the detectives on the boats and the strikers on the riverbanks.

Finally, the detectives on the boats surrendered, and were brought ashore and kicked out of town, as they were led through a jeering crowd of the strikers and their families, but after that, the state militia arrived in far too great a number for the strikers possibly to resist, and forced the workers to give way, and starved them out.

The strikers lasted another six months, but eventually led to the strike being completely bankrupted and its members being forced back to work without their union being recognized.

Pullman Strike of 1894

An even bigger conflict came with the Pullman Strike of 1894, just a couple of years later. By now, Eugene Debs, a trade unionist, who had been a very moderate leader of the firemen, had become radicalized by experiences like the Great Strike of 1877. He was now the head of an organization called the American Railroad Union, which was an attempt to get all the railroad workers into one union, where they’d have far more clout than they did so long as they were separated in the little craft brotherhoods. They went on strike.

The trigger of the strike was a labor dispute at the Pullman factory. George Pullman was the man who made luxury railroad cars, and Pullman, Illinois, was his model town for employees, so that if one worked in the factory, one also lived in Pullman houses, and one shopped at the company store, and so on. Pullman himself reduced wages, but didn’t reduce rents in the houses he was renting to the men, and didn’t reduce the prices being charged in his store, so the employees felt they were being squeezed from both directions, especially when some of them started to lose their jobs.

The employees went on strike, then, and Eugene Debs brought out the entire union in sympathetic strike with the Pullman workers.

Judicial Interventions

It was an enormously effective strike at first, because it paralyzed communications over the whole of the Midwest and the far West of the United States, but once again it was defeated by judicial interventions. Court injunctions specified that the strike must stop, and Debs and his colleagues, when they refused to obey the injunctions, were taken off to prison.

The case was appealed to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court upheld the railroad and upheld its use of court injunctions., and it said in its decision: “The strong arm of the national government may be put forth to brush away all obstructions to the freedom of interstate commerce, or the transportation of the mails.”

Debs himself was sentenced to six months in jail. While he was in prison, he studied Socialist literature, and he emerged from prison as a convinced Socialist, that is, believing that capitalism itself had to be destroyed. He became one of the founders of the American Socialist Party, and was a five-time presidential candidate for the American Socialists.

Common Questions about Trade Unions Clashing with Employers

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