TRADE UNION

The transformation of economic enterprise that began after the American Revolution (1775–1783) was the major cause for the development of U.S. labor's most significant institution: permanent trade unions. With the rise of U.S. industry came the rise of a management class seeking to pay lower wages. During the late 1700s working men with trades (carpenters, shoemakers, typesetters, cabinetmakers, machinists, masons, coopers, tailors) created organizations to conduct their struggles, known often as "associations" or "societies." The membership of these early unions were confined to journeymen of a single craft, and they joined together not only to obtain better wages for themselves, but also to keep out of industry inferior untrained workmen known as "runaway apprentices" who worked for lower wages than the skilled tradesman or craftsman.

In 1886, a national organization, the American Federation of Labor (AFL) was created and rose to dominate the U.S. labor movement for the next 50 years. It was a federation of most of the early trade and craft unions scattered throughout the many states of the union, bringing together under the umbrella of the AFL most of the trade and craft unions. The AFL, a consolidation of separate trade unions, was first led by the father of the U.S. labor movement, Samuel Gompers (1850–1924). The focus of the AFL was largely aimed at short-term objectives, like higher pay and shorter hours of work. The AFL maintained that trade unions should restrict their membership to skilled and qualified craftsmen in specific trades, believing that a trade union composed of many different kinds of workers, including unskilled laborers, would lack the cohesiveness essential to hard-hitting business-like unionism. Trade unions ignored unskilled workers in the mass-production industries who eventually were unionized by the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). In the 1960s, the AFL and the CIO pursued a cautious merger, under the name AFL-CIO.