Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions of the United States and Canada (FOTLU)

United States and Canada 1881

Synopsis

The Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions of the United States and Canada (FOTLU) was the predecessor of the American Federation of Labor (AFL), which was proclaimed in 1886. FOTLU replaced the National Labor Union (1866-1872), which had been pulled apart by the lure of divergent electoral strategies. FOTLU veered away from electoralism and sought more efficient organization and a more narrow focus than the more expansive labor reform group, the Knights of Labor. There were both socialists and nonsocialists among FOTLU's founding members, yet the Federation as a whole helped to consolidate the trend toward an increasingly nonradical "pure and simple" unionism in the U.S. labor movement.

Timeline

• 1861: Serfs in Russia are emancipated.
• 1871: U.S. troops in the West begin fighting the Apache nation.
• 1874: Gold is discovered in the Black Hills of South Dakota.
• 1879: F. W. Woolworth opens his first department store, in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
• 1881: President James A. Garfield is assassinated in a Washington, D.C., railway station by Charles J. Guiteau.
• 1881: In a shootout at the O.K. Corral outside Tombstone, Arizona, Wyatt, Virgil, and Morgan Earp, along with "Doc" Holliday, kill Billy Clanton, Frank McLowry, and Tom McLowry. This breaks up a gang headed by Clanton's brother Ike, who flees Tombstone. The towns-people, however, suspect the Earps and Holliday of murder. During the same year, Sheriff Pat Garrett shoots notorious criminal William Bonney, a.k.a. Billy the Kid, in Fort Sumner, New Mexico.
• 1881: Louis Pasteur develops a method for inoculation against anthrax.
• 1881: U.S. author Helen Hunt Jackson publishes A Century of Dishonor, which discusses government mistreatment of Indian tribes. In the following year, Jackson is appointed to the position of special commissioner to investigate conditions among the Mission Indians of California.
• 1881: The first major planned "company town," Pullman, Illinois, outside Chicago, is created.
• 1883: Foundation of the League of Struggle for the Emancipation of Labor by Marxist political philosopher Georgi Valentinovich Plekhanov marks the formal start of Russia's labor movement. Change still lies far in the future for Russia, however: tellingly, Plekhanov launches the movement in Switzerland.
• 1887: John Emerich Edward Dalbert-Acton, a leader of the opposition to the papal dogma of infallibility, observes, in a letter to Cambridge University professor Mandell Creighton, that "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely."
• 1891: French troops open fire on workers during a 1 May demonstration at Fourmies, where employees of the Sans Pareille factory are striking for an eight-hour day. Nine people are killed—two of them children—and sixty more are injured.

Event and Its Context

"We have numberless trades unions, trades' assemblies or councils, Knights of Labor and various other local, national, and international unions," declared the call for the national conference that formed FOTLU. "But great as has been the work done by these bodies, there is vastly more that can be done by a combination of all these organizations in a federation of trades."

Forward Steps

The Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions came into being in a gymnasium at the Turner Hall in downtown Pittsburgh. The Turnverein, or "Turners," were German-American social and athletic societies; many of the pioneers of the American labor movement in this period were German-American, though many others were Irish-American, these being the two largest immigrant groups at the time. In its early incarnation, the federation called in 1882 for the celebration of Labor Day on the first Monday in September. The organization also called for work stoppages and demonstrations on 1 May 1886 in favor of the eight-hour workday (initiating May Day, the international workers' holiday). The AFL and its predecessor, however, are best known for organizing the most durable union federation in U.S. history, providing an effective approach for improving the wages, hours, and working conditions of its members.

Over a hundred delegates attended the founding convention, representing close to half a million members. Represented were eight national and international trade unions: 14 from the Typographical Workers, 10 from the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers, 8 from the Molders, 6 from the Glass Workers, 5 from the Cigar Makers, and 5 from the Carpenters. Also represented were the central labor councils of 11 cities, 42 local unions, 3 district assemblies, and 46 local assemblies of the Knights of Labor, which at that time was the largest labor organization in the country. The Knights organized workers into reform struggles, social events, and educational efforts as well as trade union activities. For several years many workers belonged both to the Knights and to the Federation, though eventually the two groups became rivals.

Solidarity and Class Struggle

Those in attendance at the conference included 68 delegates from Pittsburgh, many of whom were members the Knights of Labor, whose membership included both people who were in unions and those who were not. One controversy arose around whether the new Federation should consist exclusively of people who were already members of labor unions. In this period, and for many years afterward, only skilled workers were able to build and sustain trade unions that were organized around a specific craft. A decision to make the Federation an exclusively union organization would restrict its membership to skilled workers. Many delegates agreed with the comments of one that "I wish this Federation broad enough to encompass all working people in its folds." An African American delegate from Pittsburgh explained, "We have in the city of Pittsburgh many men in our organization who have no particular trade, but should not be excluded from the Federation. … I speak more particularly of my own people and declare to you that it would be dangerous to skilled mechanics to exclude from this organization the common laborers, who might, in an emergency, be employed in positions they could readily qualify them to fill."

The inclusive spirit of these delegates won the day not only in the selection of a name, but also in the preamble, which was retained in 1886 when the group was reorganized as the American Federation of Labor. The preamble cited the "struggle between capital and labor" and forecast "disastrous results" if the "toiling millions" did not "combine" in the struggle for protection from oppression: "Conforming to the old adage, 'In union there is strength,' the formation of a Federation embracing every trade and labor organization in North America, a union founded upon a basis as broad as the land we live in, is our only hope."

