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Craft unionism



Craft unionism refers to an approach to union organizing in the United States and elsewhere that seeks to unify workers in a particular industry along the lines of the particular craft or trade that they work in. It contrasts with industrial unionism, in which all workers in the same industry are organized into the same union, regardless of differences in skill.


 


Craft unionism is perhaps best exemplified by many of the construction unions that formed the backbone of the old American Federation of Labor (which later merged with the industrial unions of the Congress of Industrial Organizations to form the AFL-CIO). Under this approach, each union is organized according to the craft, or specific work function, of its members. For example, in the building trades, all carpenters belong to the carpenters' union, the plasterers join the plasterers' union, and the painters belong to the painters' union. Each craft union has its own administration, its own policies, its own collective bargaining agreements and its own union halls. The primary goal of craft unionism is the betterment of the members of the particular group and the reservation of job opportunities to members of the union and those workers allowed to seek work through the union's hiring hall.


 


This distinction between craft and industrial unionism was a hotly contested issue in the first four decades of the twentieth century, as the craft unions that held sway in the American Federation of Labor sought to block other unions from organizing on an industrial basis in the steel and other mass production industries. The dispute ultimately led to the formation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, which split from the AFL to establish itself as a rival organization. The distinction between craft and industrial unions persists today, but no longer has the political significance it once had.


Origins of craft unionism in the United States

The first unions established in the United States in the early nineteenth century tended, by nature of the industries in which their members worked, to be craft unions: shoemakers, cordwainers (shoemakers who work with cordovan leather) and typesetters all worked, as a rule, in small shops in which they had little contact with workers in other fields. Some of these early unions also came out of a guild tradition, in which skilled workmen often owned their own shops or, if they worked for another, had a good deal of control over how the work was done, which they policed by maintaining standards for admission into the trade, requiring entrants to go through an apprenticeship program controlled by the union, rather than the employer, and dictating the processes, tools, standards and pace of work. These traditions persisted into the twentieth century in fields such as printing, in which the International Typographers Union would enforce its own rules determining how work was done in union shops, and in the construction industry.


 


These practices began to give way in many trades, however, with the advent of industrialization in the second quarter of the twentieth century. The most impressive example was in the textile industry, which created massive new factories staffed by unskilled workers that displaced the small scale and home workshops of weavers in New England. New industrial processes and markets also gave rise, however, to many small shops in which semiskilled and unskilled workers did a discrete portion of the work that a skilled worker might have done a decade earlier. The wholly new industry of ready-made clothes, as an example, replaced the workshops run by established master tailors with small operations where unskilled workers were "sweated" – a term that entered popular usage in the middle of the nineteenth century – to produce clothes for all classes of customers, from slaves to gentlemen. Gender and ethnicity also played a part in these new patterns of work: the cotton and woolen mills in New England hired primarily young unmarried girls, often straight from the farm, to tend their machines, while sweatshops most frequently exploited immigrant workers.


 


Those workers who could hold on to their skill and their control over work processes, such as carpenters, butchers and printers, resisted by forming craft unions. They not only extolled the dignity of work and the dignity of the master worker, but frequently defined themselves by what they were not: to that end, craft unions often developed rigid entrance requirements that excluded women, immigrants, African-Americans and other minority workers.

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