This article traces the chronological development of organized labor in the United States from the colonial era through the early twenty-first century. For broader context, see American Labor Movement and american-labor-movement-consensus. For ideological interpretations of the movement, see american-labor-movement-viewpoint-left-critique-viewpoint and american-labor-movement-viewpoint-libertarian-viewpoint.
Organized work stoppages in North America predate the Republic. Philadelphia journeymen printers struck in 1786 over wage cuts, one of the earliest recorded strikes on the continent.1) Cordwainers (shoemakers) in Philadelphia formed a journeymen's society in 1792 and struck in 1799. Courts treated such combinations under English common law doctrine, which held that collective action by workers to raise wages constituted criminal conspiracy.
The Philadelphia Cordwainers were prosecuted in 1806 in Commonwealth v. Pullis. The court found the workers guilty of criminal conspiracy for combining to raise wages, establishing a legal precedent that constrained union activity for decades.2)
In 1827, the Mechanics' Union of Trade Associations formed in Philadelphia, representing multiple trades rather than a single craft. The following year it shifted focus to electoral politics, forming the Working Men's Party, which contested city elections in 1828 and 1829. Similar workingmen's parties emerged in New York and Boston during the same period, advocating for free public education, abolition of imprisonment for debt, and limits on monopoly charters.
In 1842, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court decided Commonwealth v. Hunt, ruling that labor unions were not inherently criminal conspiracies and that strikes for a closed shop were lawful if pursued by peaceful means.3) The decision did not immediately transform labor law uniformly across states but marked a significant doctrinal shift.
The National Typographical Union formed in 1852, the first national trade union to survive in continuous existence. Several other national craft unions followed during the 1850s, including the Hat Finishers, Stone Cutters, and Cigar Makers.
The Civil War disrupted organizing in the South and drew workers into military service nationally, but also accelerated industrialization and created labor shortages that gave workers temporary leverage in Northern industries. Wage gains during the war years were partially eroded by inflation.
In 1866, the National Labor Union (NLU) convened in Baltimore under the leadership of William Sylvis, a founder of the Iron Molders' International Union. The NLU sought an eight-hour workday, currency reform, and cooperative enterprises as alternatives to wage labor. It formally endorsed the inclusion of black workers, though implementation was uneven; black delegates formed a parallel Colored National Labor Union in 1869.4) The NLU dissolved after the 1872 election cycle.
The Noble and Holy Order of the Knights of Labor was founded in Philadelphia in 1869 by Uriah Stephens and a group of garment cutters. Initially operating as a secret fraternal organization with ritual and ceremony, it opened its membership in 1878 under Terence Powderly, who served as Grand Master Workman from 1879 to 1893.
The Knights departed from the craft-union model by organizing workers across skill levels, industries, races, and (to a limited degree) sexes. Black workers were admitted to integrated local assemblies in some regions, and separate black local assemblies in others, depending on local conditions. Chinese workers were explicitly excluded following pressure from Western members.5)
Membership surged following a successful 1885 strike against Jay Gould's Wabash Railroad, reaching an estimated 700,000 by 1886. A subsequent strike against Gould's Missouri Pacific in 1886 failed, and membership declined sharply thereafter. The Haymarket affair of May 4, 1886 - in which a bomb thrown at Chicago police during a labor rally killed seven officers and injured many others, prompting retaliatory police fire that killed several workers - damaged the broader labor movement by association, though the Knights officially distanced themselves from the anarchist organizers involved.6)
The American Federation of Labor (AFL) was founded in Columbus, Ohio, in December 1886, growing out of a predecessor body, the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions. Samuel Gompers of the Cigar Makers' International Union became its first president and held the position nearly continuously until his death in 1924.
The AFL organized along craft lines, focusing on skilled trades. Its philosophy - later described as “pure and simple” unionism or “business unionism” - emphasized winning concrete gains in wages, hours, and conditions through collective bargaining rather than pursuing broad social transformation or independent political parties. Gompers was skeptical of socialist politics and maintained that labor's interests were best advanced through economic power, not state action.7)
The AFL's craft structure largely excluded unskilled industrial workers, and its affiliated unions maintained varying policies toward black workers. Some national unions formally excluded black members by constitutional provision; others admitted black workers into segregated locals. The Federation passed resolutions against discrimination periodically but did not expel affiliates that practiced it.
