Labor Movement History

Particularly important are the ways that workers both defined and were defined by differences of race, gender, ethnicity, class, and place. Individual workers and organized groups of working Americans both transformed and were transformed by the main struggles of the industrial era, including conflicts over the place of former slaves and their descendants in the United States, mass immigration and migrations, technological change, new management and business models, the development of a consumer economy, the rise of a more active federal government, and the evolution of popular culture.
The history of unions in the US is a story of workers' struggle to organize unions and convince or force employers to recognize them for bargaining. From the
Congress passed the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) in June 1933, which sought to create a new corporatist style of regulated and planned economy in which big government, big business, and labor would work together to achieve greater efficiency. The NIRA stipulated that “employees shall have the right to organize and bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing,” which marked the first time the federal government legally recognized workers’ right to union representation. The masses of the workers responded immediately. In a rank-and-file movement they began
history. The New Deal represented a series of experiments which, though they did not pull the nation out of the depression (only economic mobilization for World War II would do that), still dramatically transformed the American economy by creating a new welfare state, strengthening unions, and affirming the economic importance of government action as a source of both spending and business regulation. In the National Industrial Recovery Act, for the first time, clear recognition was given to labor’s right to organize and to bargain collectively. The New Deal did not bring the country out of the depression, although it did improve the lives of millions of citizens and transformed the foundations of American politics so that future battles would be fought over the nature of organized labor’s place in the nation (rather than its mere right to exist) and over broad access to “security.” Union membership increased dramatically from just under 3 million in 1933 to approximately 12 million by