Office Quandries
Peter Rachleff
|
|
|
|
|
|||
|
|
|
|
|
|||
|
|
||||||
|
|
PUNCHING OUT page 2 of 4 | |||||
|
|
||||||
|
|
Weekly Answers to Office Quandries |
|
Professor Peter Rachleff |
|||
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Again, employers
resisted and warned that other states would never pass such laws and that
all business would flow to those states, again forcing the workers to
move
and work the longer hours they had sought to avoid. In the 1860s and
1870s,
employees tried to get a federal law passed, one that no employer could
avoid. Few employers threatened to move outside the U.S. That just wasn't
a
realistic option at the time. But they hired legal talent, which
successfully argued that the federal government had no right to regulate
the
hours posted by employers.
The news wasn't all bad. The workers' movement did succeed in getting the federal government to limit the hours of its own workers (who were not all that numerous in the 1860s and 1870s), which was a symbolic victory. Private sector workers continued to put in long hours until in the 1880s, the issue became the flash point of a broad labor movement, organized by the Knights of Labor, the first U.S. labor organization to take in immigrants as well as the native born, women as well as men, blacks as well as whites, and unskilled workers as well as skilled. Their slogan was "An Injury to One is the Concern of All." They made the eight hour day the focus of their movement, and in the spring of 1886, they launched a nationwide strike to achieve this goal. |
|||||||||||||
|
|
||||||||||||||
|
|
 |
 |
||||||||||||
|
|
|
|
||||||||||||
|
|
| |||||||||||||