The Homestead Strike of 1892 pitted the AFL-affiliated Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers against Carnegie Steel at its Homestead, Pennsylvania plant. After Carnegie management locked out the union and brought in Pinkerton agents, armed conflict broke out on July 6, 1892, killing seven workers and three Pinkertons. The Pennsylvania governor called in the National Guard, the lockout succeeded, and the union was effectively destroyed at Homestead, curtailing steel organizing for decades.8)
The Pullman Strike of 1894 began as a local strike by workers at the Pullman Palace Car Company near Chicago and spread through the American Railway Union (ARU), led by Eugene V. Debs, into a national rail boycott. President Grover Cleveland obtained a federal injunction against the strike on the grounds that it obstructed mail delivery; Debs was imprisoned for contempt. The strike collapsed, the ARU dissolved, and Debs emerged from prison having embraced socialism.9)
In 1905, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) was founded in Chicago by an assembly that included Debs, Mary Harris “Mother” Jones, and William “Big Bill” Haywood of the Western Federation of Miners. The IWW (“Wobblies”) rejected the AFL's craft model and its accommodation of capitalism, advocating industrial unionism and, among some members, syndicalist and anarchist goals. The IWW organized migratory agricultural workers, lumbermen, miners, and textile workers - categories largely outside AFL reach.
The Lawrence, Massachusetts textile strike of 1912 (“Bread and Roses Strike”) and the Paterson, New Jersey silk strike of 1913 were among the IWW's most prominent actions. IWW organizers including Elizabeth Gurley Flynn were active in both.
AFL membership grew significantly during World War I as the federal government sought labor peace for war production. Gompers supported the war effort and participated in the Council of National Defense. The National War Labor Board, established in 1918, arbitrated disputes and recognized workers' rights to organize without employer interference, producing short-term union recognition gains.
The postwar period brought a wave of strikes in 1919, including the Seattle General Strike in February, a national steel strike beginning in September, and a Boston police strike. The steel strike, led by AFL organizer William Z. Foster, sought union recognition in an industry that had been largely non-union since Homestead. U.S. Steel and affiliated companies refused to recognize the union; the strike collapsed in January 1920.10)
The early 1920s saw the Red Scare, marked by federal raids under Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, deportation of immigrant labor radicals, and intense open-shop campaigns by employers organized under slogans like the “American Plan.” The IWW was devastated by prosecutions under the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918; Haywood fled to the Soviet Union in 1921 rather than face imprisonment.
AFL membership declined through the 1920s as employers pursued welfare capitalism - company-sponsored benefit programs, employee representation plans (company unions), and other measures intended to reduce workers' interest in independent unions.
The Great Depression beginning in 1929 altered the political and economic landscape. Unemployment reached roughly 25 percent at its peak, and established institutions lost legitimacy in broad segments of the workforce. The Norris-LaGuardia Act of 1932 sharply restricted federal courts' ability to issue injunctions in labor disputes and declared yellow-dog contracts (by which workers pledged not to join unions) unenforceable in federal courts.
The National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) of 1933, enacted under President Franklin D. Roosevelt, included Section 7(a), which affirmed workers' right to organize and bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing. The provision stimulated organizing drives across industries. When the Supreme Court struck down the NIRA in Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States (1935), Congress passed the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA, “Wagner Act”) the same year, creating the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and providing legal enforcement mechanisms for collective bargaining rights.11)
The Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) emerged from a split within the AFL. John L. Lewis of the United Mine Workers led a faction that sought to organize workers in mass-production industries - steel, auto, rubber, electrical - on an industrial rather than craft basis. The AFL expelled the dissident unions in 1937; they formally constituted the CIO under Lewis.
The CIO conducted major organizing drives in auto and steel. The Flint Sit-Down Strike against General Motors (December 1936 - February 1937) saw workers occupy GM plants rather than walk out, making it difficult to bring in replacement workers. GM recognized the United Auto Workers (UAW) in February 1937. U.S. Steel, without a strike, recognized the Steel Workers Organizing Committee (SWOC) in March 1937.12) “Little Steel” companies (Bethlehem, Republic, Inland, Youngstown Sheet and Tube) refused recognition; the Memorial Day Massacre of May 30, 1937, in which Chicago police fired on strikers outside Republic Steel's South Chicago plant, killing ten workers, marked the violent end of the initial SWOC effort against those firms.
