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Y319: Civil Rights in the USA 1865–1992

Trade Union and Labour Rights: the World Wars, the New Deal and the Reagan era

  • 3 things to know
  • Unit group 3

Overview

Recall questions on the IWW, the Clayton Act, the First World War and the 1920s, New Deal labour law and the CIO, the Second World War, Taft-Hartley, the 1960s, Cesar Chavez and the Reagan era.

What you need to know

Answer each one before you reveal it.

Your recallNot started
Numbers

What kind of organisation was the Industrial Workers of the World?

Who and when

What did organised labour gain from the Clayton Act of 1914, and why was the gain limited?

Evaluation

Why did unions lose ground in the 1920s?

Questions from this subtopic

Each one with the model answer underneath.

  1. 1

    What kind of organisation was the Industrial Workers of the World?

    Model answer

    Founded in 1905 and led by figures such as Bill Haywood, the Wobblies were revolutionary syndicalists who rejected contracts and wage bargaining, aimed at One Big Union of all workers including migrants and the unskilled, and won a celebrated textile strike at Lawrence in 1912 before wartime prosecutions destroyed them.

  2. 2

    What did organised labour gain from the Clayton Act of 1914, and why was the gain limited?

    Model answer

    The Act declared that human labour is not an article of commerce and appeared to exempt unions from antitrust prosecution, which Gompers hailed as labour's charter, but the courts read the exemption narrowly and continued to grant injunctions against strikes and boycotts through the 1920s.

  3. 3

    How did the First World War affect union and labour rights?

    Model answer

    Labour shortages and the need for uninterrupted production gave unions leverage, and the National War Labor Board of 1918 conceded the right to organise, the eight-hour day and equal pay for women in exchange for no-strike pledges, lifting AFL membership from about two million in 1914 to about four million by 1920, with total union membership passing five million.

  4. 4

    Why did unions lose ground in the 1920s?

    Model answer

    The failed strike wave of 1919 and the Red Scare let employers brand unionism as Bolshevik; the open-shop American Plan, yellow-dog contracts, company unions and welfare capitalism spread; hostile courts issued injunctions freely; and prosperity plus falling immigration weakened the case for organising, so membership fell to about three and a half million by 1929.

  5. 5

    Which New Deal measures transformed union rights, and what did each do?

    Model answer

    Section 7(a) of the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933 first recognised the right to organise but was unenforceable and fell with the Act in 1935; the Wagner Act of the same year created the National Labor Relations Board to run recognition elections and outlaw unfair employer practices; and the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 set a national minimum wage, a forty-hour week and limits on child labour.

  6. 6

    How did the CIO change American unionism in the later 1930s?

    Model answer

    Breaking from the AFL's craft tradition, the CIO organised entire mass-production industries regardless of skill or race; the Flint sit-down strike of 1936 to 1937 forced General Motors to recognise the United Automobile Workers, US Steel conceded without a fight in 1937, and total union membership roughly trebled by 1940.

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