Germans, knights, communists and craftsmen: a brief look at woodworking unions.

"Middle class threatened with falling wages. Low wage immigrants taking American jobs. Technology making skills obsolete." If this sounds like newspaper headlines of the '90s, guess again. Like the issues of today, workers of 150 years ago were facing rapidly changing times.

The first cabinetmakers union was established in New York City in 1833 by Scottish and English immigrants, but the prime mover behind the labor movement was the United Cabinet Makers of New York, a local German workers who led in the formation of the International Furniture Workers Union in 1872. This group later became Local 309 of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners, a union of 500,000 today.

The International Furniture Workers Union highlighted the issues that were important for the coming decades: opposition to child labor, formation of an independent socialistic labor party, abolition of the piece-work system and establishment of the eight-hour work day.

It was the latter demand that took on the characteristics of a holy crusade by the nation's infant labor movement. In 1884, the nation's labor leaders met in Chicago and resolved that, "as of May 1, 1886, eight hours would constitute a day's work." Chicago's Furniture Local No. 1 became a leading actor in the fight for the shorter workday. F. Mayer & Co. of Chicago was closed by the proprietors rather than give in to the union demands. Taking advantage of the increasing turmoil in Chicago, radicals called for a protest rally at Haymarket Square on the evening of May 4. As the rally was breaking up, someone threw a bomb into the crowd, resulting in panic and violence. Seven police officers and four workers lost their lives. Scores were injured. The resulting public furor over the Haymarket riot ended any hope that the eight-hour gains would soon be achieved.

While Chicago and other cities were torn by strife, the furniture workers of Grand Rapids fared better under the conservative leadership of the Knights of Labor. After several short strikes at various manufacturers around the city, Nelson, Matter & Co., The Worden Furniture Co., the Phoenix Co. (present-day Irwin Seating Co.), Berkey & Gay, Grand Rapids Chair (present-day Baker Furniture Co,), Widdicomb (present-day John Widdicomb Co.), and the Oriel Cabinet Co. all acceded to the eight- hour day with a compromise on wages. The gains were short lived and by July, 1886, woodworkers were back to the 10-hour day, 60-hour week.

Knights of Labor (1869-1917)

In the beginning, the Knights was not only a labor union, but also a secretive fraternal society. Members were sworn to secrecy, passwords were necessary to get into meetings and coded messages were used to avoid detection by employers who "blacklisted" union members. For years members were allowed to write the organization's name only as five * * * * * stars. However, they caught the imagination of the public with their motto, "An injury to one is the concern of all."

Woodworkers joined their ranks in droves, not just in the large urban centers but in small rural communities. Local assemblies (LAs) were organized along trade lines (furniture, glass, railroads), craft lines (woodcarver, upholsterer, varnisher), ethnic origins (German, Irish, Polish, Black), and mixed assemblies. Everyone was welcome to join except saloon keepers and lawyers. The Knights opposed liquor and stood for integrity. In 1884, they numbered 50,000. In 1886, membership exploded to 750,000 after a successful railroad strike.

Four years later, the Knights were all but defunct as a national organization, a casualty of the public's anger over the Haymarket tragedy and the abandonment of the K. of L. by the skilled tradesmen who formed the American Federation of Labor (AFL). The woodworkers decided they needed a new home and found one in 1895 with the Amalgamated Wood Workers.

Amalgamated Wood Workers International Union of America-AFL (1895-1912)

The AWWIU was the first true national union of all woodworkers in the United States. It was composed of remnants of the German Furniture Workers Union, lapsed K. of L. assemblies, and locals of the Machine Wood Workers, a new union established in St. Louis in 1890 by a gifted orator and organizer, T. I. Kidd. At its peak in 1904, there were 31,230 members distributed among 242 locals. Thirty percent of the membership worked in Chicago, with a sizable number employed at the Brunswick, Balke and Collander Co., a world famous manufacturer of billiard tables, bowling lanes and high-class bar room fixtures.

From the German Furniture Workers, the Amalgamated inherited a taste for Socialist party politics and strong internal democracy, which included membership referendums and weak central authority. From the Knights, it resolved to organize all woodworkers, not just the skilled cabinetmakers, but the unskilled packers, rubbers and varnishers. From the Machine Wood Workers, it received the indomitable T.I. Kidd as general secretary. From all the merged organizations, it received the seeds of its own destruction, in a later jurisdictional war, at the hands of the powerful United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners.

