UNIONS ARE ESSENTIALLY working people standing together, in solidarity, to form collective power in the workplace and sometimes beyond. One root of this type of power in the United States stretches back to 1824, when in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, hundreds of girls—teenagers mostly, but some as young as seven—led what they called a “turnout,” which would become the first factory strike in US history.

The girls worked at a dam-powered cotton mill, where their bosses had met the night before and decided to cut their pay by 25 percent while simultaneously extending their thirteen- to fifteen-hour workdays by yet another hour. The day after the bosses announced these new conditions, 102 workers blocked the mill entrances at start time. They held a meeting there, just outside the factory, in front of their bosses and the rest of the town. They resolved not to go inside to work, and by the next day, their turnout had spread to the other cotton mills in town. It lasted a week, until one of the mills mysteriously caught fire, in what was perhaps the first act of industrial sabotage in this country’s long, rich history of industrial sabotage. The day after the fire, mill owners negotiated better hours and pay and safer conditions with the teenage strike leaders.

The Uprising of the 20,000 was part of a wave of strikes that blew the top off of whatever had been containing the remaining rage and militancy of workers during the Gilded Age, a time that, until around the turn of the twenty-first century, marked the greatest level of economic disparity in US history. One response to this period of great and growing labor strife was a legislative one—the National Labor Relations Act of 1935.

The NLRA was created as a system to manage industrial conflict. It, through the government agency it precipitated, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), supports labor organizing through its power to compel employers to recognize unions and bargain over working conditions. The NLRB represented a significant shift in the government’s stance with regard to unions: from repression to what has been called “integrative prevention.” The legislation marked a turning point in union density, too—membership shot up, because the government was suddenly regulating and protecting workers’ rights, and the strike wave that led to its passage died down as strikes became more limited to the bread-and-butter issues of wages and benefits that arose during contract renewal fights at already union worksites.

Of course, the NLRA is not what gives workers the right to organize. Working people have the right to assemble and can withhold their labor with or without the NRLA. They had been doing so and winning since long before 1935, both in the United States and around the world. And, anyway, almost immediately after its passage, the protections that were established by the NLRA were peeled away.

In 1938, just three years after the NLRA’s passing, the Supreme Court ruled in its Mackay Radio decision that while workers could not be fired for striking, they could be permanently replaced. Under the Mackay doctrine, as it came to be called, if workers struck for economic gains like raises and improved working conditions, the employer could hire permanent replacements—scabs, as they are otherwise known—and then not have to give the workers their jobs back when the strike was over. For workers, the difference between the terms fired and permanently replaced was of little importance if both meant they were out of a job. After a short curve of learning how to wield this new crushing tool, bosses realized that, since they can hire scabs to keep production moving during a strike, there is little incentive to reach an agreement with current employees at the bargaining table.

Despite the modest protections of the NLRA and the active threat of the Mackay doctrine, workers in the mid-1940s launched another massive strike wave, which included over five million workers at public utilities and in industries like coal and steel, meatpacking, and auto manufacturing. In 1946 in Pittsburgh alone, 120,000 workers went on strike. This time, instead of passing legislation that would calm strife as it had in 1935, Congress did the opposite. In 1947, it ratified the Taft-Hartley Act, or the Labor-Management Relations Act, even over the veto of President Harry S. Truman. This vile law establishes a litany of constraints on union activity. It prohibits certain strikes and boycotts. It limits union political power by banning federal campaign contributions. It allows states to pass right-to-work laws, which were first championed by Jim Crow architects as a way to prevent the coming together of Black and white workers into the same unions.

the labor movement loves to trace its lineages through the deep palimpsest of antecedent organizations and their mergers and the internal culture shifts they necessitated