Craft Unionism - Origins in The United States

Origins in The United States

The first unions established in the United States in the early nineteenth century tended, by nature of the industries in which their members worked, to be craft unions: shoemakers, cordwainers (shoemakers who work with cordovan leather) and typesetters all worked, as a rule, in small shops in which they had little contact with workers in other fields. Some of these early unions also came out of a guild tradition, in which skilled workmen often owned their own shops or, if they worked for another, had a good deal of control over how the work was done, which they policed by maintaining standards for admission into the trade, requiring entrants to go through an apprenticeship program controlled by the union, rather than the employer, and dictating the processes, tools, standards and pace of work. These traditions persisted into the twentieth century in fields such as printing, in which the International Typographical Union would enforce its own rules determining how work was done in union shops, and in the construction industry.

The concept of organizing a strong federation on the basis of craft evolved out of conflict between the Knights of Labor (KOL), which organized mass organizations of unskilled, semiskilled and skilled workers by territory, and the American Federation of Labor (AFL), which organized only skilled workers. The craft workers were capable of demanding more from their employers due to their skills, and therefore organized into stronger organizations pursuing narrower interests. The AFL was formed as a direct result of the perceived need by skilled workers to defend their individual craft organizations from poaching by the Knights of Labor. The Knights of Labor believed that skilled workers should dedicate their greater leverage to benefit all workers. Selig Perlman wrote in 1923 that this resulted in "a clash between the principle of solidarity of labor and that of trade separatism." The trade unions "declared that their purpose was 'to protect the skilled trades of America from being reduced to beggary'."

In 1901, the AFL issued a statement referred to as the Scranton Declaration, which asserted that unions were formed on the basis of the trade practiced by a group of skilled workers. The Scranton Declaration would be invoked – except in the case of powerful industrial unions that resisted, such as the United Mine Workers – to enforce craft autonomy as the cornerstone of the organization.

The principle of craft autonomy began to give way in many trades, however, with the advent of industrialization in the second quarter of the twentieth century. The most impressive example was in the textile industry, which created massive new factories staffed by unskilled workers that displaced the small scale and home workshops of weavers in New England. New industrial processes and markets also gave rise, however, to many small shops in which semiskilled and unskilled workers did a discrete portion of the work that a skilled worker might have done a decade earlier. The wholly new industry of ready-made clothes, as an example, replaced the workshops run by established master tailors with small operations where unskilled workers were "sweated" – a term that entered popular usage in the middle of the nineteenth century – to produce clothes for all classes of customers, from slaves to gentlemen. Gender and ethnicity also played a part in these new patterns of work: the cotton and woolen mills in New England hired primarily young unmarried girls, often straight from the farm, to tend their machines, while sweatshops most frequently exploited immigrant workers.

Those workers who could hold on to their skill and their control over work processes, such as carpenters, butchers and printers, resisted by forming craft unions. They not only extolled the dignity of work and the dignity of the master worker, but frequently defined themselves by what they were not: to that end, craft unions often developed rigid entrance requirements that excluded women, immigrants, African-Americans and other minority workers.