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Historian Erik Loomis on This Day in Labor History: August 20, 1866. The National Labor Union, the first labor union federation in U.S. history, demanded Congress implement a national 8-hour day. Let’s talk about the first attempt to have a nationwide labor union.
The trade union movement had roots early in American history but had never really taken off, in part because the system of American employment was still in the pre-Civil War years by and large artisan and farmer based.
Where you did see large concentrations of industry, unions formed such as in the Lowell mills. But the nation was changing rapidly in 1866. The capitalist revolution of the Civil War was beginning to be felt by workers.
Factories were growing and money was increasingly concentrated in the hands of the few. Long hours, low pay, and dangerous working conditions in factories, railroad yards, and mines were becoming part of the everyday experience for workers.
Unions began to develop in these industries, but there was no national federation to organize them. That’s what the National Labor Union intended to do. Founded at a Baltimore conference in 1866, it was a precursor to the Knights of Labor and American Federation of Labor.
It wanted to bring together all of the current unions in its umbrella and take a political and bargaining approach to solving problems, as opposed to striking which was quite controversial even among workers at this time.
It favored arbitration as its preferred labor action. It also wanted a Labor Party to challenge both the Republicans and the Democrats.
The NLU’s leader, William Sylvis, was an interesting individual. In 1846, at the age of 18, Sylvis became an iron molder, which was someone who poured hot slag into wooden patterns to shape the final product. This was hard, tough, dangerous work.
He soon became active in Philadelphia’s union movement and was elected secretary of his local in 1857. In 1859, Sylvis called for a convention of all the iron moulders locals around the nation. He was elected president of what became the National Union of Iron Molders.
He spent the Civil War building the union where he instituted a number of innovations, including creating the first ever national strike fund, through mandatory dues payments by members.
Sylvis was also a major supporter of unions of female workers, particularly Kate Mullaney’s Collar Laundry Union. Sylvis would later invite Mullaney into a leadership role within the NLU, making her the nation’s first female union executive.
The NLU did invite all workers, including farmers into the organization. But as would be the case with the AFL, its core membership was the skilled building trades. Also, like the rest of the labor movement of the time, the NLU held white supremacy as a central guiding point.
It was segregated and while there was a black chapter, it was ineffective and small.
Sylvis actually opposed this segregation — although he supported Stephen Douglas in the 1860 election — he believed that all workers had the same issues and would have preferred one integrated organization.
It took years of fighting recalcitrant unionists to even allow the Colored National Labor Union to exist alongside the NLU.
The federation also called for the exclusion of Chinese workers from the United States, which would eventually be the first legislative victory for the American labor movement in history.
Not for the last time, white workers would choose their white identity over their shared class identity, even when operating in terms of class.
The major legislative aim for the NLU was the passage of the 8-hour day. As capitalism developed, the 8-hour day would become the ultimate goal for much of the American labor movement.
It was the call to arms for the Knights of Labor in the 1880s, so much so that the Knights basically lost control of its exploding membership by 1886.
Union after union would call for this over the next decades and it was not achieved nationally until the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938, and even then only partially.
Amazingly, the NLU actually achieved an early victory on the 8-hour day when in 1868, the government created the 8-hour day for federal employees.
But this was a very limited win as most of the government agencies then reduced wages to go along with it, which was very much not what the NLU wanted.
When President Grant ordered departments to stop reducing wages, most just ignored him and he did not press the issue. Ultimately, little concrete benefit came of the 8-hour day announcement.
Frustrations with the federal employee 8-hour day and loopholes in laws in New York and California that made similar statues unworkable combined with the growing concern in the post-Civil War period about monetary policy to turn the NLU in a starkly political direction.
It focused its energy on electoral politics and monetary reform, specifically the issuance of greenbacks, as well as providing public land for settlers as opposed to the huge land grants given to railroads as an incentive to build transcontinental lines.
This did not exactly excite workers. Many locals believed in “pure and simple unionism” that kept workers out of politics. Thus, the NLU became increasingly divided as it prioritized politics over workers’ concerns.
While Sylvis claimed the NLU had 600,000 members, he was exaggerating significantly. At its peak, it might have had 300,000. That number declined as the 1860s became the 1870s.
Sylvis dying in 1869 at the age of 41 helped speed the decline as the federation lost its guiding light. The NLU dissolved in 1874 after its membership plummeted in the Panic of 1873.
So ultimately, we should see Sylvis and the NLU as an important ancestor of both the Knights of Labor and the AFL.
The NLU was an early attempt for workers to collectively find ways out of the inequality arising during and after the Civil War and for all its limitations, was probably more successful than any other organization before the AFL.