Unions and Immigrant Workers

As the American economy grew, and businesses became more profitable, workers began to band together and "unionize" (create "unions"). A union is a group of workers at a factory or business who join together in order to negotiate better wages and working conditions. They acquire power by banding together, and they threaten to strike if the owner does not give in to their demands. In the early 1800s there were no unions and no strikes, but by the late 1800s workers began to see that they could increase their wages and improve their conditions by forming unions and threatening to strike. Today, Wal-Mart does everything it can to keep its workers from unionizing, and union organizations despise it for that reason.

Factory owners responded by hiring Chinese workers at lower wages, and unions objected to that. Factory owners would also import Chinese workers to "break a strike," and keep the factory operating despite the refusal of the regular employees to work. So quickly the unions became opposed to immigration from China.

From 1877 to 1880, the Workingmen's Party developed for ordinary workers. It was socialistic (against capitalism) and opposed to immigration from China. Its leader was Dennis Kearney, who was actually imprisoned for his provocative speeches. (Today the broad interpretation of the First Amendment prohibits such imprisonments.)

In 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act was enacted as a culmination of growing opposition to Chinese immigrants, who were thought to lower wages for workers. This Act banned the Chinese from immigrating to the United States, and was not repealed until 1943 when America sought Chinese cooperation in the war against Japan.

Some cities passed laws to frustrate efforts by Chinese to operate businesses in competition with Americans. San Francisco, for example, passed a law requiring laundries to be in only expensive stone or brick buildings, which made it more difficult for the Chinese to open laundry businesses. But Chinese Americans challenged that law and took it to the U.S. Supreme Court, which invalidated the law and gave the victory to the Chinese immigrants in Yick Wo v. Hopkins (1886).

In 1886, Samuel Gompers formed the American Federation of Labor (AFL) in order to demand limiting the workday to 8 hours and stop employers who required longer workdays. Initially this was a non-political organization, not aligned with either political party. By 1901 it had 1 million members. The Knights of Labor, another labor group in the 1880s, had 700,000 members at that time. So these labor groups were quite large.

In 1886, workers at the McCormick Harvesting Machine Co. in Chicago began a strike in the hopes of shortening the workday to 8 hours. The company tried to break the strike by using new workers, and police were called in to protect the new workers. A fight broke out and one person was killed.

Anarchists were anti-civilization extremists who sided with the unions, and the anarchists planned a large rally the next day to protest the alleged police brutality. They expected 20,000 to show up at the public Haymarket Square in Chicago, but actually only 1500 to 2000 attended, with the police there also. At one point a protester threw a pipe bomb at the policemen, and its explosion killed seven policemen and injured more than 60 others. The police then fired into the crowd, and killed four.

Eight anarchists were tried for conspiracy to commit murder; seven were convicted, and four were hanged in November 1887. This was a huge embarrassment for the union movement, which did include many socialists and anarchists. It caused a delay in acceptance of the eight-hour workday, and many workers left the Knights of Labor to join the more moderate American Federation of Labor.^[5]

Despite the fact that radicals killed policemen in the Haymarket Square riots, in 1969 radicals (including Barack Obama's friend Bill Ayers) detonated a bomb to destroy a statute honoring the fallen policemen. The mayor of Chicago correctly criticized it as an attack on law and order.^[6]

Another violent conflict involving striking workers occurred near Pittsburgh in 1892, called the Homestead Strike. Guards hired by wealthy businessman Andrew Carnegie suppressed a strike by workers, and ten were killed in the conflict.

The most aggressive leader of the labor movement was Eugene V. Debs, who headed the American Railway Union (railroad workers). Debs was jailed for leading strike against Pullman railroad cars in 1894 over wages. In 1895, in a case entitled "In re Debs," the U.S. Supreme Court upheld judicial power to prohibit strikes against railroads, and upheld the power of courts to jail those who disobey court orders and engage in strikes anyway (as Debs had).

Debate: Are Unions a Good Thing?