How the workplace has changed in 75 years, (EXCERPT), Monthly Labor Review Online, Feb. 1988

How the workplace has changed in 75 years

Walter Licht

The Department of Labor owes its inception in 1913 to a crisis in the American workplace.¹ For four decades, starting with the great railroad strikes of July 1877, the Nation became witness to a contagion of work stoppages and protests. About 1,500 strikes a year involved more than 300,000 workers; momentous confrontations were accompanied by substantial loss of life, limb, property, and commerce.² This was the unnerving record of the period, and sufficient reason to search for answers and solutions

Contemporary analysts can offer explanations for the industrial unrest of the late 19th and early 20th centuries: Low wages, long hours, unsafe working conditions, irregular employment, capricious supervision, and the antiunion tactics of some managers provided the visible sparks. The underlying powderkeg was the spread and fastening of the wage labor system; dampened prospects for independent producership; increased specialization, weakening of skills, and mechanization of jobs; business cycle fluctuations; the effects of immigration and urbanization; and the developing economic and political power of concentrated capital.

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1 Standard histories of the Department of Labor include Twenty-Five Years of Service, 1913-1938 (Department of Labor, 1938); The Anvil and the Plows: A History of the United States Department of Labor (U.S. Department of Labor, 1963); Ewan Clague, The Bureau of Labor Statistics (New York, Praeger Publishers, Inc., 1968); and Jonathan Grossman, The Department of Labor (New York, Praeger Publishers, Inc., 1973).

2 Melvyn Dubofsky, Industrialism and the American Worker, 1865-1920 (Arlington Heights, IL, Harlan Davidson, 1985). Scholars remain in debt to the Department of Labor for its voluminous publications. Statistics reported in this essay are drawn from a remarkable historical compendium of information on the American workplace, Two Hundred Years of Work in America (U.S. Department of Labor, 1976).

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