A Message from President Biden
What have labor unions ever done to benefit any of us? Below are just a few of their major accomplishments, many of which we take for granted without acknowledging the debt we owe to those who came before us.
Previous generations of Americans worked hard, opposed the status quo favoring capital, made tremendous sacrifices, and, at times, paid with their lives to make life a little more bearable and equitable for all of us.
Demanding a shorter work week. Safer working conditions. Ending child labor exploitation. Seeking health and pension benefits. Negotiating fair compensation. Some downtime on weekends to relax with their families. And many, many more benefits that trickled down to all Americans. In short, these concessions were won to achieve some measure of dignity and security for working-class Americans.
That is the legacy of the labor movement, one which remains under attack to this day by Rightwing forces in this country.
Despite what many CEO’s and right-wing politicians may say, unions created many benefits all Americans enjoy today.
The Weekend
In 1870, the average workweek for most Americans was 61 hours — almost double what most Americans work now. Yet in the late nineteenth century and the twentieth century, labor unions engaged in massive strikes in order to demand shorter workweeks so that Americans could be home with their loved ones instead of constantly toiling for their employers with no leisure time. By 1937, these labor actions created enough political momentum to pass the Fair Labor Standards Act, which helped create a federal framework for a shorter workweek that included room for leisure time.
End of Child Labor
“Union organizing and child labor reform were often intertwined” in U.S. history, with organization’s like the “National Consumers’ League” and the National Child Labor Committee” working together in the early 20th century to ban child labor. The very first American Federation of Labor (AFL) national convention passed “a resolution calling on states to ban children under 14 from all gainful employment” in 1881, and soon after states across the country adopted similar recommendations, leading up to the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act which regulated child labor on the federal level for the first time.
40 hour work week
“The rise of unions in the 1930′s and 1940′s led to the first great expansion of health care” for all Americans, as labor unions banded workers together to negotiate for health coverage plans from employers. In 1942, “the US set up a National War Labor Board. It had the power to set a cap on all wage increases. But it let employers circumvent the cap by offering “fringe benefits” — notably, health insurance.” By 1950, “half of all companies with fewer than 250 workers and two-thirds of all companies with more than 250 workers offered health insurance of one kind or another.”
Read more about the enormous contribution labor unions have made to this country and American society — Beyond Labor Day: 3 Ways Unions Have Helped American Workers. Attribution for the Labor Movement image at the very top: Zinn Education Project.
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