Explain the effects of the Haymarket Riot.Discuss the immediate and long term effects.?

Answer 1

The split in the US trade union movement that took place this week (25 July 2005) in Chicago at its most recent convention is only the latest in a series of divisions that have weakened the movement over the last century.
Trade unions are an endangered species in the United States today, with only one worker in eight a member of a union.
Excluding the public sector, it is less than one worker in 10.
Divisions over how to respond to this crisis have led the two biggest private sector unions to walk out of the US trade union federation, the AFL-CIO.
They want more money spent on organising workers who have never been union members, and less emphasis on lobbying Congress. And they believe that the stakes are very high for the future of American democracy.
"We're living through the most profound, significant, and historic economic revolution in our country's history," said Andrew Stern, leader of the breakaway union SEIU.
However, the current split echoes many other divisions in US trade union history.
And, along with a more hostile attitude towards unions by both government and employers, such divisions go a long way to explain the weakness of the US trade union movement today.
Mass mobilisation
The most famous split in US trade union history was the creation of the Congress of Industrial Organisations (CIO) itself in 1935. In the depth of the Depression, mineworkers leader John L Lewis led a bevy of industrial unions out of the existing US trade union federation, the AFL (the American Federation of Labor) , after a famous punch-up with its president William Green.
The CIO proceeded to organise the unskilled workers in mass production industries like steel and autos, through a series of sometimes violent strikes and with the tacit support of the Roosevelt administration.
By the l940s the union movement had doubled in size and represented one-third of the workforce, as compulsory union membership was introduced at many wartime production plants.
But after WWII, as the Cold War began, many CIO unions came under attack for being dominated by Communists.
In the end, a weakened CIO merged back with the AFL in 1955.
The Wobblies
But the CIO was not the first radical breakaway union in the USA.

In the early 1900s, a radical syndicalist union known as the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) sought to organise the unskilled, and criticised the conservative "business unionism" approach of the AFL, led by Samuel Gompers, which organised craft unions of skilled tradesmen.
The IWW led bloody, and ultimately unsuccessful, strikes in the textile towns of Lawrence, Massachusetts, and Paterson, New Jersey, which attracted support from artists and intellectuals.
And in the Western states, the Western Federation of Mineworkers, representing workers in hard rock mining like gold and copper, engaged in a series of violent strikes - with ample use of dynamite and guns on both sides - in towns like Butte, Montana, Cour D'Alene, Idaho, and Cripple Creek, Colorado.
Indeed, the violent early history of the US labour movement extends further back, to 1886, when workers seeking an eight-hour day (and lead by the Knights of Labor) were gunned down by police in the Haymarket riots in Chicago on 1 May - leading to the creation of May Day as an international labour holiday.

Violence and suppression
The splits in strategy in the US labour movement - between those who advocated violence and peaceful strikes, and between those who wanted to gain power through state action, and those who emphasised the workers acting on their own - reflected the deep-seated opposition to unions among other sections of US society.
Until the l930s union organising was illegal and employers could get court injunctions preventing strikes.
For example in the 1892 Homestead steel strike, the steel magnates like Andrew Carnegie could appoint their own deputies who suppressed the strike violently.
The big increase in US union membership in the 1930s and l940s corresponded with increasing support - and links - to the New Deal Democratic Party, who in turn introduced new laws, such as the Wagner Act, to strengthen union rights.

Democratic coalition
And the unions are still an important part of the democratic coalition today.
Although they represent only 12% of voters, "union households" (where one or more people are members of unions) are 25% of the electorate, and they do tend to vote more Democratic than average.
Union organisers and money are central for the "get out the vote" campaign that is crucial for modern US elections, where turn-out recently has been low. One consequence of the split may be that there will be less union effort to help the Democrats in future elections.
Of course, the unions leaving the AFL-CIO argue that the Democrats in recent years have not delivered on any of their promises to the unions.
"It's very clear that in the last decade, (the labour movement) has lost a lot of weight. No one is really taking them seriously," said Charles Hechshcer, Labor Studies Professor at Rutgers University in New Jersey.
But the new unionists may find that, with a Republican administration in power and more sophisticated opposition from private sector employers to union organising, they will face an uphill task.
"Maybe all they are doing is rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic," said Randel Johnson of the US Chamber of Commerce, an employers organisation.

Answer 2

Effects Of The Haymarket Riot

Answer 3

The overreaction by corrupt Industry bought police against union men helped galvanize the labor movement. Working men no longer trusted the owners; they began trusting the unions.