IN THE development of the labor movement in New York State, a cyclical pattern, begun about 1800, has repeated itself down to the present: organization and protest, collective action resulting in political pressure, then a period of disintegration and stagnation, and then again a resurgence of activity.
As a rule the initiative was taken in New York City, with reverberations soon shaking the upstate industrial towns. In 1822 the New York City hatmakers, who had organized in 1819, struck for higher wages and won; and as a result, hatmakers in Schenectady doing piecework received the almost unbelievable wage of $10 a week. In 1829 the Working Men’s Party, known as ‘Workies,’ was organized in New York City, and the movement rapidly spread upstate. The mechanics and workingmen of Albany held a preliminary meeting in February 1830; Troy followed on March 24, and a little later an address was issued ‘To the Journeymen Mechanics and Other Young Workingmen of the County of Rensselaer.’ In Rochester, Utica, Syracuse, and other smaller places similar measures were taken and candidates were nominated for town and village offices.
The first State convention of the new party met in the courthouse at Salina (Syracuse) on August 25, 1830, with 78 delegates. The principal issues were the ten-hour day, a universal system of education, abolition of imprisonment for debt, and a mechanics’ lien law. The convention nominated General Erastus Root for governor and General Nathaniel Pitcher for lieutenant governor, both old-line politicians, who betrayed the workers by withdrawing two weeks before election. The party was split by internal dissension on religious, racial, and intellectual questions; the depression of 1832–7 completed the disintegration, and labor activity returned to ‘craft’ action. A number of important gains, however, were made: better educational advantages for workers’ children, abolition of imprisonment for debt, reform of the militia system, and in some industries better working conditions.
In 1840 President Martin Van Buren, with the aim, so often expressed since, of setting an example for private industry, proclaimed that ten hours a day should be the maximum on all public works. By that time canal and railroad construction had been responsible for increasing the average day’s wages of common labor to 75¢ and $1.25.
After 1840 labor was diverted from its proper concern with wages, hours, and working conditions by many indirect issues: land reforms—with the slogan ‘vote yourself a farm,’ the gold rush, the Mexican War, the abolition of slavery, and such Utopian experiments as Fourierism and the Oneida Community. But after the middle of the century collective action started on the upgrade again. The New York Printers’ Union was formed in 1850; in 1852 it became part of the National Typographical Union, which issued a charter to the Albany local on May 6, 1862, and became the International Typographical Union in 1869. The Typographical Union No.12, which at one time reached a maximum enrollment of 26,000 members, was organized in Rochester in 1859. In the same year the iron molders of Dutchess County were unionized. One of the oldest local unions in Schenectady County, also a molders’ union, was established in 1860. Local clearing houses known as ‘trades assemblies’ were formed in industrial centers, principally as co-ordinating and advisory agencies with no power to declare strikes. The New York State Trades Assembly, later the Workingmen’s Assembly of the State of New York, was organized on February 26, 1865. In the 1868 convention women appeared for the first time as delegates, and Kate Mullaney of the Laundry Workers’ Union of Troy was appointed assistant secretary and national organizer.
The Knights of Labor, organized in Philadelphia in 1869, grew in New York State until in 1886 it numbered 700,000 members with local assemblies in all the major industrial centers. Paralleling this movement, and in many cases co-operating with it, were farmers’ organizations, like the Patrons of Husbandry. The fact that one element in the Knights of Labor advocated violence aroused widespread opposition, and after it lost a number of major strikes the organization began to split and disintegrate. The confusion resulted in a return to craft unionism under the guidance of the ‘pure and simple’ philosophy of Samuel Gompers as expressed in the American Federation of Labor.
But the mass agitation of the Knights of Labor stirred up the State to the job of enforcing existing laws and adding new ones. The truancy law (1852) and the compulsory education law (1874) had little effect on child labor because no provision was made for enforcement; the same weakness existed in the eight-hour-day law (1867, 1870). But the 1870 amendment to the statute on conspiracy exempting trade union efforts to raise wages was a real gain for the labor movement. The State bureau of labor statistics was established in 1883. In 1886 the legislature passed an act prohibiting the employment of children under 13 in factories and limiting factory employment of minors to 60 hours a week, and creating the office of factory inspector to enforce these provisions. In the same year the legislature established a board of mediation and arbitration, the first such board in the United States. The fire in the Triangle shirtwaist factory in New York City in 1010, which cost the lives of 143 workers, mostly girls, aroused such public indignation that a State factory investigating commission was appointed, with Robert F. Wagner, Alfred E. Smith, and Samuel Gompers among its members; its 13-volume report, published in 1915, was responsible for the enactment of rigid standards of factory construction and inspection and the creation of the State Industrial Commission.
At a convention in Niagara Falls in 1910, the Workingmen’s Federation of the State of New York became the New York State Federation of Labor. Activities upstate were slowed up during the World War, but the early twenties were marked by an epidemic of strikes for higher wages and union recognition. These were the issues of the shoe workers’ strike in Rochester in 1922, supported by the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, which had established itself in that city as well as in New York on a collective bargaining basis. Other strikes occurred in the knitting industry and among streetcar workers. Most of these strikes were broken and the unions were beaten, and it required only the prosperity of the later twenties to stagnate the labor movement upstate almost completely.
The depression of 1930, however, brought a resurgence, stimulated by the National Labor Relations Act and the growth of the Congress of Industrial Organizations. As elsewhere, labor was on the march in Rochester, Syracuse, Schenectady, Amsterdam, Newburgh, and other upstate industrial centers. The conflict with the CIO was bitter and union success was gradual. The diversity of reaction to the Wagner Act is illustrated by two extreme cases: the General Electric Company plant in Schenectady, which after a Labor Board election recognized the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers union as the exclusive bargaining agency of its employees; and the Remington Rand plants in Syracuse and Ilion, which fought a last-ditch fight against the decisions of the Board.
Again New York State has reached the phase in the labor movement when concentration upon organizational and strike activity passes to the political stage. In New York City the American Labor Party has become a determining factor in political campaigns, and upstate it has centers in Albany, Schenectady, Rochester, Buffalo, and Syracuse. The workers realize that great strides have been made in the position of labor during the 1930’s, and that in order to fix and protect these gains they must become a power in the legislature and clinch their position with legislative support.
From its beginning as a statistical bureau in 1883, the State Department of Labor has grown into an organization of 14 major divisions and more than 1,500 employees. Its activities, reflecting recent advances in labor legislation, include the fields of workmen’s compensation and insurance, industrial codes, industrial hygiene, the State Labor Relations Board, mediation, placement and unemployment insurance, women in industry and minimum wage, and the prevailing rate of wages on public works.
