The Rhetoric of American Labor

Contents

• Who were the Laborers?
• Communities of Labor
  • The Urban Enclave
  • Company Towns
• The Labor Movement
• The Rhetorics of Labor
  • The Rhetoric of Business
  • The Rhetoric of the Working Class
  • The Rhetoric of Socialism and Anarchism
• Exercises

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Who were the laborers?

• New American Urbanites
  • Displaced Craftsmen. The change to the industrial system displaced the craftsmen had characterized pre-factory industrial production. For example, a cabinetmaker now worked in a cabinet factory; a blacksmith was now an ironworker. Thus, skilled workers went from a shop setting into a factory setting.
  • Exiles from agriculture. Now that the frontier was closed, the next generation of sodbusters had to turn toward the towns and cities for their livlihood. In addition, the exhaustion of the agricultural land in the more settled areas continued and refugees from the exhausted land moved to the factory towns and cities.
  • Refugees from the American South. The collapsed agricultural and plantation economy of the South sent droves of workers to the Northern industrial cities and towns. Particularly noteworthy is the first large migration of former slaves to the factori
• Immigrants.
  • 11.7 million immigrants arrived in the United States between 1870 and 1900.  This is one of every six Americans in 1900.
  • By 1882, 789,000 immigrants were arriving a year (the high mark of this period).
  • These immigrants were largely from Eastern and Southern Europe where earlier immigration had been more typically English speaking.
  • By 1900, 86 percent of the foreign born were in the states in which the industrial strength of the country lay. Even though immigrants did go to the frontier, immigration during this period overwhelmingly provided labor for the factories.

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Communities of Labor: Places for Public Life

The Urban Enclave

• Overwhelmingly immigrant communities. The decision to immigrate was seldom an individual decision. Immigrants most often came as extended families: brothers and sisters and parents and their children. Often letters went back to the country of origin talking about opportunities in America that brought more relatives and friends. Most often, arriving immigrants began life in America living with those that they knew from the old country.

• Thus, communities developed within the cities. Cities were composed of these ethnic enclaves. The same clustering patterns of the immigrants tended also to mark the other labor groups. These boundaries of these communities were marked by differences in language and culture.

• The communities found spaces for public life within:

• the stoop. The urban dwellers were densely packed in the slums of the city. Extended families contained many people; "apartments" could contain many families, buildings could contain many apartments; and blocks contained many buildings. Thus, the street and the front stoop became a meeting place where public life developed.

• the church. One of the institutions of the community was the ethnic church. Most often it was catholic or some sort of orthodox catholic. Church was most often conducted in the language of the homeland. Thus, the church became a gathering place for the community and thus for public life.

• the workplace. Because there was relative immobility, factories supported particular enclaves. Typically, many from the family, and from the neighborhood, worked together in the factory. The factory thus became a site for public life of the community. Importantly, only in this latter space did public life cross ethnic and community lines.

The Company Town

• Mining and some manufacturing was located in created towns of laborers. These towns were built by the owners. The company owned the store, other businesses, all the housing, and usually the services such as medical care. The cost of living -- food, housing, clothing, medical care, etc. -- would be deducted from the employees paycheck each payday.

• Ethnic diversity varied in these factory towns. The same pattern of letters home and migrations following tended to concentrate particular ethnic identities in these factory towns. But because tthey absorbed labor from several sources and because they were typically smaller than the cities because they supported a single factory or mine, they tended to draw from several different sources of labor.

• Places for public life were more confined. Because the company owned the town, they were not eager to provide physical spaces for public life. Workers had to convert places constructed with some incentive into places for public life.
  • The church. Because factory owners viewed religion as a necessary element of workers lives they welcomed the church to the factory town. Churches thus became ethnic gathering places just as they were in the urban enclaves. But there might be fewer in the factory towns with more interaction across ethnic lines.
  • The tavern. A good factory town tavern was another way of recouping the wages of workers. So they became gatherning places for male workers in the communities.
  • The store. A typical place for women to make a public life..
  • The workplace. The long hours and relative paucity of other activities meant that contact at the workplace was a constant of life.

