US.14 Describe working conditions in industries, including the use of labor by women and children. (C, E)
US.15 Analyze the rise of the labor movement, including its leaders, major tactics, and the response of management and the government: (C, E, H, P, TN) Samuel Gompers, Eugene Debs, Haymarket Affair, Pullman Strike, Coal Creek Labor Saga, Collective bargaining, Blacklisting, Open vs. closed shops.
10. (US14,15) Bad Working Conditions & the Labor Movement
a. Working Conditions for Women
b. Working Conditions for Children
c. Labor Leaders
d. Labor Tactics
e. Government Response
Though most people moved to the city with high hopes for a better life, many earned a paltry $1 to $1.50 for a ten-hour day. Many worked six days a week. An accident often meant loss of employment. Women and children joined immigrants to become a significant part of the labor force.
By 1900, factories employing more than a thousand people were common in industrial centers. The growth of industrialism led to an increase in the disparity of income and living conditions between the industrialists and the wage earners. The industrialists led a sumptuously lavish and opulent lifestyle, one reason this time period is referred to as the Gilded Age.
Labor unions, or organized labor, sought to improve unregulated working conditions. Conflicts between organized labor and management led to violent strikes.
Government did little to regulate unjust labor conditions, opting instead for a laissez-faire (no government interference) approach to big business.
The Coal Creek Labor Saga, also known as the Coal Creek War was an early 1890’s armed labor uprising in the southeastern United States that took place primarily in Anderson County, Tennessee.
This labor conflict ignited during 1891 when coal mine owners in the Coal Creek watershed began to remove and replace their company-employed, private coal miners then on the payroll with convict laborers leased out by the Tennessee state prison system.
These former wage-earning Coal Creek coal miners repeatedly attacked and burned both state prison stockades and mine properties, all while releasing hundreds of the state convict laborers from their bondage to the mine companies. Many of these same Coal Creek coal miners were also wounded or killed in small-arms skirmishes during the Coal Creek War, along with dozens of Tennessee state militia.
One historian describes the Coal Creek War as "one of the most dramatic and significant episodes in all American labor history."
The Coal Creek Saga was itself part of a greater labor struggle across Tennessee that was launched against the state government's controversial convict-leasing system, which allowed the state prison system to lease convict labor to mining companies (and other business enterprises) with the effect of suppressing employee wages in the open market across the state.
The outbreak of this labor conflict touched off a partisan media firestorm between the miners' supporters and detractors, and brought the issue of convict leasing to the public debate.
Although the Coal Creek War essentially ended with the arrests of hundreds of former company coal miners during 1892, the adverse exposure that this state conflict with private labor generated nationwide led to the downfall of Governor John P. Buchanan, and forced the Tennessee General Assembly to reconsider its state convict labor-leasing system.
The Tennessee state government later refused to renew its convict labor-lease contracts with private businesses upon the arrival at the 1896 expiration dates, making Tennessee one of the first states within the southern United States to end this controversial practice.
Inhumane working conditions caused needless tragedy in the deadly Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire. This sweatshop was located in the upper floors of a building in New York City and employed nearly 500 seamstresses, mainly Jewish and Italian immigrants, some as young as fourteen. One late afternoon in 1911, a fire erupted. The women panicked and fled to the fire escape. The owners did not maintain the fire escape and it broke under their weight, plunging the women to their deaths. Doors that would have allowed them to escape down the stairwells were locked. The owners later explained that the doors were kept locked so the women would not leave for breaks. More than 145 women fell, jumped, or were burned to death-one of the worst workplace disasters since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. After the tragedy, reformers lobbied even more extensively for workplace safety regulations.