Chapter 17- Corporations and Conflicts Flashcards
The 1892 lockout of workers at the Homestead, Pennsylvania, steel mill after Andrew Carnegie refused to renew the union contract. Union supporters attacked the guards hired to close them out and protest strikebreakers who had been employed by the mill, but the National Guard soon suppressed this resistance and Homestead, like other steel plants, became a non-union mill.
Homestead lockout
An internal management structure adopted by many large, complex corporations that distinguished top executives from those responsible for day-to-day operations and departmentalized operations by function.
Management revolution
A business model in which a corporation controlled all aspects of production from raw materials to packaged products. “Robber barons” or industrial innovators such as Gustavus Swift and Andrew Carnegie pioneered this business form at the end of the Civil War.
Vertical integration
A business concept invented in the late 19th century to pressure competitors and force rivals to merge their companies into a conglomerate. John D. Rockefeller of Standard Oil pioneered this business model.
Horizontal integration
A small group of associates that hold stock from a group of combined firms, managing them as a single entity. Trusts quickly evolved into other centralized business forms, but progressive critics continued to refer to giant firms like United States Steel and Standard Oil as “trusts.”
trust
The elimination of skilled labor under a new system of mechanized manufacturing, in which workers completed discrete, small-scale tasks rather than crafting an entire product. With deskilling, employers found they could pay workers less and replace them more easily.
deskilling
A phrase coined by Henry Ford, who helped to invest a system of mass production of goods based on assembly of standardized parts. This system accompanied the continued deskilling of industrial labor.
mass production
A system of organizing work developed by Frederick W. Taylor in the late 19th century. It was designed to coax maximum output from the individual worker, increase efficiency, and reduce production costs.
scientific management
The 1882 law that barred Chinese laborers from entering the United States. It continued in effect until the 1940s.
Chinese Exclusion Act
A nationwide strike of thousands of railroad workers and labor allies, who protested the growing power of railroad corporations and the steep wage cuts imposed by railroad managers amid a severe economic depression that had begun in 1873.
Great Railroad Strike of 1877
A national political movement calling on the government to increase the money supply in order to assist borrowers and foster economic growth; “Greenbackers” also called for greater regulation of corporations and laws enforcing an eight-hour workday.
Greenback Labor Party
The argument that real economic wealth is created by workers who make their living by physical labor, such as farmers and craftsmen, and that merchants, lawyers, bankers, and other middlemen unfairly gain their wealth from such “producers.”
producerism
Economic regulatory laws passed in some Midwestern states in the late 1870s, triggered by pressure from farmers and the Greenback-Labor Party.
Granger laws
The first mass labor organization created among America’s working class. Founded in 1869 and peaking in strength in the mid 1880s , the Knights of Labor attempted to bridge boundaries of ethnicity, gender, ideology, race, and occupation to build a “universal brotherhood” of all workers.
Knights of Labor
The advocacy of a stateless society achieved by revolutionary means. Feared for their views, anarchists became scapegoats for the 1886 Haymarket Square bombing.
anarchism
