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Labor Strikes

Labor strikes in wartime are as old as the United States. American industrialization began following the War of 1812, and by 1880 America was the world's premier industrial power. Its “labor wars” were also the fiercest on Earth. Government intervention during the two world wars finally brought these bloody labor conflicts to an end, and labor–management relations became domesticated.

Early Conflicts

From the founding of Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607, America has been characterized by violent clashes between the haves and have-nots. But the colonies had no labor strikes, as we know them; members of the Journeymen Printers Union struck against their local shops in New York City in 1776, but this was an anomaly, because America was not yet an industrial society. The Industrial Revolution began in America around 1820 and an industrial working class (or proletariat) began to form. Even so, class conflicts tended to take the forms of political action, producer and consumer cooperatives, demonstrations by the unemployed, and the creation of the world's first workingmen's political parties, rather than labor strikes.

As the world's first modern industrial war, the Civil War was a great stimulus to American industry. By the war's end, labor, which had begun to organize into municipal and regional labor unions, had become a newly powerful cultural and political force. Indeed, the peak of union membership in the 19th century came in the war year of 1864, which witnessed both the largest percentage of the workforce unionized as well as the largest union membership in raw numbers.

The fast pace of industrialization continued after the war. By 1870 America produced one-third of the world's coal, iron, and steel, with nonagricultural workers accounting for just under half of the total workforce. The 1870s also brought the nation's first business empires: the railroads. Along with them came the rise of the corporation, necessary to generate the large sums needed to finance these huge industrial enterprises. But as corporations grew and matured, so did the size of the industrial proletariat and the labor movement. Coupled with the government's laissez-faire (“hands-off”) stance toward the economy at that time, this was a recipe for conflict. Large scale, often violent, labor strikes took place throughout the latter half of the 19th century. The summer of 1877 was a watershed, as general strikes involving tens of thousands of workers brought the nation to a virtual standstill.

World War I

As America entered World War I in 1917, a massive strike wave engulfed the country. Widespread class warfare could not continue if the nation's economy was to be efficiently mobilized for the war effort. Therefore, for the first time, the federal government intervened in both the management of the economy and in labor–management relations. This established the precedent for government intervention in the economy and in labor-management disputes, which became the pattern for the rest of the 20th century.

Even before America's entrance into the war, supplying the Allied war effort had increased industrial production. This industrial expansion—along with the military draft, initiated in May 1917—created widespread labor shortages, which greatly benefited labor organizations. Older unions grew and new ones were formed. Between 1914 and 1920 union membership grew to more than five million, an increase of 70 percent, accounting for almost 20 percent of the total nonagricultural workforce.

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