Gender & Labor
In 1881, thousands of Black women who worked as laundresses in a Southern city organized a mass strike, demanding higher pay and even proposing a standardized rate for their services across employers.
What is the Atlanta Washerwomen’s Strike?
This management system used time-and-motion studies to increase efficiency and reduce worker control over production.
What is Scientific Management?
These employer-sponsored organizations mimicked unions but were designed to limit genuine worker power.
What are Company unions?
This early phase of Roosevelt’s policies focused on stabilizing the economy through experimentation and relief programs.
What is the First New Deal?
This organization emerged in the 1930s to organize workers in mass production industries like steel and auto.
What is the CIO?
This labor system, prevalent in the garment industry, relied on layers of subcontracting, with immigrant workers producing clothing in crowded tenement apartments and factories for extremely low pay and long hours.
What is the Sweating System?
This process broke skilled labor into simpler, repetitive tasks, shifting control from workers to managers.
What is Deskilling?
This legal era prioritized “freedom of contract” and often invalidated labor protections like minimum wage laws.
What is the Lochner Era?
This later phase of Roosevelt's policies expanded labor rights and social welfare programs, strengthening workers’ protections.
What is the Second New Deal?
This organizing approach emphasized uniting all workers within an industry rather than separating them by skill.
What is Industrial unionism?
This 1911 factory fire in NYC exposed dangerous working conditions and galvanized support for workplace safety reforms.
What is the Triangle Shirtwaist fire?
This concept promoted worker participation in decision-making as a response to growing corporate power.
What is Industrial Democracy?
This late 19th-century strike by agricultural workers in Louisiana brought together Black and white laborers in a rare moment of interracial organizing, coordinated by the Knights of Labor. It prompted a violent crackdown by planters and state militia determined to preserve the racial and labor order.
What is the 1887 Sugar Cane Strike?
This 1935 law guaranteed workers the legal right to organize unions and bargain collectively.
What is the National Labor Relations Act?
During the Great Depression, this policy forcibly removed hundreds of thousands of Mexican and Mexican American workers from the United States, illustrating how economic crisis reshaped labor markets through racialized exclusion.
What is repatriation?
This 1912 strike, coordinated by the Wobblies, united immigrant textile workers across language and ethnic lines under the slogan “Bread and Roses.”
What is the Lawrence Textile Strike?
This process allows workers to negotiate wages and conditions collectively rather than individually.
What is Collective Bargaining?
This AFL leader (1886-1924) advocated focusing narrowly on economic gains rather than political reform.
Who is Samuel Gompers?
This 1938 law established federal standards for minimum wages and overtime.
What is the Fair Labor Standards Act?
This feminist labor framework emphasized workplace protections and acknowledged women’s dual roles in paid and unpaid labor.
What is Labor Feminism?
This employer strategy provided benefits like pensions and housing to reduce labor unrest and discourage unionization.
What is Welfare Capitalism?
Established in 1920 within the U.S. Department of Labor, this federal agency studied women’s working conditions and advocated for protective labor legislation, reflecting broader debates in U.S. labor history over labor feminism, workplace equality, and the role of the state in regulating work.
What is the Women's Bureau?
This Secretary of Labor played a central role in shaping labor protections during the New Deal. She also taught at the ILR School later in life!
Who is Frances Perkins?