rise of labor unions
In the colonial period, labor was in different forms. It included slave, free, agricultural, skilled, bonded, and artisanal labor. Among the free people, the majority of them were self-employed either as independent farmers, artisans, or urban trade retailers or professionals. Among the American colonies, there include sea cities that required a lot of labor to be maintained. Therefore, there were day to day laborers and hired craftsmen who were paid in wages for their job. The skilled craftsmen set up retail shops and employed journeymen who worked for wages and apprenticeship to gain the skills of the crafts. With the increased demand for more labor in the new land, the potential employees were the enslaved Africans and bonded servants. Since the African slaves were considered property, slave labor became popular since the slave children inherited their parents’ status. With slave labor being more advantageous than the indentured labor, it led to more merchants and the prosperous landowners to turn to the slave labor business. The indentured servants were bound in contracts for seven years of services then they were given something small by their masters during their departure to help with their start over. Some of them bought small farms while others continued with their craftsmen’s work. They started the rural group of poor whites. In the colonial labor force, there were also free workers such as smiths, coopers, tailors, printers, and glaziers, less-skilled workers like carters and waterproof workers.
In the early nineteenth century, there was a rise of labor unions that started due to the economic transformation that happened because of the merchant capitalists who began the wholesale trade basis from a retail basis. In the colonial period, the master workmen used journeymen and apprentices to work on joint projects and paid them in wages. Both the masters and the journeymen worked in the interest of preserving the standards of their crafts, protecting themselves from the unnecessary competition, and retaining their price lists. The labor unions started as a result of the journeymen wanting protection against the control of the trade masters. They felt the need to join together against their employers. At the beginning of the 19th century, these merchants and artisans used the method of printers and shoemakers of forming societies whose purpose was to guard their interest against the ruses of their employers and ensure they got the right compensation for their labor. The labor unions suffered whenever there was a scarcity of jobs and depression, which forced each worker to look after their interest. These unions later flourished from 1800 to 1819, which was a period for prosperity. The unions’ members gained productive bargaining powers for their attention due to the risen demand for workers.
In the current era, workers have both similar and different issues like the wage workers from the early nineteenth century. The wage workers in the colonial period used unions that helped protect their interests and express their differences. Like today, these unions used strikes and other stoppages to represent the workers’ views. In these unions both early and today, wagers demand an increase in salaries and better working conditions. The first labor unions used the concept of labor, which adopted social equality and honest work of equal treatment with respect by employers. Today the unions use the idea of coming together to negotiate their wages, working conditions, and exercise their freedom.