U.S. entry into World War II following Pearl Harbor produced a no-strike pledge from the AFL and CIO in exchange for union security provisions administered by the National War Labor Board. Union membership rose substantially during the war, reaching approximately 35 percent of the non-agricultural workforce by 1945.
The postwar period opened with a wave of strikes in 1945-1946 as workers sought wage increases to offset wartime controls. Congress responded with the Labor Management Relations Act of 1947 (Taft-Hartley Act), passed over President Truman's veto. Taft-Hartley prohibited jurisdictional strikes, secondary boycotts, and closed shops (though union shops were permitted if approved by workers). It required union officers to file non-communist affidavits, authorized states to pass right-to-work laws, and allowed the president to seek injunctions against strikes affecting national health or safety.
The CIO expelled eleven communist-led unions between 1949 and 1950 following internal conflicts over the Marshall Plan, the 1948 presidential campaign, and compliance with Taft-Hartley's anti-communist affidavit requirement.
The AFL and CIO merged in 1955 under the AFL-CIO, with George Meany of the AFL's Plumbers union as president and Walter Reuther of the UAW as a vice president. The merger consolidated most of organized labor into a single federation.
During the late 1940s and 1950s, major industrial unions negotiated long-term contracts with cost-of-living adjustments, employer-provided health insurance, and defined-benefit pensions - a pattern sometimes called the “Treaty of Detroit” after the 1950 GM-UAW agreement.13)
President John F. Kennedy signed Executive Order 10988 in 1962, granting federal employees the right to organize and bargain collectively, though not to strike. State and local governments extended varying rights to public employees through the 1960s. The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) grew substantially in this period.
The Memphis Sanitation Strike of 1968, in which predominantly black sanitation workers struck the city of Memphis under the slogan “I Am a Man,” drew national attention and the participation of Martin Luther King Jr., who was assassinated in Memphis on April 4, 1968, while supporting the strike.14)
The Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970 created federal workplace safety standards and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA).
The United Farm Workers (UFW), led by Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta, organized California agricultural laborers beginning in the early 1960s. The Delano Grape Strike, begun in 1965 when Filipino-American workers in the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC) struck Delano-area table grape growers and were joined by Chavez's National Farm Workers Association, extended into a consumer boycott of California grapes that continued until 1970 agreements with major growers.15)
Private-sector union membership began declining in the mid-1970s. Deindustrialization - the contraction of manufacturing employment in steel, auto, rubber, and textiles - eliminated heavily unionized jobs. The shift of industry to Southern states, where right-to-work laws and cultural resistance to unionism were prevalent, also reduced the organized share of the workforce.
The Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) strike of August 1981 marked a significant moment. When PATCO members struck over wages and working conditions, President Ronald Reagan declared the strike illegal (as federal employees could not legally strike), gave controllers 48 hours to return to work, and fired approximately 11,400 who refused, decertifying the union.16)
The Hormel strike in Austin, Minnesota (1985-1986) saw Local P-9 of the United Food and Commercial Workers strike against wage cuts at the George A. Hormel & Company plant. The international union withdrew its support and placed the local in trusteeship, reflecting tensions between rank-and-file militancy and national union strategy.
The AFL-CIO elected John Sweeney of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) as president in 1995 on a platform emphasizing organizing over collective bargaining maintenance. Sweeney expanded organizing budgets and launched campaigns in health care, janitorial services, and other growing sectors.
In 2005, a bloc of unions led by SEIU, the Teamsters, UNITE HERE, and several others left the AFL-CIO to form the Change to Win federation, arguing that the AFL-CIO devoted insufficient resources to organizing. The split reduced the AFL-CIO's membership base significantly; several of the breakaway unions subsequently returned or established affiliations with both bodies.
Union membership as a share of the total workforce fell below 12 percent by 2010 and continued declining in the private sector. Public-sector unions retained higher density.
