6.3 Labor Strives to Organize
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Government & Business
The new Working Class
Working Conditions
The Knights of Labor
The Great Upheaval
The Homestead & Pullman Strikes
Government & Business
• Gov’t placed high tariffs on imports helped American businesses.
• 1890 Sherman Antitrust Act
– Outlawed all monopolies and trusts.
New Working Class
• Demand for labor increased during
Industrial Revolution.
• Immigrants
• African Americans moved from the
South to the North for jobs
– The Great Migration
• Women and Children
• 1900, women accounted for 18% of workforce
• 1890 20% of children ages 10-15 worked.
Working Conditions
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Terrible conditions
12 hour shifts for children
Low wages
African American & immigrants worked for
lower wages
• Women & children half pay
• Long hours fatigue unsafe working
conditions
– 1881 30,000 Railroad workers killed/injured.
Knights of Labor
• (1869) union skilled & unskilled
workers
• 8 hour workday
• Regulation of child labor
• Equal pay for women
The Great Upheaval
• 1886 year of intense strikes & violent
labor confrontations
• WV RR Strike (1877)
• Haymarket Riot (Chicago)
– Police killed a striker
– Demonstrators met to protest and someone
threw a bomb that killed 7 police officers
• American Federation of Labor
– Union for skilled workers
Homestead & Pullman Strikes
• Carnegie Steel & Pullman Sleeping Car
factory
– Wage cuts
– Carnegie locked out workers
– Railroads shut down
– President Grover Cleveland steps in to end
strike US Mail.