Hostname: page-component-788cddb947-pt5lt Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-10-14T06:22:15.190Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Strikebreaking and the Labor Market in the United States, 1881–1894

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 March 2009

Joshua L. Rosenbloom
Joshua L. Rosenbloom
Affiliation:
Associate Professor, Department of Economics, University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS 66045 and Research Associate, National Bureau of Economic Research
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Using data from a sample of over 2,000 individual strikes in the United States from 1881 to 1894 this article examines geographic, industrial, and temporal variations in the use of strikebreakers and the sources from which they were recruited. The use of strikebrekers was not correlated with business cycle and did not vary appreciably by region or city size, but employers located outside the Northeast or in smaller cities were more likely to use replacement workers recruited from other places. The use of strikebreakers also varied considerably across industries, and was affected by union authorization and strike size.

Type
Articles
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 58 , Issue 1 , March 1998 , pp. 183 - 205
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1998

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Bailey, Gary L. “The Commissioner of Labor's ‘Strikes and Lockouts’: A Cautionary Note.” Labor History 32, no. 3 (1991): 432–40.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bennett, Sari, and Earle, Carville. “The Geography of Strikes in the United States, 1881–1894.” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 13, no.1 (1982): 63–84.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brecher, Jeremy. Strike! Boston: South End Press, 1972.Google Scholar
Brown, Martin, and Philips, Peter. “Craft Labor and Mechanization in Nineteenth-Century American Canning.” this JOURNAL 46, no. 3 (1986): 743–56.Google Scholar
Card, David, and Olson, Craig A.. “Bargaining Power, Strike Durations, and Wage Outcomes: An Analysis of Strikes in the 1880s.” Journal of Labor Economics 13, no. 1 (1995): 32–61.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chandler, Alfred D. Jr, The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977.Google Scholar
Commons, John R., Sappos, David J., Sumner, Helen L., et al. History of Labour in the United States, Vol. 2. New York: Macmillan, 1918.Google Scholar
Cramton, Peter C., and Tracy, Joseph S.. “The Use of Replacement Workers in Union Contract Negotiations: The U.S. Experience, 1980–1989.” NBER Working Paper no. 5106 (05 1995).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cumbler, John T. “Labor, Capital, and Community: The Struggle for Power.” Labor History 15, no. 3 (1974): 395–415.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Currie, Janet, and Ferrie, Joseph. “Strikes and the Law in the U.S., 1881–1894: New Evidence on the Origins of American Exceptionalism.” NBER Working Paper, no. 5368 (11 1995).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dawson, Andrew. “The Paradox of Dynamic Technological Change and the Labor Aristocracy in the United States, 1880–1914.” Labor History 20, no. 3 (1979): 325–51.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Edwards, Alba M. “A Social-Economic Grouping of the Gainful Workers in the United States.” Journal of the American Statistical Association 28, no. 4 (1933), 377–87.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Edwards, P. K.Strikes in the United States, 1881–1974. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1981.Google Scholar
Ehrlich, Richard L. “Immigrant Strikebreaking Activity: A Sampling of Opinion Expressed in the ‘National Labor Tribune’.” Labor History 15, no.4 (1974), 529–42.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Friedman, Gerald. “Strike Success and Union Ideology: The United States and France, 1880–1914.” this JOURNAL 48, no. 1 (1988): 1–26.Google Scholar
Foner, Philip S. History of the Labor Movement in the United States. 2nd ed. Vol. 2: From the Founding of the American Federation of Labor to the Emergence of American Imperialism. New York: International Publishers, 1975.Google Scholar
Gordon, David M., Edwards, Richard, and Reich, Michael. Segmented Work, Divided Workers: The Historical Transformation of Labor in the United States. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982.Google Scholar
Gutman, Herbert G. “Reconstniction in Ohio: Negroes in the ocking Valley Coal Mines in 1873 and 1874.” Labor History 3, no.3 (1962): 243–64.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gutman, Herbert G.. “The Worker's Search for Power: Labor in the Gilded Age.” In The Gilded Age: A Reappraisal, edited by Wayne, Morgan H., pp. 31–54. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1970.Google Scholar
Heckman, James J., “Sample Selection Bias as a Specification Error.” Econometrica 47, no. 1 (1979): 153–61.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kennan, John. “The Economics of Strikes.” In Handbook of Labor Economics. 2 vols., edited by Ashenfelter, Orley and Layard, Richard, pp. 1091–138. Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1986.Google Scholar
Lebergott, Stanley. Manpower in Economic Growth: The American Record Since 1800. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964.Google Scholar
Maddala, G. S., Limited–Dependent and Qualitative Variables in Econometrics. Econometric Society Monographs, no. 3. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Montgomery, David. “Strikes in Nineteenth–Century America.” Social Science History 4, no. 1 (1980): 81–104.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Montgomery, David. “Strikes of Machinists in the United States, 1870–1922.” In Strikes, Wars and Revolutions in an International Perspective, edited by Haimson, Leopold H. and Tilly, Charles, pp. 269–88. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mullin, Debbie. “The Porous Umbrella of the AFL: Evidence from Nineteenth–Century State Labor Bureau Reports on the Establishment of American Unions.” Ph.D. diss., University of Virginia, 1993.Google Scholar
Nelson, Daniel. Managers and Workers: Origins of the New Factory System in the United States, 1880–1920. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1975.Google Scholar
Ozanne, Robert. A Century of Labor Management Relations. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1967.Google Scholar
Rosenbloom, Joshua L. “Employment Agencies and Labor Exchanges Before the First World War: An Examination of the Methods of Labor Market Adjustment.” Photocopy, Department of Economics, University of Kansas, 1991.Google Scholar
Rosenbloom, Joshua L.. “Looking for Work, Searching for Workers: U.S. Labor Markets after the Civil War.” Social Science History 18, no. 3 (1994): 377–403.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rosenbloom, Joshua L.. “Was There a National Labor Market at the End of the Nineteenth Century? New Evidence on Earnings in Manufacturing.” this JOURNAL 56, no. 3 (1996): 626–56.Google Scholar
Rosenbloom, Joshua L.. “The Extent of the Labor Market in the United States, 1850–1914.” Social Science History (forthcoming, 1998).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tuttle, William M. Jr “Some Strikebreakers' Observations of Industrial Warfare.” Labor History 7, no. 2 (1966): 193–96.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tuttle, William M. Jr, “Labor Conflict and Racial Violence: The Black Worker in Chicago, 1894–1919.” Labor History 10, no. 3 (1969): 408–32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tygiel, Jules. “Tramping Artisans: The Case of the Carpenters in Industrial America.” Labor History 22, no.3 (1981): 348–76.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ulman, Lloyd. The Rise of the National Trade Union. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1955.Google Scholar
U.S. Bureau of Labor. Third Annual Report of the Commissioner of Labor. Washington, DC: GPO, 1888.Google Scholar
U.S. Bureau of Labor. Tenth Annual Report of the Commissioner of Labor. Washington, DC: GPO, 1896.Google Scholar
U.S. Bureau of Labor. Sixteenth Annual Report of the Commissioner of Labor.Washington, DC: GPO, 1901.Google Scholar
U.S. Bureau of the Census. Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970, Bicentennial Edition. Washington, DC: GPO, 1975.Google Scholar
Whatley, Warren C. “African–American Strikebreaking from the Civil War to the New Deal.” Social Science History 17, no. 4 (1993): 525–58.CrossRefGoogle Scholar