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The Labor Movement

We want to focus on the place of speaking in the labor movement. What did the laborers face as barriers to their uniting in a movement? What were the motivational problems that blocked their unity? What resources did labor leaders have that they could draw upon in using discourse to forge that unity?

The Motivational Problem

• Work was not tied to labor activity. Jobs were given by employers not by unions. No union certification was necessary to employment as it is in many places today. In fact, quite the contrary. Labor activity could cause you to be fired as an agitator, or even killed in confrontations with armed forces representing the employers or the government.

• Participation had to be motivated in the face of risk:

• Economic risk. Union activity could cost people their jobs. And with many in a family working, a entire family of five or six or more wage-earners could lose their jobs. Your participation in the union could cost everyone in your extended family their livlihood. Without jobs, there was no support other than others in the community. With factories tied to particular enclaves, there were not other possibilities for jobs.

• Physical risk. Industrialists regularly hired security -- "goons" to the workers -- and enlisted police forces from governments to beat or even kill workers. Typically, organized union action would be met with quasi-military force. Non-union workers could even be set onto union workers with threats that the union activity was costing them jobs in the plant. Overall, there was a climate of physical violence that surrounded union activity.

• Union activity violated the rhetoric of individualism. The rhetoric of individual initiative and the freedom of individuals to choose their employment dominated in this time. The rhetoric of the free individual, polished in the reform movements, now dominated people's thinking. The victory against slavery declared that workers were now free to choose their place of employment. This rhetoric empowered understanding of one's position far more than any rhetoric of constraints on that choice. Workers often saw that there were jobs there, not that there were only jobs in a limited number of factories or even one factory.

Resources that rhetors could call upon

• Material Conditions that rhetoric could capture and transform to motivation:
  • The disparity of rich and poor. The immense difference in wealth between the industrialist and the worker was a fairly obvious presence to the workers. Particularly in the mining or factory town, the squalor of the workers huts contrasted with the opulence of the owners mansion on the hill above the town.
  • Urban squalor. Although their communities could be culturally rich, they were often materially poor. The word "slums" was invented in this period to characterize the American city enclaves. Crowding, filth, sanitation problems, disease, all marked the everyday conditions.
  • Factory conditions. Industry considered labor another cost of doing business. Industrialists would attempt to hire the cheapest labor they could. "To make a profit I must buy my iron from the cheapest source," they reasoned, "I must do the same with my labor." Immigration provided a seemingly endless supply of workers. Thus, wages could be kept low and the conditions of workers ignored. In addition, where slavery had provided a "skilled" worker in which the owner had an investment, the factory system sought to use organization to produce with an unskilled laborer. To the extent that the industrialist succeeded, any worker was as good as any other -- labor was another replaceable part. The result was squalid and dangerous conditions in the factory. Investment in safety made no sense since injured workers were not the responsibility of the factory and were easily replaced. Days were long, often twelve hours and more. Children as young as ten often worked in the factories. Conditions in the factories were indeed material conditions that could motivate public action.

 

• Social unity was a rhetoric that immigrants recognized. The rhetoric of individual initiative was grounded in American experience and thus was strongest in the New Urban Settlers and had far less power with the immigrants. The immigrants came from European locations where the rhetoric of class solidarity was a more common rhetoric. Thus, when the unions were seeking to organize immigrant workers, their discourse could relate to European notions.

The rhetorical challenge was to find a rhetoric that transformed these resources into motivation that would overcome the motivational problem.

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The Rhetorics of Labor

The Rhetoric of Business

The first rhetoric of labor was a rhetoric that talked about labor's situation in the vocabulary and patterns of business. This rhetoric accepted the industrial system and its rhetoric. It sought to commodify the skill. Economically, these unions sought to achieve their ends by restricting the quantity of workers available to the industrialist by emphasizing the skill. The union was then an organization supplying another input of the factory -- like the supplier of raw materials or of machinery.

• Used a terminology and logic of business. Talked of supply and demand, productivity, output and all those concepts. It was a heavily reasoned discourse that talked system and used the language of the new economics. Samuel Gompers: "the business organization of the workers."

• Built around a rhetoric of pride. Workers were praised for their skill and could talk about that skill with pride. There was even a class distinction with the skilled workers looking down upon the unskilled. Unionization, in this rhetoric, was for the skilled only.

