Woodworkers of Chicago

WOODWORKERS OF CHICAGO. Chicago’s phenomenal growth attracted workers of all nationalities to the expansive construction industry. Hence no one national group numerically dominated the largely foreign-born building carpenters, although the top union leadership was usually Anglo-Irish. Germans and Scandinavians, in contrast, predominated in Chicago’s large furniture industry until its decline in the early twentieth century.

Chicago’s woodworkers were particularly prominent in trade union organization and Left political activity in the second half of the nineteenth century. In the early 1870s Chicago’s German cabinetmakers led the movement for a national furniture workers’ union, and their local received the number one in recognition of their efforts; a descendant of this local still exists. Like their international union, Chicago’s furniture workers were among the earliest advocates of industrial unionism. During the great railroad strikes of 1877, a meeting of Chicago furniture workers in the Bohemian Turner Hall was attacked by the police in one of the most violent and controversial occurrences in the Chicago upheaval.

Chicago’s building carpenters were slower to organize stable unions, in part because of the deeper and more numerous ethnic divisions among them; but by the early 1890s they had created the strongest interethnic union in Chicago. After a huge strike in 1890, they won higher wages, union recognition, and the eight-hour day, victories that put them at the forefront of the Chicago labor movement.

Although it is easier to trace Chicago’s woodworkers as unionists than as participants in Left political activity, recent work has found that woodworkers were prominent in the founding of Chicago’s socialist German-language labor press in the mid-1870s and were well represented in the constituency of Chicago’s anarchist movement. Carpenters made up the largest skilled occupational group among the members of the International Working People’s Association, while cabinetmakers ranked fourth. Carpenters were also significantly involved in independent labor political movements in 1886–1887, 1894, and 1919.

Furniture workers formed an important constituency for the Left when the industry was marked by rapid mechanization within production units that nonetheless still utilized large numbers of craft workers in specialized departments. Construction carpenters also felt the impact of mechanization through the production of standardized, prefabricated building parts. Ethnically diverse and well organized, Chicago’s building carpenters have been able to maintain an enviable tradition of controlling their industry from the late-nineteenth century up to the present, although, with significant exceptions, their politics have been confined to the Democratic Party.

Jentz, John B. “Skilled Workers and Industrialization: Chicago’s German Cabinetmakers and Machinists, 1880–1900.” In German Workers in Industrial Chicago, 1850–1910: A Comparative Perspective, edited by Hartmut Keil and John B. Jentz. De Kalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1983.

Jentz, John B. “Artisan Culture and the Organization of Chicago’s German Workers in the Gilded Age, 1860 to 1890.” Amerika-Studien 29, no. 2 (1984).

Nelson, Bruce C. Beyond the Martyrs: A Social History of Chicago’s Anarchists, 1870–1900. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1988.

Ross, Robert B. “Scales and Skills of Monopoly Power: Labor Geographies of the 1890-1891 Chicago Carpenters Strike.” Antipode 43, no. 4 (Sept: 2011).

Schneirov, Richard, and Thomas J. Surbuhr. Union Brotherhood, Union Town: A History of the Carpenters’ Union of Chicago, 1863 to 1987. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988.

Surbuhr, Thomas J. “Ethnicity and the Formation of the Chicago Carpenters Union, 1855–1890.” In German Workers in Industrial Chicago, 1850-1910, edited by Keil and Jentz.