WHILE THE TITLE HAS OFTEN BEEN CONTESTED, Illinois has always been a labor state. In this sense, it reflects many aspects in the history of industrial America. It has been “Hog Butcher for the World, . . . Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler.” That is to say, it became the industrial giant's transportation hub and home to a remarkably diverse range of industries—and an equally remarkable range of immigrant workers who made all this happen. Likewise, free Black people flocked to the state for jobs and a measure of freedom, especially during and after the two World Wars. Most immigrants came simply to make a living, but others to find political and religious freedom. It is not too much to say that these migrants built Illinois—and most of the rest of the country. Dominic Pacyga suggests how Chicago became the most important livestock and meat packing center, while Rose Fuerer describes the importance of mining throughout the state.Logically, Illinois was also the birthplace of many of the nation's most important labor organizations not only in construction, railroading, mining, steel, and other heavy industries but also in service work, garment manufacturing, teaching, and white-collar occupations. In the early twentieth century, Illinois unions organized some of the earliest unions for women and other service workers and Local One of the American Federation of Teachers. In the 1930s and ’40s, the state was the cradle of industrial unionism in steel, meat packing, farm implements, electrical manufacturing, and other industries.Such organization was generally not welcomed by employers, of course, so the state also became a cauldron of labor conflict. One of the earliest strikes occurred in the 1840s among Irish canal builders, and one of the nation's earliest eight-hour strikes occurred in Chicago in 1867. By the late nineteenth century, Illinois had become a flash point for many of the great labor conflicts of those years—the first national railroad strike in 1877; Haymarket and the Great Upheaval for the Eight Hour Day in the 1880s; the Pullman strike and boycott of 1894, which spread out along the state's rail lines; and the bituminous coal strikes of 1894 and 1897, which laid the foundations for the United Mine Workers of America. Immigrants played vital roles in each of the conflicts, and they continue to be a focus for labor organizing today. These were often rather brutal affairs, symbolic of the struggle throughout the nation between Labor and Capital, and from these roots, the labor radicalism, that is so often left out of the nation's story, flared up. Name a radical grouping and you will find its birthplace or its headquarters in Chicago. The Haymarket anarchists, the Socialist and Communist Parties, and the anarcho-syndicalist Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) all traced their beginnings to the city's West Side. The city remains a center of radicalism today. Anyone looking for consensus in the throes of industrialization and later had better look elsewhere.Deindustrialization took its toll on the state's unions, as it did elsewhere. In Chicago, for example, the number of workers in manufacturing was cut in half from a high of 667,000 (70.6 percent of the labor force) in 1947 to 227,000 (34.2 percent) in 1980. As basic industry continued to decline in the US in the late twentieth century, Labor's “clout” declined with it. About thirteen percent of Illinois workers were in unions in 2024, a slight increase over 2023 and a bit higher than the national average, but this represented part of a continuing decline from almost 21 percent in 1989.To meet these changes, Illinois workers moved in new directions. Changes in state law, in its occupational structure, and in the racial and ethnic composition of its labor force led to a transformation of organized labor. Again, Chicago provides an example. The city's janitors, teachers, and government employees were among the earliest to organize at the beginning of the twentieth century, and one hundred years later, they once again lead the way. As older manufacturing-based unions declined due to technological change and the low-wage global economy in the late twentieth century, government workers poured into the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), and health care and service workers built the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). These industries included large numbers of women, African Americans, and Latinos, which changed the face of the state's movement. SEIU Local 73, with eighteen thousand health care workers, became the largest union in the state. Meanwhile, the Chicago Federation of Teachers (CTU-AFT) emerged as a powerful political force and one of the most progressive organizations in the nation, raising broad social issues beyond the normal union contract. Partly due to these new efforts, at the time of this celebration, Illinois’ labor movement has remained more significant than in most other states.
James R. Barrett (Thu,) studied this question.