One major strike, a city-wide lockout, and a conspiracy trial highlighted the union's brief but heroic existence. In 1898, Oshkosh, Wisconsin, was the center of the sash, door and blind industry. Industry rivals complained that Oshkosh enjoyed an unfair advantage due to low wages and child labor and the union agreed. After the refusal of several lumber companies to talk with the AWWIU, a strike was called. Involving over 1,400 workers, the strike began May 14, lasted 14 weeks, saw the murder of a 17-year-old striker, and ended in defeat. A company owner's son was acquitted of murdering the youth, while the union official in charge of the strike was jailed on conspiracy charges.

T.I. Kidd was acquitted of all charges in front of a hostile Oshkosh jury after a brilliant defense by Clarence Darrow, the attorney who would later become famous for the Scopes Monkey Trial.

Chicago sash manufacturers, sensing the union's depleted condition, announced that as of June 20, their factories would become open shops. The union reacted quickly to forestall a lockout by striking 60 firms on the morning of June 16. When other union members supported the strike, it dragged on until the end of the year as the mill manufacturers gradually broke ranks and signed the union agreement guaranteeing a nine-hour day at a minimum wage of $2 per day.

United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners (AFL-CIO) (1881-present)

Among the union members supporting the Chicago strike was the UBCJ, which began as a union of carpenters in 1881, incorporating furniture workers by 1898. Its success in organizing shops all over the country brought it into direct conflict with the Amalgamated. One of the first skirmishes in a bitter jurisdictional war between the two unions took place in 1906 at the newly built Brunswick plant in Muskegon, Michigan. A carpenter boycott forced the company to drop Amalgamated. Since that time, Brunswick products have carried the distinctive Brotherhood union label. By 1912 the AWWIU was no more.

The UBCJ, the most powerful union in the American Federation of Labor, was free to take on the Grand Rapids Furniture Manufacturers Association (FMA), the trade group that represented the city's 38 furniture manufacturers. The FMA represented the most prominent and successful furniture companies in America, which had succeeded in keeping their "thrifty, pious, home-loving Hollanders" out of the unions.

But where the German Furniture Workers Union, the Knights of Labor and the Amalgamated failed, the Brotherhood succeeded in recruiting thousands of these Dutch immigrants. For 17 weeks in the spring and summer of 1911, these immigrant factory workers waged a disciplined but desperate battle for the nine-hour day and a 10 percent increase in wages. The walkout left the factories empty and the city polarized. It captured national headlines and cost the Carpenters Union the current equivalent of $1 million in $4-a-week strike benefits.

In the end, the strike was broken by workers brought in by rail from other furniture-making centers, the poverty induced by the length of the strike, the 2,000 striking workers not allowed to join the exclusive craft unions and receive strike benefits, and the official condemnation of the Christian Reformed Church, the Protestant religion of the Dutch strikers.

The enormous expense and failure of the Grand Rapids strike and an earlier 30-week strike in Dubuque, Iowa, in 1907 convinced the Brotherhood that organizing factory hands the traditional way was too costly and time consuming.

Beginning in 1902, with the national copyrighting of the UBCJ's union label, the Brotherhood began organizing companies from top down. The formula was simple. If companies met the conditions of the Brotherhood - no child labor, minimum wage of 30 cents an hour, a union shop - the manufacturer could affix the label to his products. A refusal meant a boycott on installing building trim, sash and blind, and store and saloon fixtures, which proved to be the Brotherhood's most potent weapon.

Three years after the Grand Rapids' strike, 17,345 union millmen belonged to the union and 46.2 percent of the industry was organized, a figure never since equaled.

