Early Labor Systems
This labor system bound workers to multi-year contracts in exchange for passage to the American colonies, often under coercive conditions.
What is Indentured Servitude?
This major transformation beginning in the late 18th century shifted production to factories and created a permanent wage labor force.
What is the Industrial Revolution?
This reform movement pushed for limiting the workday to eight hours instead of the much longer industrial norm.
What is the Eight-Hour Day Movement?
This term refers to the late 19th-century period of rapid economic growth alongside extreme inequality and labor unrest.
What is the Gilded Age?
This early 20th-century radical union promoted direct action and the overthrow of capitalism.
What is the Industrial Workers of the World?
This 1676 uprising of landless colonists in Virginia exposed tensions over land, labor, and colonial governance.
What is Bacon’s Rebellion?
This postbellum phase of industrial growth introduced steel, electricity, and large-scale factory production.
What is the Second Industrial Revolution?
These unions organized workers based on specialized skills or trades, often excluding unskilled laborers.
What are Craft Unions?
This 1877 uprising spread across multiple states and marked the first major national labor conflict.
What is the Great Railroad Strike of 1877?
This World War I-era law criminalized speech critical of the government and was used to arrest labor activists, including members of the IWW, who opposed World War I or challenged industrial working conditions.
What is the Sedition Act?
This form of slavery treated human beings as property whose status was permanent and passed down through generations.
What is Chattel slavery?
This labor system, prevalent in the late 19th and early 20th century South, leased incarcerated individuals to private employers, often under brutal and exploitative conditions.
What is Convict Leasing?
These unions aimed to organize all workers within a single industry, regardless of skill level or job type.
What are Industrial Unions?
This 1886 protest in Chicago turned violent, leading to speedy trials without due process and lasting repression of labor radicalism.
What is Haymarket Square?
This 1919 citywide strike began with shipyard workers and quickly spread as over 60,000 workers across industries walked off the job, briefly shutting down a major west coast city and raising fears of radical labor solidarity.
What is the Seattle General Strike?
This brutal transatlantic journey forcibly transported millions of enslaved Africans to the Americas.
What is the Middle Passage?
This massive 19th-century infrastructure project connected the eastern and western United States using immigrant labor.
What is the Transcontinental Railroad?
This late-19th-century labor organization, led by visionary leader Uriah Stephens, sought to unite skilled and unskilled workers—including women and Black workers—into a broad-based movement for economic reform.
What is the Knights of Labor?
This 1892 steel strike at Andrew Carnegie’s plant escalated into a violent battle when Pinkerton agents arrived by barge to break the strike and were met by armed workers.
What is Homestead?
These government raids targeted suspected radicals and immigrants during the first Red Scare.
What are the Palmer Raids?
W.E.B. Du Bois described the mass flight of enslaved people during the Civil War using this labor-related term.
What is a general strike?
This 1867 labor action by Chinese workers protested low wages and dangerous conditions during railroad construction.
What is the Chinese Railroad Strike?
This national federation of unions emphasized skilled labor and practical economic gains over radical change.
What is the American Federation of Labor?
This 1914 attack on a Colorado tent colony of striking coal miners saw the state militia and company guards open fire and set the camp ablaze, killing workers and their families, including women and children.
What is the Ludlow Massacre?
This union, led by Eugene Debs, attempted to organize railroad workers across multiple crafts.
What is the American Railway Union?