The Wisconsin Budget Repair Bill dispute of 2011 prompted mass protests at the state capitol in Madison when Governor Scott Walker proposed legislation curtailing collective bargaining rights for most public employees. The bill passed; subsequent recall elections and a 2012 gubernatorial recall election against Walker failed to reverse the outcome. Similar legislation passed in other states.
Following a 2018 Supreme Court decision in Janus v. AFSCME, which held that compulsory agency fees paid by non-union public employees to public-sector unions violated the First Amendment, public-sector unions faced membership and revenue pressures as states could no longer require non-members to pay fees.17)
The 2018-2019 period saw a wave of teacher strikes in West Virginia, Oklahoma, Arizona, Los Angeles, and other locations, often in states with limited or no formal collective bargaining rights for teachers.
Amazon and Starbucks became prominent organizing targets in the early 2020s. The Amazon Labor Union, an independent organization not affiliated with an established union, won a representation election at the JFK8 facility on Staten Island in April 2022 - the first successful union election at a U.S. Amazon facility.18) Starbucks Workers United, affiliated with Workers United, won elections at hundreds of locations beginning in late 2021.
Whether the AFL's craft-union structure and selective membership policies primarily reflected the strategic priorities of skilled-trade leadership or the racial and ethnic exclusionary preferences of the membership base is disputed among labor historians; see american-labor-movement-controversy-afl-exclusion-controversy.
The extent to which the New Deal labor legislation of 1933-1935 reflected genuine government support for worker organizing versus an attempt to stabilize industrial capitalism and contain more radical labor alternatives is contested; see american-labor-movement-controversy-new-deal-labor-controversy.
Whether PATCO's defeat in 1981 was primarily the result of Reagan administration policy choices or of strategic errors by PATCO leadership is debated among labor historians and industrial relations scholars; see american-labor-movement-controversy-patco-strike-controversy.
Some historians argue that postwar collective bargaining arrangements entrenched union bureaucracies and suppressed shop-floor radicalism; the left-labor critique of this period is presented at american-labor-movement-viewpoint-left-critique-viewpoint.
The causes of private-sector union decline since the 1970s - variously attributed to globalization, employer opposition, labor law failure, union strategic errors, or structural economic change - remain actively debated; see american-labor-movement-controversy-union-decline-controversy.
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1. John R. Commons et al., History of Labour in the United States, vol. 1 (New York: Macmillan, 1918), 105.
2. Walter Nelles, “The First American Labor Case,” Yale Law Journal 41, no. 2 (1931): 165-200.
3. Commonwealth v. Hunt, 45 Mass. 111 (1842).
4. Herbert Hill, “The Problem of Race in American Labor History,” Reviews in American History 24, no. 2 (1996): 189-208.
5. Leon Fink, Workingmen's Democracy: The Knights of Labor and American Politics (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983), 149-172.
6. Paul Avrich, The Haymarket Tragedy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 190-215.
7. Samuel Gompers, Seventy Years of Life and Labour: An Autobiography, 2 vols. (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1925).
8. Paul Krause, The Battle for Homestead, 1880-1892 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992).
9. Nick Salvatore, Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982), 126-155.
10. David Brody, Labor in Crisis: The Steel Strike of 1919 (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1965).
11. James A. Gross, The Making of the National Labor Relations Board (Albany: SUNY Press, 1974).
12. Sidney Fine, Sit-Down: The General Motors Strike of 1936-1937 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969).
13. Nelson Lichtenstein, The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit: Walter Reuther and the Fate of American Labor (New York: Basic Books, 1995), 271-298.
14. Michael K. Honey, Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King's Last Campaign (New York: W.W. Norton, 2007).
15. Randy Shaw, Beyond the Fields: Cesar Chavez, the UFW, and the Struggle for Justice in the 21st Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 1-40.
16. Joseph A. McCartin, Collision Course: Ronald Reagan, the Air Traffic Controllers, and the Strike That Changed America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).
17. Janus v. American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, Council 31, 585 U.S. 878 (2018).
18. Lauren Kaori Gurley, “Amazon Workers on Staten Island Vote to Unionize in Landmark Win,” Washington Post, April 1, 2022.
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