By Angie C. Marek By the turn of the 20th
century, the American workforce was verging on
disaster. The 1900 census showed that about 2
million children, some as young as 8, were toiling
long hours next to their adult counterparts. The
public was growing ever more outraged as it learned
of grim worlds behind factory doors. Upton
Sinclair's bestseller The Jungle, published
in 1906, highlighted the violent and filthy
conditions in Chicago's meatpacking plants. And
New York's Triangle Shirtwaist Co. became
synonymous with workplace danger when a fire in 1911
killed nearly 150 workers, mostly young women,
hopelessly locked inside.
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Joe Hill, an organizer
for the Industrial Workers of the World--"the
Wobblies"--captured the mood when he sang that
the only rewards a worker could hope for would come
in the afterlife:
You will eat, bye and bye
In that glorious land above the sky
Work and pray, live on hay
You'll
get pie in the sky when you die.
The sense of
looming crisis was only exacerbated by the growing
number of workers seduced by the promises of
socialism. The rhetoric of the Wobblies, in
particular, was so inflammatory that in 1918 the
government sentenced its leaders to prison for
disloyalty to the United States. And in 1912, for
the first time, rank-and-file workers overwhelmingly
endorsed a Socialist, Eugene Debs, for president. It
was small wonder that workers were driven to
desperation--although their labors fueled an economy
that grew by an astounding 43 percent in the 1920s,
their wages during the same period stayed virtually
flat.
Yet, efforts to organize yielded
disappointing--sometimes even violent--results.
Local politicians and industrial bosses routinely
called in Pinkerton detectives and the National
Guard to forcibly break up strikes. There were
nonviolent defeats, as well: In 1918, the Supreme
Court struck down the Keating-Owen Child Labor Act,
a protective law that had seemed unbeatable thanks
to widely distributed muckraking photographs of
Dickensian working conditions.
When a
reform-minded Franklin D. Roosevelt became president
in 1933, many workers believed the government had
finally gained a place on the factory floor. It had,
for Roosevelt agreed with academics who argued that
capitalism was self-defeating without some
government control. In 1933, the president signed
the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), which
called on industries to adopt "codes of fair
competition" that laid a floor under wages and
prices and put a ceiling over hours and effort.
Posters bearing the familiar eagle logo demonstrated
widespread compliance with the rules. But two years
later, with the act under fire from all sides, the
Supreme Court threw it out, ruling that it
improperly delegated legislative powers to the
executive branch.
Roosevelt, however, had no
intention of abandoning the workingman. In 1935, he
delivered a powerful pro-worker punch with the
National Labor Relations Act, a groundbreaking
measure that gave workers the right to collectively
bargain, select their own unions, strike, boycott,
and picket. The act also targeted a host of unfair
management practices, including the hiring of
industrial spies, maintaining company-dominated
unions, and threatening or firing employees seeking
to join unions. When the high court hinted that it
would attack the plan, Roosevelt responded by
threatening to pack the court with more activist
members. His strategy worked: The law stood, and to
this day, the five-member National Labor Relations
Board (NLRB) serves as a sort of grand referee,
adjudicating tens of thousands of management-worker
disputes each year.
