Tramps and Trade Union Travelers by Moody Kim;

Author:Moody, Kim;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 3)
Published: 2019-10-09T16:00:00+00:00

The Perfect Storm, 1886–1887

The 1880s provided a climate in which labor organizations could grow, but also be undermined by the sheer volatility that underlay the economic growth of that decade. Measured decade from decade, the gross national product of the years 1879–1888 averaged 84 percent above the previous ten-year average in real terms, while the nominal amount of capital invested in manufacturing grew by 134 percent over the decade for the country as a whole, about four times the rate of the 1870s. In the Midwest, manufacturing capital grew by 183 percent in the 1880s, compared to 37 percent in the 1870s. As Commons et al. argued, “the factory system of production, for the first time, became general during the eighties,” along with the “introduction of machinery upon an unprecedented scale.”34 Furthermore, growth often meant geographic shifts. The number of gainfully employed workers rose by 31 percent across the country in the 1880s, while wageworkers in manufacturing increased by 74 percent nationally and 88 percent in the Midwest.35 Under twentieth-century conditions this might simply indicate a healthy climate in which unions could be expected to experience sustainable growth. But as we have seen, capital accumulation in the late nineteenth century was far more contradictory and employment more irregular even in the best of times. In this context, this expansion of industry provided the major “pull” factor in what became a “perfect storm” that undermined the Knights of Labor and limited unionization as a whole for a time. Table 1 shows the relative rates of change rendered as indexes to emphasize the speed of change for seven important measures of the perfect storm for the three decades of the Gilded Age, with the 1880s clearly standing out by all measures.

As table 1 shows, the rates of growth of accumulated capital both nominal and adjusted for inflation, the manufacturing workforce, the number of construction workers, and both measures of migration were far higher in the 1880s than either before or after. Only the rate of growth in the number of urban dwelling unit starts increased slightly in the 1890s despite the depression as people filled the growing cities of the Midwest and West, outstripping the growth of the workforce. The lag in the construction workforce is likely the result of the increase in prefabricated elements of new buildings and economies of scale from the growth in building size in the 1890s.36 Doucet and Weaver point out, for example, that machine-made bricks raised the productivity of bricklayers dramatically, while factory-made building parts, such as window and door frames, meant that “machined products moved jobs away from the construction site and concentrated them in wood-finishing mills.”37 In any case, the rapid growth of urban housing units and the construction workforce in the 1880s reflects a workforce on the move in the wake of spreading urban growth in that decade. Indeed, the level of interstate migration during the Gilded Age reached its highest point during the 1880s, with a total of 3.5 million people crossing state lines between the 1880 and 1890 censuses, two-thirds of them moving to the Midwest or West.

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