Thanks to Garrison Keillor's Writer's Almanac on NPR we have this piece of important history to share and celebrate today:
On this date in 1648, Boston shoemakers formed the first American labor union. The colonies had so far failed to successfully import the English tradition of "gilds," wherein craftsmen would band together to establish prices and standards of quality, supervise apprenticeships, and establish a common fund to provide for members who were in hardship due to age, disaster, injury, or illness. The shoemakers succeeded in forming an association of sorts, but it was limited to suppressing shoddy workmanship; the Massachusetts General Court eliminated provisions for education and charity, and also forbade "The Company of Shoomakers," as it was called, from acting contrary to public interest by fixing prices. Any disputes had to be settled by the county courts, and not the association itself. The barrel-makers, known as "coopers," were also granted a similar charter on that date.
Here's a little more on it:
THE boot and shoe makers, either as shoemakers or "cordwainers," have been the earliest and the most strenuous of American industrialists in their economic struggles. A highly skilled and intelligent class of tradesmen, widely scattered, easily menaced by commercial and industrial changes, they have resorted with determination at each new menace to the refuge of protective organizations. Of the seventeen trials for conspiracy prior to 1842, the shoemakers occasioned nine. Taking the struggles of this harassed trade, it
is possible to trace industrial stages by American documents from the gild to the factory. Organizations whose records give us this picture of industrial evolution
under American conditions are the "Company of Shoomakers," Boston, 1648; the "Society of the Master Cordwainers," Philadelphia, 1789; the "Federal
Society of Journeymen Cordwainers," Philadelphia, 1794; the "United Beneficial Society of Journeymen Cordwainers," Philadelphia, 1835; the Knights of St. Crispin, 1868; the Boot and Shoe Workers' Union, 1895. Each of these organizations stands for a definite stage in industrial evolution from the primitive itinerant cobbler to the modern factory; each represents an internal contention over the distribution of wealth provoked by external conditions of marketing or production; each was productive of written
documents preserving to us the types of social organization that struggled for adaptation to the evolving economic series.
It seems appropriate to look back and see that today's struggle is a continuation of one which predates our Nation's birth. Read on for more on this.
A quick review of labor history yields some great insights into today's world. For example, our revolution did not succeed in throwing off all the repressive ideas the rulers in the "Mother Country" used to keep people in tow:
rade unions and/or collective bargaining were outlawed from no later than the middle of the 14th century when the Ordinance of Labourers was enacted in the Kingdom of England. Union organizing would eventually be outlawed everywhere and remain so until the middle of the 19th century.
Today the oligarchs that rule us have this well in place in so many places. Among their servants we can recall Ronald Raygun's union breaking victory. The state of Virginia where I live is very successful in limiting union activity and it surely is not alone.
One of the important facets of OWS is Union participation. They are carrying on a long tradition in the fight against enslavement in new forms:
The 18th century economist Adam Smith noted the imbalance in the rights of workers in regards to owners (or "masters"). In The Wealth of Nations, Book I, chapter 8, Smith wrote:
We rarely hear, it has been said, of the combination of masters, though frequently of those of workmen. But whoever imagines, upon this account, that masters rarely combine, is as ignorant of the world as of the subject. Masters are always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform combination, not to raise the wages of labor above their actual rate[.] When workers combine, masters ... never cease to call aloud for the assistance of the civil magistrate, and the rigorous execution of those laws which have been enacted with so much severity against the combination of servants, labourers, and journeymen.
As Smith noted, unions were illegal for many years in most countries, although Smith argued that it should remain illegal to fix wages or prices by employees or employers. There were severe penalties for attempting to organize unions, up to and including execution. Despite this, unions were formed and began to acquire political power, eventually resulting in a body of labour law that not only legalized organizing efforts, but codified the relationship between employers and those employees organized into unions. Even after the legitimization of trade unions there was opposition, as the case of the Tolpuddle Martyrs shows.
The right to join a trade union is mentioned in article 23, subsection 4 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), which also states in article 20, subsection 2 that "No one may be compelled to belong to an association". Prohibiting a person from joining or forming a union, as well as forcing a person to do the same (e.g. "closed shops" or "union shops", see below), whether by a government or by a business, is generally considered a human rights abuse. Similar allegations can be levelled if an employer discriminates based on trade union membership. Attempts by an employer, often with the help of outside agencies, to prevent union membership amongst their staff is known as union busting.
So among the many violations of human rights that are now commonly accepted and even codified in certain sham laws are those that limit labor in these restrictive ways. I hope the folks out there in OWS and its many outgrowths in this country and around the world are using this as inspiration today. The goal is to be free people and to enjoy our human rights.