What was the difference between skilled and semi skilled workers during the Gilded Age quizlet?

By the late 1800s the United States' industrial output and GDP was growing faster than that of any other country in the world. [What is GDP?]
At the center of the nation's economic success was a dynamic and expansive industrial capitalism, one consequence of which was mass immigration. From 1865 to 1918, 27.5 million immigrants poured into the United States, many aspiring to the opportunities afforded by the nation's economic successes

The late nineteenth century was a time when industrial capitalism was new, raw, and sometimes brutal. Between 1881 and 1900, 35,000 workers per year lost their lives in industrial and other accidents at work, and strikes were commonplace: no fewer than 100,000 workers went on strike each year. In 1892, for example, 1,298 strikes involving some 164,000 workers took place across the nation. Unions—which function to protect workers' wages, hours of labor, and working conditions—were on the rise.

Strikes and strikebreaking: The Homestead Strike
On June 29, 1892, Henry Clay Frick, the manager of the Homestead Steelworks outside Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania—motivated by a desire to break the union of skilled steel workers who for years had controlled elements of the workflow on the shop floor in the steel mill and slowed output—locked the members of the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers (AA) out of the Homestead Steelworks. In response, the next day, AA members struck the plant.

Photograph of Henry Clay Frick.
Henry Clay Frick, manager of the Homestead Steelworks. Image courtesy Library of Congress.
In the first days of the strike, Frick decided to bring in a group of strikebreakers (commonly called scabs).

To get inside the steelworks, the replacement workers would have the daunting task of making their way past picketing strikers who had surrounded the steelworks. But Frick hadn't hired any old strikebreakers: he decided to hire men from the Pinkerton detective agency, who were technically dubbed "detectives" but who were actually armed men seeking to push past striking workers and forcibly reopen the steelworks.

On July 6, gunfire broke out between striking workers and some of the three hundred Pinkerton detectives that Frick had hired. The Pinkerton agents, who were aboard barges being towed toward the side of the steelworks that bordered the Monongahela River, were pinned down in the barges by gunfire from the striking workers. By the next afternoon, with several having been killed on both sides, the Pinkertons raised a white flag of surrender.

Five days later, however, 6,000 state militiamen who had been dispatched by the governor of Pennsylvania marched into town, surrounded the steelworks, and reopened the plant. The state government had sided with the owners. The union had been defeated.

  1. Arts and Humanities
  2. History
  3. History of the Americas

  • Flashcards

  • Learn

  • Test

  • Match

  • Flashcards

  • Learn

  • Test

  • Match

Terms in this set (44)

There were and are many bad and good effects on monopolies. Consumers of a monopoly product pay a higher price than they would have under a competitive market, so there is a transfer of income from the consumers to the owners of the monopoly. In general, owners of businesses, including stockholders, tend to be wealthier than the buyers of a monopoly product, so this causes a transfer of income from poorer people to wealthier people, creating a greater inequity than would otherwise be the case. This is very clear in the idea of the gilded age. Some monopolies do maintain research and development because the barriers to entry into the industry may be short-lived, which is true in the case of patents, for instance, so in today's day and age drug companies continually spend billions of dollars every year developing new drugs.
Monopolies will also often use the legal system to thwart would-be competitors, especially with regard to patents. Even when the monopolist does not have a strong legal position, the exorbitant cost of defending against a patent suit in most countries can effectively suppress competition in many cases. Monopolies do however create a more powerful economy which everyone 'benefits' off of so the effects are not really black and white.

The Knights of Labor began as a secret society of tailors in Philadelphia in 1869. The organization grew slowly during the hard years of the 1870s, but worker militancy rose toward the end of the decade, especially after the great railroad strike of 1877, and the Knights' membership rose with it. Grand Master Workman Terence V. Powderly took office in 1879, and under his leadership, the Knights flourished; by 1886 the group had 700,000 members. Powderly dispensed with the earlier rules of secrecy and committed the organization to seeking the eight-hour day, abolition of child labor, equal pay for equal work, and political reforms including the graduated income tax The American Federation of Labor was organized in 1886. Its president was Samuel Gompers, who served until 1925. During Gompers' presidency, the AFL rose to more than 4 million members by 1920, after which its membership declined until 1933 when it was not much more than 2 million. The purpose of the AFL was to organize skilled workers into national unions consisting of others in the same trade. Their purpose was not political and aimed simply at shorter hours, higher wages, and better working conditions. The unwillingness of the AFL to address the needs of unskilled and semi-skilled workers in mass production industries led to the establishment of the Committee for Industrial Organization by eight international unions within the AFL. The CIO did not succeed in changing AFL attitudes and the following year, the then-ten members of the CIO were expelled from the AFL. The CIO reorganized in 1938 and changed their name to the Congress of Industrial Organizations.

The Pullman strike was an important labor strike. On May 11, 1894, workers of the Pullman Palace Car Company in Chicago struck to protest wage cuts and the firing of union representatives. They sought support from their union, the American Railway Union, led by Eugene V. Debs, and on June 26 the ARU called a boycott of all Pullman railway cars. Within days, 50,000 rail workers complied and railroad traffic out of Chicago came to a halt. When the railroad owners asked the federal government to intervene, Attorney General Richard Olney, a director of the Burlington and Santa Fe railroads, obtained (July 2) a court injunction. On July 4, President Cleveland dispatched troops to Chicago. Much rioting and bloodshed ensued, but the government's actions broke the strike and the boycott soon collapsed. Debs and three other union officials were jailed for disobeying the injunction.

Sets with similar terms

Other sets by this creator

Verified questions

US HISTORY

Verified answer

US HISTORY

Verified answer

US HISTORY

Verified answer

US HISTORY

Verified answer

Recommended textbook solutions

What was the difference between skilled and semi skilled workers during the Gilded Age quizlet?

What was the difference between skilled and semi skilled workers during the Gilded Age quizlet?

What was the difference between skilled and semi skilled workers during the Gilded Age quizlet?

What was the difference between skilled and semi skilled workers during the Gilded Age quizlet?

Other Quizlet sets

Related questions

What was the difference between skilled and semiskilled workers during the Gilded Age?

What was the difference between skilled and semiskilled workers during the Gilded Age? Skilled workers were less common, possessed technical skills, and enjoyed better wages depending on the industry. In "The Souls of Black Folk," W. E. B. DuBois argues that blacks brought three gifts to America.

What was labor like in the Gilded Age?

Compared to today, workers were extremely vulnerable during the Gilded Age. As workers moved away from farm work to factories, mines and other hard labor, they faced harsh working conditions such as long hours, low pay and health risks. Children and women worked in factories and generally received lower pay than men.

What is meant by the name the Gilded Age and what did this mean to workers in the US quizlet?

The Gilded Age refers to the era of rapid economic and population growth in the United States during the post-Civil War and post-Reconstruction eras of the late 19th century. it have technology, big business, urbanization, immigration and reaction segment.

Why is the period between 1870 and 1890 known as the Gilded Age quizlet?

The era from 1870 to 1890 was called the Gilded Age because it suggested that outward appearances were misleading, and one needed to look under the surface to understand what was happening.