United States or Macao ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The Knights of Labor endeavored to annex the skilled men in order that the advantage from their exceptional fighting strength might lift up the unskilled and semi-skilled.
The change that occurred between 1870 and 1910 in the sources of the immigration which has furnished the United States with the bulk of its supply of unskilled and semi-skilled labor, is a commonplace of American industrial history.
The leaders of the Knights realized that mere numbers were not sufficient to defeat the employers and that control over the skilled, and consequently the more strategic occupations, was required before the unskilled and semi-skilled could expect to march to victory.
Very, very far away, light-years distant and light years apart, four shiploads of grain hurtled toward the famine-stricken planet of blueskins. Each great ship had a single semi-skilled blueskin for pilot and crew. Thousands of millions of suns blazed with violence appropriate to their stellar types in a galaxy of which a very small proportion had been explored and colonized by humanity.
Mary McLeod Bethune of the National Council of Negro Women, Robert C. Weaver, and Ralph Bunche, who later became the first Negro to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. The number of Afro-Americans hired by the Federal Government mushroomed rapidly. Between 1933 and 1946 the number rose from 50,000 to almost 200,000. Most, however, were employed in the lower, unskilled and semi-skilled, brackets.
About ninety per cent of them do unskilled labor. Only ten per cent of them do semi-skilled or skilled labor. They serve as common laborers, puddlers, mold-setters, painters, carpenters, bricklayers, cement workers and machinists. What the Negroes need then is that sort of freedom which carries with it industrial opportunity and social justice.
On the whole, however, though the Federation was not unmindful of the unskilled, still, during the fifteen years after 1898 it brought into its fold principally the upper strata of semi-skilled labor.
The craftsman, on the other hand, wished to use his superior bargaining strength for his own purposes and evinced little desire to dissipate it in the service of his humbler fellow worker. To give effect to that, he felt obliged to struggle against becoming entangled with undesirable allies in the semi-skilled and unskilled workers for whom the Order spoke.
The Knights of Labor held, as was seen, that the strategic or bargaining strength of the skilled craftsman should be used as a lever to raise the status of the semi-skilled and unskilled worker. It consequently grouped them promiscuously in "mixed assemblies" and opposed as long as it could the demand for "national trade assemblies."
The data published in the monthly U. S. Labor Bulletin covers most of the articles which are at all important in the wage earners' budget. The collection of such data, however, has remained spasmodic up to the present. See the article by H. S. Hanna in the October, 1919, issue of the Monthly Review of the U. S. Department of Labor. Data was collected for skilled, semi-skilled, and unskilled labor.
Word Of The Day