Toward industrial organization: Timber workers, unionism and syndicalism in the Pacific Northwest, 1900-1917.
Item
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Title
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Toward industrial organization: Timber workers, unionism and syndicalism in the Pacific Northwest, 1900-1917.
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Identifier
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AAI9405519
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identifier
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9405519
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Creator
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Dreyfus, Philip Jacques.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Irwin Yellowitz
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Date
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1993
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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History, United States | History, Modern | Sociology, Industrial and Labor Relations
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Abstract
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This dissertation examines the communities, labor struggles and organization efforts of timber workers in the Pacific Northwest in the first two decades of the twentieth century. These workers, natives and immigrants alike, struck repeatedly against their employers' efforts to cut wages and destroy union prerogatives in an industry characterized by alternate bouts of reckless competition and cartelization. Frequently violent employer and middle-class assaults against both the standard of living and the constitutional liberties of workers tended to forge fighting alliances between workers of disparate industrial, national and religious backgrounds. The physical proximity of timber workers to one another in class-segregated, single-industry towns and isolated lumber camps reinforced a sense of commonality. This commonality was at all times counter-balanced by potentially divisive ethnic loyalties or union affiliations.;By the First World War, skilled and unskilled, native and foreign-born timber workers had come to wage convergent struggles against their employers through two apparently antagonistic labor organizations, the A.F.L. and the I.W.W. This study posits that these unions represented workers whose aspirations were not as far removed from each other by 1917 as one might assume. Practical considerations such as improved wages and conditions and effective industrial unionism played a more important role in driving workers' oppositional tactics than ideology. The ultimate intervention of the United States government in wartime strikes imposed a stability on the industry that benefitted workers in the short run while depriving them of independent organization. Workers' experiences in two decades of progressively extensive and frequently fruitless confrontations with their employers combined with material, if not general, victories assisted by the government served as a basis for shaping workers' tactics and ideas in the decades beyond the First World War.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
