American Labor Unions

American Labor Unions is a substantial study by Helen Marot, the American labour activist, writer, and editor who lived from 1865 to 1940 and who was one of the leading American Progressive era figures in the substantial movement for industrial labour reform and for the development of women’s trade unionism. The book was published in 1914 and presents Marot’s substantial analysis of the American labour union movement at the moment when American industrial unionism was undergoing substantial development and conflict.

Marot was substantially involved in the Women’s Trade Union League, the substantial American organisation founded in 1903 to support the development of women’s trade unionism and to bridge the substantial gap between middle class women reformers and working class women workers that characterised much of the broader American Progressive era reform movement. She served as secretary of the New York chapter of the WTUL during the substantial period when the organisation was central to the various major American industrial disputes including the New York shirtwaist strike of 1909 and the broader textile workers’ organising efforts of the period.

Marot’s American Labor Unions presents the substantial historical and analytical material that her years of practical organising and observation had given her access to. The book covers the substantial historical development of American trade unionism from the early nineteenth century craft unions through the major industrial unions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The various major American labour organisations are treated including the Knights of Labor, the American Federation of Labor, the Industrial Workers of the World, and the various other organisations that had been substantial in American labour history.

The analytical material addresses the substantial questions about the relationship between American trade unionism and the broader American political and economic system. Marot was working in the period when American socialism, syndicalism, and the various other radical labour movements were substantially active alongside the more conventional craft and industrial unionism, and her analysis engages substantially with the various theoretical and practical questions about the proper relationship between American labour organising and the broader political and economic transformation that various of the radicals were advocating.

The book is essential reading for historians of American labour, of the Progressive era, and of American women’s reform movements. It pairs naturally with the substantial broader American labour history literature of the period.