United Furniture Workers of America-AFL-CIO (1939-1987)

While it seemed as if the Brotherhood was the clear-cut winner in the battle to organize woodworkers, another craft union, the Upholsterer's International Union of North America (UIU), formed in Chicago in 1892, quietly and effectively began to challenge the Brotherhood. On the eve of the Great Depression in 1929, both unions began to experiment with industrial unionism, organizing all workers in one factory into one union, regardless of whether they were skilled cabinetmakers or simply machine operators. Then the stock market crash closed factories by the thousands. Those workers fortunate enough to retain their jobs saw their hours and wages slashed. Union and non-union workers alike suffered. UIU Local 76 in New York City declined from 1,800 to 200 members between 1929 and 1932.

Membership rose again, however, when the UIU merged with the generally unsuccessful Furniture Workers Industrial Union (FWIU), which was founded by the Communist Party of the United States in 1932. The merger came as the UIU started organizing workers on an industrial basis, shaking off the restrictive craft union mentality that had isolated and separated woodworkers from each other for 100 years. Membership soared, aided by the Congressional passage of the Wagner Act.

Meanwhile, at the Denver convention of the AFL in October 1937, opposition was growing against those who wanted to organize workers industrially. The UIU was forbidden to expand its jurisdiction to all furniture workers. However, this did not stop the Committee for Industrial Organization (CIO) from organizing the industry-wide United Furniture Workers of America.

The UFWA embraced the new industrial union philosophy with vigor, entering the traditionally anti-union South and West. Local 270 was created in Fort Smith, Arkansas, after a 90-day strike in 1940. Nearby Local 281 represented workers at Ward's Furniture Co. A 17-week strike at the Thomasville Chair Co. in North Carolina in 1946 involved over 1,200 workers, garnered national headlines and brought hundreds of black members into the union. West Coast organizing victories at Simmons Co. and the Dornbecker Co. in Portland would later bring Hispanics into the union.

While concentrating on the virgin organizing areas, the union also strengthened older furniture centers. Chicago Local 18B picked up the American Furniture Co. and Great Northern Chair Co. by 1940. Workers at the legendary Steinway Piano Co. in New York joined the union to resolve the favoritism shown German workers at the expense of the Italians. Grand Rapids Local 415 picked up many of the furniture shops lost by the UAW in an aborted organizing drive in 1937. This included the large American Seating Co., Hekman Furniture Co. and Irwin Seating. By 1947 the Furniture Workers reached a peak membership of 43,389.

At the height of its power, the union came under attack by the CIO for its leftist politics and Communist domination. It demanded that the UFWA get rid of certain officers suspected of being members of the Communist Party, or face expulsion from the committee. At the same time, other unions began raiding UFWA shops. An intense debate took place in the ranks of the union resulting in factions and infighting. By 1950 the Communists were gone and CIO affiliation retained.

Woodworkers greatly benefited from union membership. By 1943 "over half of the UFWA members had gained paid vacations and paid holidays were becoming common." In May 1944 the UFWA established an industry-wide health-accident-life-insurance plan, popular with small shop employers. A national, multi-employer, non-contributory retirement plan was established in 1953.

By the '60s, rising wages and benefits began to blunt the union appeal among woodworkers. Numerous plant closings and mergers made it difficult to reach employees with the union message. Changes in national labor legislation and the flight of factories from heavily unionized urban areas to union-hostile rural areas also contributed to a slow decline in UFWA membership.

The UFWA fought valiantly to replace the lost membership. It even moved its headquarters from New York City to Nashville to be in the heart of non-union territory. However, it was a losing battle for the small but feisty union. Membership declined from 30,690 to 19,367 between 1970 and 1985.

Declining membership was a problem facing all labor in the '80s. By 1985 the Upholsterers merged its 35,000 members into the United Steel Workers, and the Furniture Workers became a division of the Electronic Workers (IUE) in 1987. The Carpenters restructured in 1976, creating an industrial department covering its 37,000 millwork and furniture workers.

Although their numbers are diminished, the union tradition of quality craftsmanship continues in numerous famous firms around the country.

Michael Johnston is a history/journalism teacher and freelance writer who served as editor of the Grand Valley Labor News for 13 years and was project editor of From Lake Superior to Indiana: The Story of UAW Region 1-D, a History of the United Auto Workers Union Outside of Detroit. From 1989 to 1993, he served as a labor history consultant for "Furniture City" at the Public Museum of Grand Rapids. He discovered two priceless 1911 handpainted labor banners (one of which appears on page 166) in a labor veteran's basement.