Skilled Worker - History

History

In the northern area of the United States, craft unions may have served as the catalyst to ferment a strong solidarity in favor of skilled labor in the period of the Gilded Age (1865-1900).

In the early 1880s, the craft unions of skilled workers walked hand in hand with the Knights of Labor but the harmony did not last long and by 1885, the Knights' leadership became hostile to trade unions. The Knights argued that the specialization of industrialization had undermined the bargaining power of skilled labor. This was partly true in the 'eighties but it had not yet made obsolete the existence of craft unionism.

"...The impact of scientific management upon skilled workers should not be overstressed, especially in the period before World War I."

The period between 1901 and 1925 signals the rise and fall of the Socialist Party of America which depended on skilled workers. In 1906, with the publication of The Jungle, the most popular voice of socialism in the early 20th century, Upton Sinclair gave them ignorant "...Negroes and the lowest foreigners - Greeks, Roumanians, Sicilians and Slovaks" hell.

There was a divergence in status within the working class between skilled and unskilled labor due to the fall in prices of some products and the skilled workers' rising standard of living after the depression of 1929. Skilled workers were the heart of the labor movement before World War I but during the 1920s, they lost much of their enthusiasm and the movement suffered thereby.

In the 20th century, in Nazi Germany, the lower class was subdivided into agricultural workers, unskilled and semi-skilled workers, skilled craft workers, other skilled workers and domestic workers.

After the end of World War II, West Germany surpassed France in the employment of skilled labor needed at a time when industrialization was sweeping Europe at a fast pace. West Germany's preponderance in the field of education, the training of skilled workers in technical schools, was the main factor to outweigh the balance between the two countries. In the period between 1950 and 1970, the number of technicians and engineers in West Germany rose from 160,000 to approximately 570,000 by promoting skilled workers through the ranks so that those who were performing skilled labor in 1950 had already become technicians and engineers by 1970.

In the first decade of the 21st century, the average wage of a highly skilled machinist in the United States of America is $3,000 to $4,000 per month. In China, the average wage for a factory worker is $150 a month.