The harsh facts of the hour, however, soon began to call for united action.The cities were expanding with such eager haste that proper housing conditions were overlooked.Workingmen were obliged to live in wretched structures.Moreover, human beings were still levied on for debt and imprisoned for default of payment.Children of less than sixteen years of age were working twelve or more hours a day, and if they received any education at all, it was usually in schools charitably called "ragged schools"or "poor schools," or "pauper schools." There was no adequate redress for the mechanic if his wages were in default, for lien laws had not yet found their way into the statute books.Militia service was oppressive, permitting only the rich to buy exemption.It was still considered an unlawful conspiracy to act in unison for an increase in pay or a lessening of working hours.
By 1840 the pay of unskilled labor had dropped to about seventy-five cents a day in the overcrowded cities, and in the winter, in either city or country, many unskilled workers were glad to work for merely their board.The lot of women workers was especially pitiful.A seamstress by hard toil, working fifteen hours a day might stitch enough shirts to earn from seventy-two cents to a dollar and twelve cents a week.Skilled labor, while faring better in wages, shared with the unskilled in the universal working day which lasted from sun to sun.Such in brief were the conditions that brought home to the laboring masses that homogeneous consciousness which alone makes a group powerful in a democracy.
The movement can most clearly be discerned in the cities.
Philadelphia claims precedence as the home of the first Trades'
Union.The master cordwainers had organized a society in 1792, and their journeymen had followed suit two years later.The experiences and vicissitudes of these shoemakers furnished a useful lesson to other tradesmen, many of whom were organized into unions.But they were isolated organizations, each one fighting its own battles.In 1897 the Mechanics' Union of Trade Associations was formed.Of its significance John R.Commons says:
England is considered the home of trade-unionism, but the distinction belongs to Philadelphia....The first trades' union in England was that of Manchester, organized in 1829, although there seems to have been an attempt to organize one in 1824.But the first one in America was the "Mechanics' Union of Trade Associations," organized in Philadelphia in 1827, two years earlier.The name came from Manchester, but the thing from Philadelphia.Neither union lasted long.The Manchester union lived two years, and the Philadelphia union one year.But the Manchester union died and the Philadelphia union metamorphosed into politics.Here again Philadelphia was the pioneer, for it called into being the first labor party.Not only this, but through the Mechanics' Union Philadelphia started probably the first wage-earners' paper ever published--the 'Mechanics Free Press'--antedating, in January, 1828, the first similar journal in England by two years.** "Labor Organization and Labor Politics," 1827-37; in the "Quarterly Journal of Economics," February, 1907.
The union had its inception in the first general building strike called in America.In the summer of 1827 the carpenters struck for a ten-hour day.They were soon joined by the bricklayers, painters, and glaziers, and members of other trades.But the strike failed of its immediate object.A second effort to combine the various trades into one organization was made in 1833, when the Trades' Union of the City and County of Philadelphia, was formed.Three years later this union embraced some fifty societies with over ten thousand members.In June, 1835, this organization undertook what was probably the first successful general strike in America.It began among the cordwainers, spread to the workers in the building trades, and was presently joined in by cigarmakers, carters, saddlers and harness makers, smiths, plumbers, bakers, printers, and even by the unskilled workers on the docks.The strikers' demand for a ten-hour day received a great deal of support from the influential men in the community.
After a mass meeting of citizens had adopted resolutions endorsing the demands of the union, the city council agreed to a ten-hour day for all municipal employees.
In 1833 the carpenters of New York City struck for an increase in wages.They were receiving a dollar thirty-seven and a half cents a day; they asked for a dollar and a half.They obtained the support of other workers, notably the tailors, printers, brushmakers, tobacconists, and masons, and succeeded in winning their strike in one month.The printers, who have always been alert and active in New York City, elated by the success of this coordinate effort, sent out a circular calling for a general convention of all the trades societies of the city.After a preliminary meeting in July, a mass meeting was held in December, at which there were present about four thousand persons representing twenty-one societies.The outcome of the meeting was the organization of the General Trades' Union of New York City.
It happened in the following year that Ely Moore of the Typographical Association and the first president of the new union, a powerful orator and a sagacious organizer, was elected to Congress on the Jackson ticket.He was backed by Tammany Hall, always on the alert for winners, and was supported by the mechanics, artisans, and workingmen.He was the first man to take his seat in Washington as the avowed representative of labor.
The movement for a ten-hour day was now in full swing, and the years 1834-7 were full of strikes.The most spectacular of these struggles was the strike of the tailors of New York in 1836, in the course of which twenty strikers were arrested for conspiracy.
