|
|
 |
 |
|
| Celebrating Labor Day |
|
 |
|
|
|
Lesson Activities
- Questionnaire and discussion. To initiate
a discussion of labor issues in the last third of
the nineteenth century, have students respond by indicating
whether they strongly agree, agree,
strongly disagree, or disagree with
each of the following statements. Create a chart divided
into four columns, and respond to each statement.
Tell the students that they should respond to the
statements from the perspective of a worker and a
business owner living in the late nineteenth century,
and then respond to the same statements from the perspective
of a worker and a business owner in the late twentieth
century:
- Workers have the right to organize and bargain
as a group about working conditions.
- Workers have the right to protest, hold parades,
give speeches, and withhold their services without
being fired by their employers.
- Eight hours is a reasonable period of time for
a workday.
- Business owners have the right to establish
working conditions at their companies.
- Business owners should be able to prevent unions
from organizing workers they have hired.
- A business owner should be able to control an
entire industry. For example, if a company is
able to control most railroads, mines, or steel
mills, it should be allowed to do so.
- It is the function of government to make laws
regulating business practices, such as the number
of businesses a corporation can own and how much
of the marketplace it can control.
- It is a proper function of government to make
laws regulating working conditions such as pay,
hours of work, and health and safety conditions.
- Government should be provided with the power
to help end strikes.
- Background on labor history. Students should
have some familiarity with, or conduct some research
about, labor history from approximately 1870 to 1900.
One way to review or reconstruct this period, is to
complete, individually or as a class, a chart of notable
labor disputes during this time with the categories
of: Date, Labor Dispute, Place, Company and Leader,
Union and Leader, Issue(s), and Outcome.
- Simulation. After students have completed
activities 1 and 2, divide the class into four groups:
company executives, labor leaders, progressive reformers
and newspaper reporters. Have each group research
the eight-hour-day movement. Conduct a public hearing
in which students playing the role of senators question
representatives from each of the four groups. Have
newspaper reporters prepare articles on the hearings.
Have legislators write a bill creating a law mandating
no more than an eight-hour day for presentation to
the president. Have the class discuss the bill, and
decide if the president should sign it.
For a brief overview of the eight hour day movement,
see The Encyclopedia of Chicago: http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/417.html
A song written in the 1800s during the union campaign
for the eight hour day still resonates for many of
us working in the 21st century:
We mean to make things over
We're tired of toil
for nought
But bare enough to live on; never
An hour for thought.
We want to feel the sunshine; we
Want to smell the flowers
We're sure that God has willed it
And we mean to have
eight hours.
We're summoning our forces from
Shipyard, shop and
mill
Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest
Eight hours for what
we will!
Song sung by the Knights of Labor and other workers
(1886)
For information on the Haymarket tragedy (described
in Joshua Freeman’s essay in this issue of HISTORY
NOW) as well as archives on anarchism, see:
http://www.chipublib.org/004chicago/
disasters/haymarket.html
For information about the Knights of Labor, the Haymarket
affair, and the life and work of Lucy Parsons, union
advocate and wife of Albert Parsons, unjustly accused
and executed as a participant in the Haymarket riot:
http://www.lucyparsonsproject.org/haymarket/
schneirov_nights_of_labor.html
|
|
|
