Greater Gotham: A History of New York City from 1898 to 1919 (The History of NYC Series) by Mike Wallace

Author:Mike Wallace [Wallace, Mike]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
ISBN: 9780199911462
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2017-09-04T04:00:00+00:00

Bang the Bell, Jack, I’m on Board

Such successes were more the rule than the exception during the merger wave years of 1898–1904, as skilled workers parlayed their advantageous position into union shop contracts. With union membership a passport to higher wages, shorter hours, and better working conditions, craftsmen surged into the many unions chartered by the American Federation of Labor. Nationally, AFL membership leapt from 250,000 in 1897 to over 2,000,000 in 1904. In Greater New York, the number of union members went from 125,429 in 1898 to 254,719 in 1904.4

A union card wrought demonstrable improvements in a skilled worker’s standard of living. His pay packet allowed him to move to better housing in a better neighborhood, provide his family with more food and clothing, buy a small insurance policy, and perhaps rent a summer cottage. His shorter hours meant more leisure time in which to enjoy Gotham’s multiplying popular entertainments.

These attainments were precarious. Craftsmen were vulnerable to the vagaries of the business cycle, or to seasonal fluctuations, or to accident, illness, and death, any of which could diminish or eliminate the breadwinner’s earnings, plunging his family back down the social slope, their slide unchecked by any safety net. These were old familiar threats.

And there were new vulnerabilities, ones that stemmed from the inability or unwillingness of unions and their federations to confront some of the era’s central dynamics: the merger movement and the corporatization of the economy; the attendant growth of factories; the deskilling of work via new technologies that enabled employers in many branches of industry to replace skilled craftsmen with semi- or unskilled workers; the tidal flow of immigration that dramatically increased the availability of such semi- or unskilled workers; and the political mobilization of capital, large and small, to blunt or halt the unionization drive.

In responding to these dynamics, union leaders from AFL president Samuel Gompers on down basically opted for a purely defensive strategy—to circle the wagons, protect what they’d won, and avoid reaching out to new constituencies. The approach and its consequences are evident in the history of Gompers’s own union, the Cigar Makers International Union (CMIU) which Gompers had joined in 1864, its founding year, at the age of 14.

There were then but two locals, his own No. 15, the English-language one, and Local No. 10, for German-speakers; both were limited to skilled hand rollers. The 1870s brought the introduction of the cigar mold, a mechanical press that enabled manufacturers to break down the skilled craft into two stages, bunch making and rolling, the first of which was assigned to unskilled recent Bohemian immigrants who worked out of tenement apartments for lower wages. In 1874 Gompers took the lead in organizing a new union, more socialist minded, and more willing to try organizing the tenement workers; it joined the CMIU as Local No. 144. A disastrous strike in 1877 led him to retreat to a craftsmen-only stance. Tenement workers were barred; women and the semiskilled were excluded in practice by high dues. In

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