Trade unionism in North America had its beginnings in a transition during the late 18th century from a mutualist/dependent to a free wage-labour system. As journeymen artisans moved out of what has been called “economic clientage” to master craftsmen, they found their interests in conflict with those of their employers. Only through collective effort could workers enforce the list of “prices” they established for their work and defend their trades against cheap and diluted labour. The first identifiable labour strike dates from 1768, when journeymen tailors in New York City stopped work to resist a pay cut. Sustained labour organization began with the Federal Society of Journeymen Cordwainers (shoemakers) in Philadelphia in 1794. The first sign of a labour movement—that is, organizational activity exceeding the narrow sectional interests of particular crafts—appeared in Philadelphia, where the various craft bodies joined in 1827 to form the Mechanics’ Union of Trade Societies. In Canada, these developments were slower to emerge: the first craft locals appeared in Montreal in 1827 and in Toronto in 1832, and the earliest city central came only in 1871, with the formation of the Toronto Trades Assembly. The first national union of locals in a single trade to survive, the National Typographical Union, was formed in 1852 in the United States. Like other national unions that followed, it chartered locals in Canada as well; this led to its renaming in 1869 as the International Typographical Union—a designation that became common in North American unionism.

Rooted as it was in the preindustrial trades, this early trade unionism did not lose its essential craft character with the onset of industrialization. Mule spinners, molders, machinists, and iron puddlers and rollers were employing new skills, and they functioned in a factory context, but they had much the same collective concerns as did traditional craftsmen and fitted readily into the emergent trade-union structure. On the railroads, too, the key jobs were defined as operating “crafts.” Even with the quickening pace of industrialism, then, North American trade unionism in the 19th century was overwhelmingly a movement of skilled workers.

But job consciousness, powerful though it was, by no means constituted the sole, or even predominant, inspiration for collective activity. Historical research on working-class life has demonstrated that labour consciousness was a complex phenomenon, rooted in distinctive structures of culture, community, and ideology as well as in craft identity. American workers of the Jacksonian era adhered to a conception of artisan republicanism, which celebrated producerist values and the republican ideals of the American Revolution. Counter to this vision ran the corrosive impact of emergent industrial capitalism, which, in the view of the Philadelphia Workingmen’s Party, created “invidious distinctions [and] unjust and unnatural inequalities” by dividing Americans into “two distinct classes, the rich and the poor.” Beginning with workingmen’s parties in the 1830s, a series of labour-reform movements fought a running battle for “equal rights.” In the 1860s, this was the task of the National Labor Union and, after its decline, of the Knights of Labor. On their face, these reform movements seemed to cut athwart trade unionism, insofar as they aspired to the cooperative commonwealth rather than simply to a higher wage, appealed broadly to all “producers” rather than strictly to wage workers, and thought of themselves as broadly inclusive political and educational movements. But contemporaries saw no contradiction here: trade unions tended to workers’ day-to-day needs, labour reform to their higher hopes. While the two were accepted as strands of a single labour movement, however, it was well understood that they were strands that had to be kept operationally apart.

During the 1880s, that functional separation began to break down. The international craft unions, having by now emerged as the dominant element in the trade-union structure, became less tolerant of challenges to their jurisdictions and internal lines of authority. For its part, despite a robust labour-reform rhetoric, the Knights of Labor began to act increasingly like a rival trade-union movement, carrying on strikes and organizing workers along industrial rather than craft lines. When the Knights rejected a proposal reaffirming the historic separation of trade-union and labour-reform functions, the alarmed internationals joined in December 1886 and formed the American Federation of Labor (AFL). The immediate aim was to drive the Knights from the industrial field, and, thanks largely to the Knights’ own confusion and to employers’ counterattacks, this was speedily accomplished. But more important in the long run was the permanent stamp that the AFL made on the American labour movement. This was partly institutional: the AFL legitimized the emergent trade-union structure that gave preeminence to the rule of the internationals. But equally significant was the enunciation of a guiding labour philosophy—“pure and simple” unionism—under the aegis of Samuel Gompers and his circle of Marxist trade unionists. Labour reform was thenceforth denied any further role in the struggle of American workers. The weapons in that struggle were to be defined as economic and not political; the participants would be strictly wage workers organized along occupational lines; and the objective of trade unionism became exclusively the incremental achievement of higher wages and better working conditions.

In Canada these American events had very considerable consequences. Given the sparse settlement and small industrial base, Canadian unions found it difficult to build a national structure of their own. An attempt initiated by the Toronto Trades Assembly in 1873 soon failed. It was also natural, given the colonial (after 1867, dominion) ties to Britain, for Canadian workers to look to English unions, and at least two groups—the carpenters and engineers—in fact built up sizable Canadian memberships after 1850. But the much more compelling links were to the United States, partly because labour markets in many skilled trades ignored the national boundaries and partly because the American unions were the readiest source of institutional assistance. By the end of the 1880s, as many as half the organized workers in Canada were in locals affiliated to internationals with headquarters in the United States. And it was this segment of Canadian labour that was mainly responsible for forming, parallel to the AFL, the Trades and Labor Congress (TLC) in 1886.

