Chapter 66: The Revolt of Labor

**Dave Broker** (0:06)
Quote, within my span of life have come inventions that have been revolutionizing in effect. Electricity, both for lighting and power, the telephone, the wireless, the submarine cable, the radio, the transcontinental railroad, aeroplane, electric street cars, internal combustion engine, cold storage, are a few of the changes that I have seen come. Methods of work, methods and agencies of communication, and facilities for travel have brought society so close together that merging of economic interests and activities has been an inevitable result. The consolidation came so gradually that many did not see the trend of development until some of the new trusts were exercising their newly found and rapacious powers.
The trust movement came with the development of quantity production. In their infancy, these gargantuan creatures were conscious only of their power and were unrestrained by ethics or experiences. They developed with ruthless disregard of competitors and without understanding or care for the human agents that were necessary in developing the network of creative force necessary to make the economic structure a going machine. The trusts and the large scale industries generally made the mistake of thinking they could treat employees as impersonally as they did material things. The corporation form of ownership had replaced the system of individual ownership and personal management. Expansion of credit revolutionized to methods of financing. The early trust seemed only a devouring monster for those without practical industrial experience.
That is from the 1925 autobiography of American labor leader Samuel Gompers. Born into a Jewish immigrant family in London's East End in 1850, Gompers emigrated to the United States as a teenager and took up work as a cigar maker in New York City. Almost immediately, he joined Local 15 of the Cigar Makers International Union. Not only did he learn his trade, he also learned about the political and economic radicalism of the trade union movement back in Europe. But Gompers was really never that sold on it. In the same paragraph in which he notes the quote-unquote ruthless disregard of modern corporations, he writes, quote, The change brought danger to the individual workers until they learned to protect their individual rights and opportunities through organized activity and groups. The trust was a part of this general movement to associated effort that is a distinctive feature of our present economic organization. The trade union movement is labor's constructive contribution to democratic regulation of large-scale production. I believe that industry can devise and operate economic principles of administration that will result in constructive control and continuous progress. So I hold that trusts should not be suppressed, but regulated and helped to develop constructive control. In the late 19th century, the labor movement was at a crossroads. And with so much economic change underway across so much of the planet, workers took different approaches to advancing their cause, In the spring of 1867, riots broke out in the French industrial city of Roubaix near the Belgian border. In several mills, the local French and Belgian workers were told they'd need to start manning two power looms at a time instead of one. Furious, the workers held demonstrations to protest the new policy. And those demonstrations turned violent. In the chaos, several mills were looted, the machines were smashed, and buildings were set ablaze. But by now, the ethos of the Luddites had largely become a thing of the past. In a letter to them, Parisian bronze workers scolded their Roubaix brothers for their actions. However justified your complaints, nothing can justify the destructive acts of which you are guilty. The machine, which is the tool you work with, should be sacred to you. Acts of violence such as these endanger your own cause and that of all other workers.
This decline of Luddism within the labor movement coincided with the rise of modern trade unionism. That same spring, a commission was set up in London to investigate the so-called Sheffield Outrages, an unsettling series of stories about violent coercion used by union steel workers against non-union steel workers during strikes. But this commission would also explore the organizational nature of trade unions. You see, Britain's High Court had recently determined that, while collective bargaining was legal, thanks to the 1824 law I told you about back in Chapter 42, trade unions still disrupted trade, and therefore, their legal formations were illegitimate. In other words, they had no legal basis to elect officers, collect dues, and create strike funds.
The commission was split, with a majority siding against the unions. But it was the recommendations issued by the commission's minority that were soon enacted. In 1871, the liberal government of Prime Minister William Gladstone passed a new Trade Union Act. It would be the first of several laws over the next few decades that provided the framework necessary for unions to organize, strike, and more. As a result, the UK became by far the most union-friendly country of the Second Industrial Revolution. Throughout the rest of the world, though, the labor movement struggled under hostile governments, uneven economic development, and stubborn employers. And in this increasingly globalized age of free trade and international migration, shout out Chapter 54, British workers could still feel the pain experienced by workers in foreign lands. If the costs of production were too high in Britain, because of unions driving up wages, merchants could simply import low-cost goods from union-hostile countries. And if that wasn't an option, if they relied too much on machinery and resources only available in Britain, capitalists could literally import non-union workers to conduct the labor. Known as blacklegs, these foreign scabs undercut the demands of British unions throughout the mid-19th century. Thus, like the forces of capital, the forces of labor would need to globalize. International solidarity was now urgently needed.