Four major trends—loss of control over the workplace, labor conflict, rapid geographic mobility, and increasing diversity— shaped the development of American labor during the last third of the 19th century. In 1870 skilled artisans working in small shops in which they exerted a great deal of control over the productive process dominated the American industrial landscape. But the reduction of skills, already well underway, combined with mechanization to transform the shops into large impersonal factories. Diminution of skills began with the subdivision of a process into minute tasks and assigning one person to each task. At some point the reduction procedure suggested a mechanical means of replacing or supplementing human effort. The machines, mostly driven by steam, but increasingly by electricity from the late 1880s, were grouped into large factories. By 1899 two-fifths of the 512,191 industrial establishments in the United States were factories.
Mechanization dramatically increased per capita productivity; the average worker in the 1890s produced twice as much as his or her counterpart in the 1860s. But the worker lost control over the job in the factory. The machine, not the employee, set the pace of work. Deprived of the knowledge of how the productive process worked, the unskilled worker became dependent upon instructions from management. It became apparent that just as machines could be redesigned to increase efficiency, so could the worker. Frederick W. Taylor, the father of “modern management,” began his scientific analysis of work behavior at the Midvale Steel Company during the 1880s. Through his and the efforts of others, the term human engineering, with all its questionable implications, came into vogue.
As laborers became viewed as cogs in a machine they lost their ability to determine their income. The diminution of skills rendered apprenticeship obsolete. But apprenticeship was more than an educational system that taught the novice the mysteries of a craft: It was the gate used by artisans to control entry into the job market. Moreover, workers had only their time to sell as demand for their skills declined. Without any real bargaining power in a highly competitive market, the individual worker was at the mercy of the employer.
Workers joined unions to improve their bargaining power and used the strike to enforce their demands. The number of strikes per year, of course, varied, but the pronounced trend in the Gilded Age was toward more strikes involving more people and lasting a longer period of time. There were twice as many strikes in 1895 as in 1893. In 1896 a total of 183,813 workers went on strike. Three years later, 308,267 strikers walked the picket line. Labor-management disputes often degenerated into armed conflict, as in the Homestead Strike. Reprisals followed strikes as employers blacklisted or identified strike leaders as unsuitable employees, forcing many to leave their communities.
Geographic mobility rates soared as workers, suffering from unemployment or looking for better jobs, moved from town to town. Waltham, Massachusetts, and Hazleton,
Pennsylvania, illustrate the rapid population changes that most American communities experienced during the era: Only 17 percent of adult males living in Waltham in 1870 resided in that city in 1890. Less than half the people residing in Hazleton, Pennsylvania, in 1884 were living there in 1890. The out-migration in both cities did not indicate a population loss. Waltham’s population increased from 9,065 to 11,512 between 1870 and 1890, while Hazleton’s population doubled between 1880 and 1890.
IMMIGRATION fueled a large part of the population growth. More than 9 million people immigrated to the United States between 1870 and 1890. The ethnic composition of the immigrants also changed. Prior to 1870 most immigrants were from northern Europe. After 1870, however, people from eastern and southern Europe began to arrive in increasing numbers. Only 55,759 Italians came to America during the 1870s, for example, but 651,893 made the trip between 1891 and 1900.
American workers feared the “new immigrants” as cheap labor and potential strike breakers. Trade unions, dismissing them as unorganizable, sought to restrict immigration or drive them out of their job jurisdictions. In 1897 the United Mine Workers of America lobbied successfully for a law (later declared unconstitutional) that taxed anthracite coal mine operators for every alien they hired. Ethnic prejudice against Slavic, Jewish, and Italian immigrants helped taint all industrial workers as inferior and, perhaps, un-American. Racism also victimized African-American industrial workers. Women who were entering the workforce in increasing numbers also suffered wage discrimination.
Further reading: Melvyn Dubofsky, Industrialism and the American Worker, 1865-1920, 3d ed.(Wheeling Ill.: Harlan Davidson, 1996).
—Harold W. Aurand
World History
