That 40k may be all fine and good for the forklift operator who is working at a plant in the middle of East Texas or out in Despair Idaho where 40k per year can support four people; where the cost of living is low, but if they are trying to make ends meet on 40K a year in most any urban area (let’s say NYC, DC or Los Angeles) where it takes double that just to make ends meet, then they may run into some problems.

Of course if your focus is the economy – and how well a company’s quarterly profits look, then of course this will not be important to you. But if you ARE that forklift operator, it will make a very big difference indeed.

You can argue till you’re blue in the face that by making the decision to employ three forklift operators as opposed to one that you are HELPING the economy, that the benefits of cutting costs will eventually ‘trickle down’ to them through lowered costs of products etc. But if they can’t afford to buy those products because they are having to spend every penny of an insufficient paycheck on necessities the argument is invalid.

These kinds of arguments are why unions EXIST. To ensure that the workers get a fair shake. That they get the kind of living wage that will enable them to provide for themselves and their families without having to choose to discontinue their health care in order to pay for their mortgage.

People who support unions are under the notion that all of the wealth of the world has already been created. They believe that because some people have more wealth, the direct result is that other people have less. This “piece of the pie” mentality is ridiculous. Life is not a zero-sum game. Wealth can be created anywhere and everywhere. Many things we use everyday have been invented by people who have created success out of thin air, and for more people than just themselves. Television, the automobile, computers, airplanes. Each of these inventions (even independent of each other, mind you) created fortunes for those who invented them, as well as spawning massive industries and billions of jobs for people, and to go even further than that, have enriched society as a whole with the amazing everyday utility of the products themselves. These are obviously the most successful examples, but possibilities are limitless.

The point is, if you don’t like your job, and you don’t like your boss paying you what he decides you’re worth; don’t cannibalize the business in order to get arbitrary pay raises and benefits via union coercion (anyone want a Twinkie?). Go out and do something on your own. Get another job, or better yet, go to school and learn a skill so that employers will compete for your services. Or start making your own “pie” by starting your own business. The way labor unions talk, they make it sound like underpaid or laid-off workers have no recourse whatsoever without them. But they do. It’s called the free market.

On January 5, 1914, the Ford Motor Company took the steps of doubling pay to $5 a day and cut shifts from nine hours to eight along with having his workers only work 5 days a week, moves that were not popular with rival companies, although seeing the increase in Ford’s productivity, and a increase in profit margin from $30 million to $60 million in a two years period, most other company’s soon followed suit.

The government passed its first law for rail road workers in 1916 which was know as the Adamson Act. This law was up haled by the supreme Court. Other presidents tried to get laws though Congress but were unsuccessful until FDR got the fair labor standards act passed in 1937. This law on the other hand was deemed unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. After FDR failed to “stack the deck” where Roosevelt tried to get justices that would be more friendly to his ways failed, he amended the law. The revision was upheld by the Supreme Court and is now a law that stands today; 40 hours a week, 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, with time and a half of your base pay, for anything over eight hours a day and or 40 hours a week.

So Like I said all three had a huge role, it was not just one organization that changed things.

In the United States, Philadelphia carpenters went on strike in 1791 for the ten-hour day. By the 1830s, this had become a general demand. In 1835, workers in Philadelphia organized a general strike, led by Irish coal heavers. Their banners read, From 6 to 6, ten hours work and two hours for meals. Labor movement publications called for an eight-hour day as early as 1836. Boston ship carpenters, although not unionized, achieved an eight-hour day in 1842.

In 1864, the eight-hour day quickly became a central demand of the Chicago labor movement. The Illinois legislature passed a law in early 1867 granting an eight-hour day but had so many loopholes that it was largely ineffective. A city-wide strike that began on May 1, 1867 shut down the city’s economy for a week before collapsing. On June 25, 1868, Congress passed an eight-hour law for federal employees[4] which was also of limited effectiveness. (On May 19, 1869, Grant signed a National Eight Hour Law Proclamation.[5])

In August 1866, the National Labor Union at Baltimore passed a resolution that said, “The first and great necessity of the present to free labour of this country from capitalist slavery, is the passing of a law by which eight hours shall be the normal working day in all States of the American Union. We are resolved to put forth all our strength until this glorious result is achieved.”

During the 1870s, eight hours became a central demand, especially among labor organizers, with a network of Eight-Hour Leagues which held rallies and parades. A hundred thousand workers in New York City struck and won the eight-hour day in 1872, mostly for building trades workers. In Chicago, Albert Parsons became recording secretary of the Chicago Eight-Hour League in 1878, and was appointed a member of a national eight-hour committee in 1880.

