one-man-shop

Updated: June 7, 2025

In the eighties, it became doubly clear that industry had gone beyond the one-man-shop stage; self-employment had to stand or fall with the cooperative or self-governing workshop. The protagonist of this most interesting and most idealistic striving of American labor was the "Noble Order of the Knights of Labor," which reached its height in the middle of the eighties.

Selig Perlman - A History of Trade Unionism in the United States