Men At Work

Library Company of Philadelphia

Philadelphia was in many ways the vanguard of the American labor movement. It was here that the first labor strike was executed in 1786. In 1806, the Philadelphia Mayor’s Court ruled that striking cordwainers were guilty of conspiring to force a wage increase. And in 1828, Philadelphia’s Working Men’s Party became the nation’s first labor party. As industrialization increased, workers were subjected to grueling workdays that could exceed fourteen hours for coal heavers. The Working Men’s Party campaigned for the rights of the working class by running reform candidates in the city’s elections. Their platform was not limited to labor policy, but extended to other concerns of the city’s poor. Though the union was destroyed by factionalism after just three years, many of its platforms were passed shortly after the union's demise, including free public school for all children, the elimination of debtor’s prisons, and a ten-hour workday.

John Swift, Mayor of Philadelphia

New York Public Library

John Swift was born in Philadelphia and served as the city’s mayor from 1832 to 1838, then 1839 to 1841, and 1845 to 1849, as well as being a prominent lawyer.

In the spring of 1836 Schuylkill dockers clashed with coal merchants when they sought a wage advance from their employers. When dockers struck, merchants won the assistance of Swift, who had eight day laborers arrested and set their bail at an exceedingly high $2,500 in hopes of breaking the strike. Swift’s plan backfired, however, as the high bail made martyrs of those arrested. The GTU came to their aid, admitted the dockers into the organization, and helped fund their defense, which proved successful when they were acquitted of breaching the peace and conspiracy charges.

Founders of the Knights of Labor

Library of Congress

While the General Trades Union of Philadelphia proved short-lived, its significance to organized labor movements reached into the next century. The General Strike of 1835, the nation’s first general strike, proved successful and was employed by other American labor movements in the postbellum years, most notably in St. Louis in 1877 and throughout the nation in 1919. By admitting unskilled dockers into their union, the GTU of Philadelphia set a precedent not replicated until after the Civil War when it became a primary objective of the Knights of Labor, the first national industrial union in the United States.

The founders of the Knights of Labor are shown here in an 1886 lithograph. Together, the general strike and the inclusion of unskilled laborers in unions ultimately proved effective for organized labor during another dire period for American workers: the Great Depression.

To the Mechanics and Working-Men of the Fifth Ward

Library of Congress

In the decades preceding the General Trades Union Strike, the printing of broadside became a tool of the working-class to promote and share ideas among the people. This particular broadside from the 1820s was politically motivated and called upon the Mechanics and Working Men of Philadelphia's Fifth Ward to condemn the utopian beliefs of Robert Owen.

This broadside states, "It must be known to you, that Robert Owen, acting under the influence of one of the wildest fancies that ever entered into the imagination of man, conceived himself capable of subverting entirely the organization of civilized society, and reorganizing it upon a plan of his own view." The utopian views of Owen and his son R.D. Owen were seen as anti-thetical to the values of the "mechanics and working men" of Philadelphia, so in order to prevent the spread of these values, they were pushing for the election of Anthony Lamb to become alderman, as his values and interests were aligned with the working class of Philadelphia.

Former Site of the Schuylkill Wharves

Along this section of the Schuylkill River in May 1835, coal heavers on the wharves went on strike for a ten-hour day. The dockers were joined by the city’s other tradesmen and eventually won the ten-hour limit. A year later in the spring of 1836 the dockers sought a wage advance from their employers, leading to more labor conflict. In the twenty-first century, this stretch of the riverbank became known as the Schuylkill Banks, a popular river-trail park bound on one side by water and on the other side by train tracks, a reminder of the river’s industrial past.

In this April 2015 photograph showing the section roughly between Walnut Street and South Street, the tracks on which the string of oil tankers sat run to refining facilities just south of central Philadelphia. (Photograph by Donald D. Groff for The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia)