In 1899 the unions of New Haven published an Illustrated History of the Trades Council of New Haven and Affiliated Unions. Along with short descriptions of the city's unions, photographs of their officers, and greetings from local societies and shop owners, the journal published articles dealing with issues of the day. Although the authors sometimes expressed quite different points of view, they all helped impart two basic messages. The first was that the ability of working people to shape their own lives depended on their level of organization and cooperation with each other. The second was that the welfare of the city depended on the community action of its working men and women. As the veteran labor activist George McNeill put it: "The organization of laborers in Trades Unions recognizes the fact that mutualism is preferable to individualism."

Jack Kennedy campaigning in front of the New Haven Public Library, 1960 PHOTO: Greater New Haven Labor History Assoc.

The men and women who put that Illustrated History together reflected on the experiences of the labor movement that had already influenced New Haven's life for sixty-five years They noted that their city of more than 108,000 inhabitants was "not only the center of trade but of a widespread railway system and the marts of agricultural exchanges, [and] also the seat of vast manifold manufacturing activities." It had become home to 137 metal fabricating firms, 65 clothing shops, 44 producers of home and business supplies, 54 cigar companies, and 44 manufacturers of beverages. New Haven, the Illustrated History concluded, may justly be regarded as one of the coming cities of the United States.

This industrial growth had been made possible by the arrival of tens of thousands of immigrants. Most members of the Trades Council were children of men and women who had emigrated from Ireland. The city was also an important center of German-American, Polish, African-American, and Swedish life. The early years of this century brought a rapid expansion of the Jewish population, while Italians replaced the Irish as the largest foreign-born group in the city Through family networks, fraternal lodges, churches and synagogues, theatrical and musical clubs, and newspapers published in their own languages, the migrants breathed a vitality into even the poorest neighborhoods surrounding the city's factories.

The labor movement first flourished in the immigrant communities. Earlier there had been delegates sent from New Haven to the New England Association of Farmers, Mechanics, and other Working Men in 1831 and to the national convention of shoemakers in New York five years later, but they left behind little trace of their local activity. Back then New Haven had only about 10,000 residents, and the workers of its docks and small shops were mostly Yankees or African-Americans. But between 1850 and 1870, the city grew more rapidly than at any other time in its history to more than 50,000 people, almost one-fifth of them of Irish lineage. The city then got its first piped water systems and horsedrawn streetcars, as well as vigorous trade unions and working mens political conventions. Their role was acknowledged by Abraham Lincoln, who came through New Haven while campaigning for President at a time when shoe workers throughout New England were on strike. "I am glad to see that a system of labor prevails in New England under which laborers strike when they want to," Lincoln declared, to the cheers of the assembled crowd.

Over the next seven years New Haven's unions established a city Trades Assembly and an Eight-Hour League, saw its leaders Alfred Phelps and William Gibson elected officers of the National Labor Union, and organized in 1867 an election campaign that put 18 workers in the state legislature and installed a governor pledged to labors program The next session of the legislature made eight hours "a legal day's work" and obliged all towns in the state to support public schools through taxation. Although the eight-hour law was subsequently ignored by virtually all employers, the school law made the creation of a functioning public school system throughout the state possible for the first time.

In 1872 what may be the most important wedding in the history of New Haven's labor movement took place: Augusta Lewis married Alexander Troup. Augusta Lewis of New York was the Corresponding Secretary of the National Typographical Union, the first woman ever elected to a national union office. Alexander had earlier been national treasurer of the typographers, but he had come to New Haven in 1871 to establish what became the New Haven Daily Union and to run successfully for the state legislature on a labor ticket. Augusta and Alexander devoted the rest of their long lives to labor journalism, politics, and public schools in the city In fact, she played a prominent role in establishing the Teachers' League and in working together with the Trades Council to make pensions for teachers a state law in 1911.

During the 1880s, New Havens labor movement enjoyed a second upswing of power and inf uence. The Trades Council was established in 1881, and its secretary, the German-born socialist J. Fred Busche, edited its newspaper, The Workman's Advocate. In addition to the trade unions, which affiliated with the Connecticut Federation of Labor aher 1886, the Knights of Labor chartered 34 local assemblies (23 of them in the year 1886 alone), many of which were also affiliated with the Trades Council. Many members of the Knights of Labor were women, like those who struck at the Candee Rubber Company in 1886 against a cut in their piece rates. Others were crahsmen, like John R. Lyons, who headed the National Trades Assembly of Machinery Constructors. Some 2,000 men and women were then employed by 38 different carriage manufacturers in the city Between February and May, 1886, a series of strikes begun by the skilled body makers in those shops under the leadership of the Knights of Labor set off sympathetic walkouts by the other workers, shutting down the citys leading industry.

Business leaders and the state government struck back fiercely at the solidarity of New Haven's workers. The most effective weapon of the Knights of Labor was the city-wide boycott, which called upon all residents to shun the business of a company that mistreated its employees. Early in 1886 the Knights had organized two effective boycotts against newspapers that refused to pay the typographical union's scale. One of those papers, the Courier replied by printing diatribes against organized labor. Its lawyers were authorized by the state's attorney general to bring charges for criminal conspiracy and libel against the organizers of the boycott. At a trial inJuly the workers were found guilty and sentenced to jail. The state Supreme Court upheld the guilty verdict, and went further: it proclaimed that anyone who attempted to prevent an employer from hiring whomever he wanted could be fined and sent to jail. That ruling was to stand in Connecticut law until the mid-1930s.

With jail sentences hanging over their heads New Haven's unions grew cautious, and the Knights of Labor collapsed. Moreover, when the economy slid into a deep depression during the 1890s, few unions could win anything. Nevertheless, unions did take advantage of the close and shifting balance between the major parties in the state to win important measures from the state legislature: legal recognition of union labels, laws securing the right to belong to a union and outlawing blacklisting of employees, an employers' liability act, and the establishment of a state board of mediation and arbitration.

This explains the optimism of the Illustrated History. When the economy picked up again after 1897, unions revived vigorously Especially between 1897 and 1903, when trade union membership in the whole of the United States expanded more rapidly than in any other period in our history, building and printing trades, machinists, molders, metal polishers, brewers, cigar makers, corset makers, and street car drivers in New Haven flocked to the union banner. They met with fierce opposition from major employers of the city, who had combined into antiunion organizations like American Anti-Boycott Association, the National Metal Trades Association, and the American Foundrymen's League, which operated a "Free Labor Bureau," to find jobs for workers who pledged to oppose unions.

Two struggles of 1902-3 demonstrated both the enthusiasm of New Haven's workers for the union cause and the power of the resistance they faced. The first involved the Sargent Company, where Metal Polishers Local 205 became better known as the "General Union of the Italians." When a shop steward was fired, some 500 workers walked out in protest and forced the company to reinstate the dismissed man, and also to agree to post in public view the piece rates paid for each job in the factory Aher that success the union waged a triumphal recruiting campaign, supported by the Trades Council, the citys Italian-language newspaper, Il Corriere del Connecticut, the Italian Socialist Federation, the Italian Republican Club, and the priest of St. Michael's church, where the major meetings were held. A gala parade and picnic at Schutzen Park on July 3 featured 800 union members wearing white hats, gathered among family and friends to enjoy themselves and to ratify demands that Sargent recognize their union and improve their pay. When the company rejected all the demands, about 1,850 men and women went out on a strike bigger than any New Haven had ever experienced before.

Mass picketing shut the plant, while pickets on bicycles toured the lodgings of recent immigrants to keep them away. But the company recruited Poles, Hungarians, and Greeks to reopen the factory, and it augmented their numbers with students from Yale and from city high schools. Most damaging of all, it persuaded the unionized molders and machinists to adhere to their separate craft contracts and return to work. As hunger grew among the pickets and arrests hecame more frequent over the next three weeks, the strikers were persuaded to settle for a vague promise of reinstatement and small loans to each worker. Over the next three years, Sargent picked off its craft unions one by one and made itself a leader of the "open shop" campaign against all unions in the city.

Early the next year the employers'campaign singled out New Haven's teamsters. About 600 drivers of horse-drawn wagons struck in May, 1903 to obtain a wage scale adopted by Teamsters Local 340. The Truck Owner's Association responded by bringing in strike breakers from out of town, and lodging them in the Chamber of Commerce headquarters on Chapel Street Early in June the police arrested business agent William Talmadge and eight other union leaders, charging them with conspiracy to force the companies to enter into an agreement. All nine were found guilty and sentenced to three months in jail. The high hopes expressed by the authors of the Illustrated History in 1899 seemed to get farther and farther out of reach.

Although World War I gave a temporary hoost to employment in New Haven, the city's growth turned to stagnation, then decline after 1920. The famous carriage industry disappeared as the automobile took over. The number of hardware and machinery companies fell from 137 in 1897 to 54 in 1936, while the number of beverage and cigar firms was cut in half. Few of the disappearing companies ran away to other parts ol the cctuntry, like textile mills in the eastern side of the state were then doing. Most of them simply went out of business in the face of competition from larger national concerns.

But the abandoned factories and lofts did not stand empty. The furniture business continued to grow. Most important of all, scores of dress and shirt manufacturers moved operations out of New York City to New Haven, while many local subcontractors opened operations in any loft, basement, or garage space they could find, especially in the Wooster Square area. Both dressmaking sweatshops and the larger shirt companies pared their costs to the bone and drove their workers with low, and often unknown, piece rates, unpaid "learners," work days of 11 to 15 hours in season, and bundles of work to be finished at once. Their workers were overwhelmingly women, and largely very young women (mostly Italians, but many also Jews, African Americans, or Poles), who provided their families with indispensable income.

Teachers picketing Whalley Ave. Jail in support of their locked-up negotiating team, 1970 PHOTO: Virginia Blaisdell

The crippled labor movement of the 1920s could provide them little help. When shop craft workers on the New York, New Haven and Hartford line joined the nation-wide railroad strike in July, 1922, they received such support from yard and track workers that more than 5,000 people left their jobs. But they were driven back to work, not by local courts this time, but by a sweeping injunction outlawing all strike activity from coast to coast obtained by U.S. Attorney General Harry Daugherty A strike by more than a thousand Italian construction laborers the next year also went down to defeat. City ordinances adopted during the war years made leafleting, parades, and speaking in public spaces without police permission criminal offenses. Even 19 Yale students leaf eting on the green in support of striking necktie workers in 1927 were arrested for "advertising without a permit." The only noteworthy success was scored by the painters' union, whose 1926 picketing campaign forced downtown establishments to hire union painters.

The great depression turned hard times into disaster for New Haven's working people, but it also opened the way to a revival of the union movement, that was spearheaded by the garment workers themselves. By the summer of 1932 a quarter of the city's labor force was without jobs. Many families were dependent on part-time earnings or children's incomes for survival, or on city relief projects that might provide three days' work a month for $3.50 a day There was no unemployment compensation in Connecticut until 1938. Moreover, the city went bankrupt, squeezed between a shrinking tax base and rising demands for relief. From the end of 1932 until the coming of the war a committee of bankers to whom the city owed money supervised the budget and secured a stringent economic program, whatever the people's needs.

Those who had jobs felt ruthless pressures to put out. As a carpenter explained:

Maybe a hundred fellows come every morning waiting for a job outside the fence. Now it would be a nice thing if the boss on the job would say, "Well, boys, there won't be any work today," and let them look elsewhere. Do they do that? No.

They let them hang around just so if a man on the job slows down or stands up for his rights the boss can holler to one of those guys outside, "Hey, you, take this chap's place. He's decided to leave." And don't you think us birds on the inside don't know that.

In 1932 the Amalgamated Clothing Workers opened an organizing drive in the shirt factories under the direction of Aldo Cursi. Months of house-by-house discussion, followed by city-wide meetings, prepared the workers for a strike, that began with a walkout by cutters in contracting shops and reached its climax when Jennie Alfano and other women at the large Lesnow Brothers factory of 500 production workers walked out for a month and put that company under contract, opening the way for unionization of every shop in town. In August, the International Ladies Garment Workers, led by Bea Bonefacio and four other women who had dared to attend its first meeting, called a general strike of dress makers, which also brought every employer to terms. Through local negotiations combined with intense lobbying to shape the industry codes under the National Industry Recovery Act, New Haven's clothing workers won an average wage increase of 10 percent, together with the 35 hour week for dress makers, and by 1935, 36 hours for shirt makers. For the first time women who were not unemployed had part of the afternoon for themselves. Moreover, through their unions they created singing and theater groups, educational classes, child-care centers, and in time a health-care plan for their families.

Garment workers protest unfair foriegn imports, c. 1970 PHOTO: Greater New Haven Labor History Assoc.

Once the shirt and dress workers had broken the grip of the open shop on New Haven's industry, other workers followed their example, but the prolonged depression made the process slow and difficult. The large number of workers available allowed companies to weed out those whom they considered "troublemakers." A survey of hiring practices conducted by Yale Professor E. Wright Bakke found that employers almost universally gave preference to white men with families, who were citizens and experienced workers, but under 50 years old, and known to have earned good wages on their previous jobs. For the rest, the main hope of getting off relief was to work for the WPA or some other federal project. At any time between 1936 and 1939 an average of 2,500 people held WPA jobs: one-fifth of the unemployed. In fact, one of the most successful unions was the Project Workers Union, which began with the WPA workers at Tweed Airport and ultimately merged with the Building Laborers.

Steady organizing efforts in the metal-working industries paid off heavily once defense orders revived the economy. In 1941 the workers at Sargent got their union at last, voting heavily in an NLRB election for the United Electrical Workers (UE-CIO). High Standard, MB Manufacturing, Eastern Engineering, American Hardware, and other hardware and machinery companies also signed with the UE during the war. At the same time the janitors, maids, maintenance, and power workers at Yale voted to affiliate with the United Construction workers, and in 1942 secured their first contract, under the leadership of Patrick J. Reardon. The influence of the labor movement during the 1930s reached beyond the shops it brought under contract. When the American Federation of Labor (AFL) expelled the unions that had formed the Committee for Industrial Organization (CIO) in 1936, the New Haven Central Labor Council under the presidency of Harold Feinmark of the typographical union, not only opposed the expulsions, but also succeeded in keeping alive close cooperation among unions that were often battling each other elsewhere in the country. It organized a conference for independent political action in 1938, bnnging together unions affiliated with the AFL, the CIO, and the railroad brotherhood. It campaigned for repeal of the state conspiracy law, under which unions had been prosecuted since the 1870s, as well as for a state labor relations act, and a federal housing program. The Council also helped establish the New Haven Labor College, where workers could study wnting and speaking, current events, and labor history.

The most visible outcome of the Council's campaign was that New Haven became a pioneer city in the development of federally funded public housing. Feinmark joined people from various walks of life in establishing the City-Wide Conference for Slum Clearance and Better Housing in 1937, and after an intense campaign publicizing the conditions under which many citizens lived, secured the funds to build the project at Dixwell and Webster. The struggle for decent, lowcost housing continued to bring more projects dunng and after the war. It demonstrated that those who need jobs can build houses who need homes, if the government makes jobs and homes a priority.

Imports protest, c. 1970 PHOTO: Greater New Haven Labor History Assoc.

Union membership in New Haven reached its peak in the 1950s. Office employees at the Knights of Columbus won a strike with city-wide support in 1955, and in the same year IAM Lodge 609 won a thumping majority in a certification election at Winchester Repeating Arms, which had been a bastion of resistance to unionism throughout the century. In 1961 Vincent Sirabella was elected president of the Greater New Haven Central Labor Council. He launched a new era of labor-community solidarity with a lively Labor Day parade, the city's first in a quarter of a century.

At this very time, however, the city's working people faced ominous threats to their welfare. First, the Red Scare of the 1940s and 1950s had embroiled the labor movement in expulsions and raids. Moreover, the trial of local Communists under the Smith Act and the hearings staged by the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities in 1956 and 1957 allegedly looking for a "Communist plot to colonize Connecticut industries," cast a shadow of fear and suspicion over politically active residents, which was only beginning to lift when the war in Vietnam injected new turmoil into the state's union movement.

District 1199 strike, October 1970 PHOTO: Virginia Blaisdell

Second, New Haven's shirt and dress factories began closing their doors. In 1936 there had been 104 firms manufacturing wearing apparel in the city, and in 1959 there were still S2. The terrible Franklin Street fire reminded everyone of the hazardous conditions under which many women still worked, but it was also the immolation of an industry, which was leaving New Haven for the same reason it had come here: the search for cheaper labor. In 1989 the last shirt factory closed its doors. The last dress factory followed suit two years later. "They call this progress," said Annette St. John, who had worked in those shops since 1930. "This is depression."

The population of New Haven, the living standards of its residents, and the physical condition of the city had entered a long downward slide. Workers who were justly proud of what they had accomplished since the 1930s and of the new and different lives on which their children had embarked felt new fear for the future. The labor movement faced the most difficult challenge of its history. However, the long and rich experience of the movement had shown that three basic ideals have held the key to every success enjoyed by working people: organization, equality, and solidarity. They have been as valuable in guiding recent struggles as they were a century ago.

Teachers jailed at Camp Hartell, 1975 PHOTO: Steve Kass

New Haveners have demonstrated again and again since 1970 that they still know what those ideals mean. From the time it won a bargaining election in 1967 the New Haven Federation of Teachers was locked in a series of fierce contract battles caused by tight city budgets and a state law that prohibited teachers from striking. The negotiations of 1968, 1970, and 1973 all ended in short strikes. The climax came in 1975, when the schools were shut down for two weeks, while the striking teachers enjoyed strong support from other workers in the schools and throughout the city. Members of the negotiating committee were jailed for violation of a court injunction, and the following week so many teachers were imprisoned at the strike strongholds, Wilbur Cross and Lee High Schools, that they became known as the "New Haven Ninety."

Teachers welcomed home to New Haven from Camp Hartell, 1975 PHOTO: NHFT

The Greater New Haven Central Labor Council responded to the arrests by organizing a city-wide general strike, scheduled to begin at noon, November 24th, and workers throughout the city were geared up to walk out on call from President Sirabella. Just before the deadline, the Board of Education officially closed the schools, so that there was no longer technically a strike, and the teachers' negotiating team could be released from jail. Over the weekend the Board improved its wage offer and reached an agreement with the union. The next year the legislature enacted a law providing for compulsory arbitration of teachers' contracts.

Students support New Haven Federation of Teachers, 1973 PHOTO: NHFT

Meanwhile the city's largest employer, Yale University, had also developed hard-line managerial policies that provoked a series of bitter strikes in 1968, 1971, and 1974 by the maintenance and service workers, who now belong to Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Local 35. In 1977 the workers were forced out for 13 weeks, in a struggle that galvanized widespread community and student support. That assistance was dramatically manifested in a march of some 4,000 people led by the mayor and a state senator, after which the administration returned to the bargaining table and reached a settlement.

In each of these union battles African-Americans, who comprised more than a quarter of the city's population during the 1970s, played a prominent part. The strike at Winchester Repeating Arms in the Fall of 1979 produced an especially powerful demonstration of support from the Newhallville community, which surrounds the plant. When the company tried to restart operations with strikebreakers, they were blocked by the combined force of the pickets and supporters from the neighborhood. Mayor Frank Logue ordered the factory shut, despite howls of protest from the press and from the business groups. The agreement ending the strike preserved the workers' conditions and kept the plant in the city, though at a reduced size.

A new style of unionism was produced by clerical and technical workers at Yale during the 1980s, with effects that still reverberate around campuses and offices throughout the country. Local 34 of HERE, strongly supported by Local 35, formed a union sparked by rank-and-file activists that won an NLRB election, then launched a year-and-a-half battle for a first contract. A strike from September to December, 1984, showed the power of solidarity between the two locals and stressed the demands that women's wages no longer be held below those of men. "On strike for respect," was the slogan of the strikers, who won a contract in January, 1985 giving them a voice in the conditions under which they worked at Yale and a major first step toward pay equity.

As these recent battles have shown, the principles of solidarity and organization, expressed in the Illustrated History of the Trades Council of New Haven in 1899 remain a vital part of the city's life almost a hundred years later. New haven's unions provide the most effective voice and the main hope of its working people in both the older manufacturing and construction sectors of the economy and the growing domain of services and offices. Even though a ruthless pursuit of private profit has pushed the city into economic decline, only the sense of communtiy that the labor movement has cultivated in New Haven's work places and neighborhoods can provide the hope and vision for a better future.