• Used a rhetoric of self-improvement. This rhetoric shared a lot with the rhetoric of the entrepreneurial community. It preached individual initiative to improve oneself, believed that education was the secret to improvement and could depict the increased economic success of the worker to improvement from education (training, you will notice) in their skill.

• Commitment to Union was justified economically.

The major labor organization employing this rhetoric was the American Federation of Labor (AFL), founded in 1886. This was a federation of a number of skill unions: cigarmakers, ironworkers, carpenters, and so forth. Samuel Gompers was their major leader. Gompers was not their most dynamic speaker however. Like the industrialist, he was an organizational leader not an organizer. The strongest rhetors were those factory workers who organized their factories. This was the most conservative of the union rhetorics. It was also the most easily embraced by the industrialists because these union leaders were those that spoke the language and understood the logic of the industrialist.

This rhetoric was effective in organizing skilled labor, but ignored the vast majority of factory workers who were increasingly in factories organized with the unskilled techniques of mass production. It was the most peaceful of union rhetorics because it was based on skill rather than on a polemic struggle of good and evil.

Some rhetoric from this style

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The Rhetoric of the Working Class

This rhetoric took the contrast between the wealth of the industrialist and the poverty of the worker and transformed it into a rhetoric of class. It then motivated solidarity in this class as a way of confronting the wealthy class.

• Declared the unity of workers in their oppression. If workers are living in ethnic enclaves, this rhetoric must overcome that division by declaring that all are united in the working class. The rhetoric established that the significant separation in their lives was the class separation, not the ethnic separation.

• Declared a moral superiority in the working class. If workers were oppressed, there must be an alternative hierarchy that represented the workers superiority.

• Attacked the concentrated wealth of the industrial class. This was a strident rhetoric condemning the wealthy and their excesses.

• Rhetorical basis of appeal was broadly conceptualized.

• There was a use of religious metaphor. A rather blunt Biblical illusion was used to paint the worker as divine and the industrialist as devil. This was not an elaborate Biblical discourse, nothing more complicated than "money changer" references. It clearly marked an appeal to immigrants particularly where the church was an important institution. It melded the union effort with the religious dedication and made organizing the poor God's work.

• There was a use of American history. This rhetoric pictured the American revolution and equality as betrayed by industrialism. It depicted the work as completion of the revolution. This strategy appealed more to the New Urban Settlers, but also focused on American ideals which had drawn many immigrants to the United States.

The primary labor organization that used this rhetoric was the Knights of Labor, founded as a secret organization in 1869. Terence Powderly was their leader and his discourse exemplifies this discourse. The growth of the Knights was phenomenal and its demise as rapid. Its strength was that it did appeal to all workers and unified all workers. It motivated through its polemic hostility to industrialists. But as the industrialists met the anger and violence of the workers with violence of their own, the physical risk confronted laborers with stark reality. Thus, the Knights strength was also its weakness.

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The Rhetoric of Socialism and Anarchism

The rhetoric of business proposed to participate in the industrial system by founding an organization that would take a role in the organizational industrial culture. The rhetoric of the working class proposed to confront the industrial organizational structure with a counter-organization. The rhetoric of socialism proposed to use the government as an instrument of public action to check the industrial organization. The rhetoric of the anarchist sought to confront organization.

• Built on rhetoric of American equality. There were in fact two forms of socialist rhetoric: a nationally oriented rhetoric and an internationally oriented rhetoric. The national strain relied heavily on the American values of equality and democracy. The international strain, which was by far the less powerful in America, depended on a Marxian account of history.

• Revolutionary in tone. This was a confrontational rhetoric that rejected the system -- the industrial system and the government it controlled -- and motivated dramatic change in the system. Socialism sought to gain control by the political process. Anarchists believed that the political system itself would have to be destroyed.

This was the most strident of the rhetorics, but not the most successful in the American labor movement. Its major organization was the International Working Men's Organization in the late nineteenth Century and the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW or Wobblies) after its founding in 1905.

Some rhetoric from this style

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Exercises

• It is 1887. You are a labor organizer. You appear at the factory gates on pay day and begin to speak to those leaving their jobs. Using each of the three rhetorics of labor above, write a paragraph making the case for joining a union.

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