Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [483]
In 1836 unions expanded their organizing drive in a desperate attempt to keep up with rocketing inflation. “The nominal value of every article of necessity has been greatly increased,” union leader Seth Luther told a Brooklyn labor audience, and working people were being “compelled to pay enormous rents or to be turned out of doors.” Yet despite climbing costs, Luther noted, the “price of labor has not received a proportionate advance.” Tailors, stonecutters, shoemakers, and cabinetmakers launched industrial actions—ten major turnouts in the skilled trades alone. Coal heavers and other unskilled laborers walked out as well. Even manure carters struck for an increase in pay from the Common Council.
As usual, the most convulsive strikes came on the waterfront. In February stevedores and riggers marched from ship to ship, pulling hundreds off the job, effectively shutting the port. Police efforts to disperse the strikers landed one watchman in the hospital with a fractured skull. The strike spread. One body of stevedores hived off from the docks and marched through the streets of the commercial district. Hundreds of laborers cleaning up postfire debris downed tools and joined them. High Constable Hays coaxed the fire workers back to their job, but the ongoing disruption of commerce led the mayor to call out the Twenty-seventh Regiment yet again. The troops paraded at City Hall Park in a show of force daunting enough to drive the stevedores back to work. For the first time, New York City had used the military to break a strike.
Despite this success, employers were thoroughly alarmed. In 1833 there had been virtually no labor movement. Now, in 1836, two-thirds of New York’s workingmen were enrolled in fifty-two confederated unions. Businessmen counterattacked by organizing pugnacious employer-only trade associations, like the Society of Master Tailors, which attacked unions for subverting the civic weal. Labor, the businessmen declared, was just like any other commodity, and its value should be set by the free market. Labor unions might in the short term interfere with the market’s “natural” workings and extort higher wages from businessmen, but this would only drive up prices, thus hurting consumers while making New York products uncompetitive. In the end strikers would only bankrupt their employers and liquidate their own jobs.
Workers, employers argued further, should pursue individual not collective improvement. An industrious and virtuous workman, especially if he stayed sober, would surely rise in society. Workingmen should quit unions, practice self-discipline, and join groups like the New-York City Temperance Society, which under evangelical merchant Robert Hartley’s leadership explicitly opposed trade unions.
Employers’ groups adopted tougher tactics too. Early in 1836 the Society of Master Tailors’ member-bosses cut wages and announced they would not employ union men. Journeyman tailors responded by launching a GTU-supported strike and by establishing cooperative workshops as an alternative to the wage system. February’s use of troops to end the dockworkers’ strike only redoubled the tailors’ militancy. Battles broke out among strikers, strikebreakers, and policemen. Other unions “turned out” too, so many that Bennett’s anti-union Herald perceived “a general movement over the city.”
The master tailors now turned to the courts, encouraged by a recent upstate ruling from Chief Justice Savage of the state supreme court. Declaring trade unions “monopolies of the most odious kind and injurious to trade,” Savage found that “a man has the right to work as he pleases” and that existing law forbade strikes. In late March the boss tailors, citing this precedent, won a conspiracy indictment against twenty strikers. In response, the unions