Immigrants and Workers

1
Immigrants and Workers

• Immigrants Numbers Sources and Location
• Movements for Restriction
• An Industrialized Labor Force
• Workers Strikes and Organizing

2
Immigration

• 1870-1900 11.6 million
• 1870-1920 25 million
• (1971-2000 nearly 21 million)
• Sources of the new immigration Southern and
  Eastern Europe
• Asia Mexico
• Movements for exclusion

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Sources
4
Locations
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Landing on Ellis Island (built 1892)  Immigrants
are brought in barges from the ships to the
Island.
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(No Transcript)
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New York tenement 1890s
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Tenement sweatshop
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II. Anti-immigrant Movements

• Chinese Exclusion Act 1882
• Literacy test bills vetoed in 1896 1913 1915
  passed in 1917
• National Origins Act 1924

10
Attitudes about Immigrants

• Open the door and let everybody come who wants
  to come . . . Until you get enough here to reduce
  the price of labor to such a point that its
  cheapness will stop their coming. Leland
  Stanford

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Advertisement 1880s
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Nativism

• American Protective Association 1887
• Immigration Restrictive League Boston elites
  1894
• Labor American men women and children cannot
  be what free people should be and compete with
  such degraded creatures in the labor movement.
  Marin Journal 1876

13
An Industrialized Labor Force Incomes

• Chicago Burlington and Quincy Railroad
• general manager 15000
• senior executives 4000
• middle managers 1500-4000
• clerical workers 800
• skilled blacksmiths etc. 500-600
• unskilled laborers 1.32/day

14
Women workers
15
Child labor West Virginia coal mines 1900 1/6
children aged 10-15 worked full time
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Working Conditions

• Wages and hours
• Safety
• Job Insecurity

17
The working people of this country suddenly find
that their boasted republicanism is not able to
save them from the miseries which they sought to
escape. They find monopolies as strong as
government itself. They find capital as rigid as
absolute monarchy. They find their so-called
independence a myth and that their subjection to
power is as complete as when their forefathers
were a part and parcel of the baronial
estate. Pennsylvania coal miner 1890s
.
.
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Workers Organize Reform Unionism
Knights of Labor 1869 -1890s all
producers Terrence Powderly 700000 workers
1886
19
Workers Organize Craft Unionism

• American Federation of Labor Columbus Ohio 1886
• skilled workers
• Samuel Gompers
• Economic not political action voluntarism
• About 5 of labor force 1900

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Workers Organize Industrial Unionism

• All workers skilled and unskilled across an
  industry
• American Railway Union
• Eugene V. Debs
• Pullman strike 1894
• United Mine Workers
• International Ladies Garment Workers Union

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Workers Demonstrate and Strike

• Great Railroad Strike 1877
• Haymarket rally and bombing 1886
• Homestead strike and lockout 1892
• Pullman strike 1894

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THE GREAT RAILROAD STRIKE OF 1877
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The Arsenal of Employers

• Company towns
• Strikebreakers
• Pinkerton Detective Agency
• Government state militias and U.S. troops
• Government court injunctions