For some years, the TLC followed its own bent. The Knights of Labor had been highly successful in Canada, notably in Quebec. After virtually disappearing from the United States in the early 1890s, the Knights remained a considerable force in Canada, and, although strictly excluded from the AFL, were made welcome in the TLC. As late as 1901, moreover, its president was proposing that the Canadian branches break their links with the internationals, form their own national unions, and turn the TLC into a wholly Canadian movement. But in 1902 just the opposite transpired. The TLC expelled the Knights and adopted the AFL principle of opposition to dual unionism, which meant that the Canadian branches of the internationals gained a virtual monopoly on trade-union representation in the TLC. It became, in effect, the Canadian wing of the American movement. Responding to Canadian political conditions, the TLC was somewhat more flexible than the AFL on issues of independent labour politics and state intervention, but, on the whole, American pure-and-simple unionism exerted the commanding influence on Canadian unionism in these years.

Only in Quebec did a very different tradition assert itself. Here, following a lockout of boot and shoe workers in 1900, the Roman Catholic church stepped in and, in accordance with the papal encyclical Rerum Novarum (1891), encouraged the unionization of Quebec workers. The result was a vigorous French Catholic movement, the Confédération des Travailleurs Catholiques du Canada, which stands as a unique instance of confessional unionism in North America. Only after World War II did Quebec unionism shed its links to the church and evolve into a secular movement.

Open full sized image

The June 1914 cover of The Masses, a socialist magazine, published in response to the Ludlow Massacre of April 1914, when 25 people were killed by the National Guard and others who attacked striking mine workers and their families in Colorado.

Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (LC-DIG-ds-10032)

In the American West, pure-and-simple unionism was challenged in 1905 by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). The IWW had two sources. One was the socialist left wing, which had concluded that the AFL could not be captured and made over into the necessary trade-union base for socialist electoral politics. The second was a western brand of working-class radicalism forged by a decade of industrial war in the western mining states. The two groups proved incompatible, and the IWW, dominated by radicals from the Western Federation of Miners, drove out the socialists and committed itself to a syndicalist version of class war, in which political action was excluded. Struggle would centre on direct industrial action and ultimately on the revolutionary general strike, and out of that would emerge a workers’ society organized on the basis of industrial unions. The IWW led a number of important strikes in the east between 1907 and 1913, but its main theatre of operations was among western workers, including Canadians, in metal mining, lumber, transportation, and agriculture. During World War I, however, the IWW was violently suppressed, and it never regained the organizational momentum of its peak years between 1914 and 1917.

The Canadian version of western syndicalism sprang into life in 1919, just as the IWW was expiring. This was the One Big Union (OBU), which had its roots in a postwar labour disaffection from conventional trade unionism that was especially pronounced in western Canada. Structured more along geographic than along the industrial-union lines of the IWW, the OBU had its moment of glory in the Winnipeg General Strike of 1919, and for a few years thereafter it virtually displaced the TLC as the dominant movement in the four western provinces. The OBU, despite its swift collapse, left behind a significant regional legacy: thereafter, the western provinces would persistently be the site of a more progressive, politically active brand of Canadian trade unionism.

The syndicalist challenge stemmed, to some degree, from the failing fortunes of pure-and-simple unionism in the early decades of the 20th century. The essence of that formulation had been to locate labour’s struggle firmly in the industrial arena. But the struggle for collective bargaining proved to be much harder than Gompers and other trade unionists had anticipated. Where competitive pressures were severe enough, as in bituminous coal mining, not even the most innovative and determined of union efforts at market control proved sufficient—hence the collapse of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) in the 1920s. Elsewhere, as in the metal-fabricating industries, the problem was the speed of technological innovation and, in particular, the perfection of mass-production methods, which undercut the role of craft workers. Scientific management, moreover, demanded strict supervisory control over the workplace and hence posed a profound threat to customary patterns of workers’ autonomy in the labour process. When an effort to find common ground in the Murray Hill agreement (1900) between the International Association of Machinists and the National Metal Trades Association failed within a year, the die was cast: a quarter-century of bitter industrial warfare ensued. Labour’s fortunes varied at different times and places, but the end result was unquestionably an arrested labour movement, with union penetration settling at roughly 10 percent of the nonagricultural labour force. As welfare capitalism took hold in the New Era of the 1920s, the more advanced sectors of the industrial economy seemed quite beyond the reach of the AFL.