Labor unions grew up with the United States. The earliest formal organizations of U.S. workers appeared during the Revolutionary War. These early organizations were craft unions; each limited itself to representing workers whose common interest was a specific skilled job, and each sought to promote the economic welfare of the skilled craftspeople who made up its membership.

For example, the Federal Society of Journeymen Cordwainers, formed in Philadelphia in 1794, worked to better the pay and working conditions of shoemakers. The Cordwainers was also one of the first unions to encounter legal roadblocks to collective action. When the union struck for higher wages in 1806, the court ruled in favor of employers, who claimed that unions were illegal “combinations” conspiring to restrain trade. The court’s ruling applied the common law conspiracy doctrine, the principle that the public interest was harmed when two or more people conspired to do something jointly. Unions continued to organize, but for the next four decades, they found it extremely difficult to take action in the face of the conspiracy doctrine.

A milestone in the history of U.S. labor occurred with the formation of the Knights of Labor in 1869. Like previous unions, the Knights began as a craft union. Soon, however, the organization set larger goals for itself. In a drive to organize any workers who were interested in its representation, the Knights expanded to encompass workers in numerous fields (noteworthy exceptions were lawyers, bankers, and bartenders). The Knights was also the first union that actively sought women and blacks as members and was one of the few unions that has ever focused on political lobbying rather than collective bargaining as a means of reaching its goals.

The Knights championed such traditional union issues as better working conditions, campaigning especially for the eight-hour day and the abolition of child labor. At the same time, the union also hoped to achieve a broad range of social goals. Chief among these were such liberal, or reformist, objectives as worker ownership of factories and free public land for those who wished to farm.

These same goals also attracted to the labor movement a variety of radicals and other political reformers, many of whom came in the waves of European immigrants who had begun arriving a few decades previously. Their activities were directed against what they saw as the oppressive nature of the industrial capitalist system, and their tactics did not necessarily reflect the typical strategies of the labor unions. Spurred by a severe depression in 1873, for example, a series of violent labor actions characterized labor-management relations from the mid- to late 1870s. Demonstrators and locked-out strikers blockaded factories, battled strikebreakers in the streets of major cities, and exchanged fire with municipal police, state militia, and armed private agents. Assassinations and bombings led to the trial and execution of anarchists and labor agitators.

However, much of the violence in this period came in direct response to the extraordinary pressures of the depression. Most U.S. laborers were conservative by nature and sought the stability of organizations such as the Knights of Labor. Under the leadership of Terence V. Powderly, the Knights grew to include roughly 700,000 members by the mid-1880s. The union was never successful, however, at increasing the number of skilled workers among its members. In addition, it was weakened by internal disagreements about social goals and outside charges of union violence. By the turn of the century, the Knights had disbanded.

With its focus on the social welfare of unskilled workers, the Knights of Labor tended to forget that its economic strength lay with its skilled craft workers. As a result of this oversight, many of these workers soon began to look for organizations that would better represent their interests, namely, unions whose primary concern was to improve wages, hours, and working conditions for their members.