At its convention in Chicago in 1884, the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions resolved that “eight hours shall constitute a legal day’s labour from and after May 1, 1886, and that we recommend to labour organizations throughout this jurisdiction that they so direct their laws as to conform to this resolution by the time named.”

The leadership of the Knights of Labor, under Terence V. Powderly, rejected appeals to join the movement as a whole, but many local Knights assemblies joined the strike call including Chicago, Cincinnati and Milwaukee. On May 1, 1886, Albert Parsons, head of the Chicago Knights of Labor, with his wife Lucy Parsons and two children, led 80,000 people down Michigan Avenue, Chicago, in what is regarded as the first modern May Day Parade, in support of the eight-hour day. In the next few days they were joined nationwide by 350,000 workers who went on strike at 1,200 factories, including 70,000 in Chicago, 45,000 in New York, 32,000 in Cincinnati, and additional thousands in other cities. Some workers gained shorter hours (eight or nine) with no reduction in pay; others accepted pay cuts with the reduction in hours.

Artist impression of the bomb explosion in Haymarket Square
On May 3, 1886, August Spies, editor of the Arbeiter-Zeitung (Workers Newspaper), spoke at a meeting of 6,000 workers, and afterwards many of them moved down the street to harass strikebreakers at the McCormick plant in Chicago. The police arrived, opened fire, and killed four people, wounding many more. At a subsequent rally on May 4 to protest this violence, a bomb exploded at the Haymarket Square. Hundreds of labour activists were rounded up and the prominent labour leaders arrested, tried, convicted, and executed giving the movement its first martyrs. On June 26, 1893 Illinois Governor John Peter Altgeld set the remaining leader free, and granted full pardons to all those tried claiming they were innocent of the crime for which they had been tried and the hanged men had been the victims of “hysteria, packed juries and a biased judge”.

The American Federation of Labor, meeting in St Louis in December 1888, set May 1, 1890 as the day that American workers should work no more than eight hours. The International Workingmen’s Association (Second International), meeting in Paris in 1889, endorsed the date for international demonstrations, thus starting the international tradition of May Day.

The United Mine Workers won an eight-hour day in 1898.

The Building Trades Council (BTC) of San Francisco, under the leadership of P.H. McCarthy, won the eight-hour day in 1900 when the BTC unilaterally declared that its members would work only eight hours a day for $3 a day. When the mill resisted, the BTC began organizing mill workers; the employers responded by locking out 8,000 employees throughout the Bay Area. The BTC, in return, established a union planing mill from which construction employers could obtain supplies — or face boycotts and sympathy strikes if they did not. The mill owners went to arbitration, where the union won the eight-hour day, a closed shop for all skilled workers, and an arbitration panel to resolve future disputes. In return, the union agreed to refuse to work with material produced by non-union planing mills or those that paid less than the Bay Area employers.

By 1905, the eight-hour day was widely installed in the printing trades – see International Typographical Union (section) – but the vast majority of Americans worked 12-14 hour days.

On January 5, 1914, the Ford Motor Company took the radical step of doubling pay to $5 a day and cut shifts from nine hours to eight, moves that were not popular with rival companies, although seeing the increase in Ford’s productivity, and a significant increase in profit margin (from $30 million to $60 million in two years), most soon followed suit.[6][7][8][9]

In the summer of 1915, amid increased labor demand for World War I, a series of strikes demanding the eight-hour day began in Bridgeport, Connecticut. They were so successful that they spread throughout the Northeast.[10]

The United States Adamson Act in 1916 established an eight-hour day, with additional pay for overtime, for railroad workers. This was the first federal law that regulated the hours of workers in private companies. The United States Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the Act in Wilson v. New, 243 U.S. 332 (1917).

The eight-hour day might have been realized for many working people in the U.S. in 1937, when what became the Fair Labor Standards Act (29 U.S. Code Chapter 8) was first proposed under the New Deal. As enacted, the act applied to industries whose combined employment represented about twenty percent of the U.S. labor force. In those industries, it set the maximum workweek at 40 hours,[11] but provided that employees working beyond 40 hours a week would receive additional overtime bonus sala

The central problem of labor unions is the degree to which they are able to wield coercive power over others… A voluntary association can serve the valuable purpose of providing a unitary voice for those with shared interests, but when such an association is involuntary, or when it is able to infringe on the liberty of others, it ceases to be a force for good… Whatever benefits unions are able to accrue for its members is necessarily taken from other categories of employees in the same industry or from other industries… Labor action cannot change the value of goods and services industry produces – it can only distort the wage remuneration for those it benefits, and only at the expense of others…