Samuel Gompers of the Cigar Makers Union was nominated to be president of the Federation, but so was Richard Powers of the lake seaman's union. The Pittsburgh Commercial-Gazette ran an article explaining the contest in this way: "It is thought that an attempt will be made to capture the organization for Gompers as the representative of the Socialists, and if such an attempt is made, whether it succeeds or not, there will likely be some lively work, as the delegates opposed to Socialism are determined not to be controlled by it." In fact, such internal conflict was side-stepped when both Gompers and Powers withdrew from the race in favor of John Jarrett of the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers (with Gompers and Powers both becoming vice presidents). The organization's secretary was Frank K. Foster.

Socialists—those favoring replacement of capitalism by social ownership and democratic control over the economy—were influential in the early Federation, but Gompers later explained that the newspaper allegation of his being part of a socialist conspiracy was a slander based partly on a misunderstanding. "In those early days not more than half a dozen people had grasped the concept that economic organization and control over economic power were the fulcrum which made possible influence and power in all other fields," he later wrote in his autobiography. This was the founding premise on which the AFL was later built, but Gompers noted that the lines between socialists and trade unionists were "very blurred."

The Rise of Pure and Simple Unionism

During the 1880s, Gompers became known not as an advocate of socialism but as an advocate of what became known as "pure and simple trade unionism." This meant the organization of workers into unions that would focus on workplace struggles around issues of higher wages, fewer hours of work, and improved working conditions, with the exclusion of radical social causes, whether socialism or anything else. When asked what the labor movement wanted, Gompers once replied simply, "More." Yet Pennsylvania Federation of Labor president James Maurer has left a record of one of Gompers's many "pure and simple" union speeches in which he contended that the needs and desires of the workingman continue to escalate with gain that is won: "After that he wants two dollars and more time for leisure, and he struggles to get it. Not satisfied with two dollars he wants more; not only two and a quarter, but a nine-hour workday. And so he will keep on getting more and more until he gets it all or the full value of all he produces."

FOTLU included members and some unions that were affiliated with the expansively reformist Knights of Labor, and it was formally on record as favoring close relations with the larger organization. Yet, in the minds of many trade unionists, FOTLU represented "a broad and enduring basis," as secretary Frank Foster put it, for organization because in contrast to the Knights, it drew members together along "the trade line," providing "greater feasibility and … economic soundness" in facing "the growing power of associated capital." Rather than relying on lobbying and elections to secure gains, "in the world of economic reform the working classes must depend upon themselves for the enforcement of measures as well as for their conception," as Foster put it. In 1886 FOTLU was reorganized as the American Federation of Labor to advance more effectively this orientation, and soon afterward it surpassed the Knights of Labor as the dominant force in the labor movement.

Key Players

Foster, Frank K. (1854-1909): Active in the International Typographical Union, Foster had also been involved in the eight-hour leagues, the Workingmen's Party of the United States, and the International Labor Union. He turned away from active participation in the Knights of Labor to focus his efforts on the formation of the American Federation of Labor.

Gompers, Samuel (1850-1924): Prominent in the Cigar Makers Union, Gompers became the long-time (1886-1924) and increasingly conservative president of the American Federation of Labor, a spokesman for the "pure and simple union" orientation that was initially developed by his colleague, Adolph Strasser. In his later years Gompers became an outright opponent of socialism (though he never lost his admiration for Karl Marx, whose outlook he viewed as consistent with his own "pure and simple" unionism).

Jarrett, John (1843-1918): Born in Wales, Jarrett became an iron puddler and emigrated to the United States in 1862, where he became a member of the Sons of Vulcan (a predecessor of the steel workers union, established in 1860). Returning to Britain in 1868, he became associated with the cautious trade unionism of John Kane in the Amalgamated Ironworkers Association. In 1872 Jarrett returned to the United States, where he became a vice president of the Sons of Vulcan and a founder of the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers, of which he became president in 1880. While accepting the office of president of FOTLU, he pulled his organization out of it in 1881 when the Federation failed to endorse a high tariff. In 1883 he left the union, and although he continued to support the labor movement for some years, he became a lobbyist for the Tin Plate Association. A longtime supporter of the Republican Party, he was appointed U.S. consul to Birmingham, England in 1889-1892, after which he took a position as employment agent for the Carnegie Steel Company (which had just destroyed the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers in the Homestead Steel Strike).

McGuire, Peter J. (1852-1906): An American-born worker who whose initial involvement in socialist politics was as a member of the First International, McGuire left the Socialist Labor Party in the 1880s to become a founder and general secretary of the Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners and a founder of the AFL. He is often credited for being involved in the creation both of Labor Day (1882) and May Day (1886), although, as with Gompers, his socialist commitments faded with the passage of time.

See also: American Federation of Labor; Eight-hour Day Movement; Haymarket Riot; International Labor Union; Knights of Labor.

Bibliography

Books

Brooks, Thomas R. The Road to Dignity, A Century of Conflict: A History of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America, AFL-CIO, 1881-1981. New York: Atheneum, 1981.

Commons, John R., et al. History of Labor in the United States, Vol. II. New York: Macmillan Co., 1918.

Fink, Gary, ed. Biographical Dictionary of American Labor.Westport, CN: Greenwood Press, 1984.

Foner, Philip S. History of the Labor Movement in the United States, Vols. 1 and 2. New York: International Publishers, 1947, 1955.

Kaufman, Stuart Bruce. Samuel Gompers and the Origins of the American Federation of Labor. Westport, CN: Greenwood Press, 1973.

Gompers, Samuel. Seventy Years of Life and Labor. New York: E. P. Dutton Co., 1925.

Mandel, Bernard. Samuel Gompers. Yellow Springs, OH:Antioch Press, 1963.

Maurer, James. It Can Be Done. New York: Rand School Press, 1938.

—Paul Le Blanc