Knights of Labor Founded (1869)
Tue Dec 28, 1869
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The Knights of Labor was an American labor federation founded on this day in 1869. At its height, K of L organized 1/5th of the U.S. labor force in the late 1800s. K of L was an important predecessor to labor unions such as the AFL and IWW.
The Knights of Labor operated in the U.S. as well in Canada, Great Britain, and Australia. K of L demanded an eight hour work day, an end to child and convict labor, and supported worker cooperatives. In some cases it acted directly as a labor union, negotiating with employers.
Jonathan Garlock of the Mapping American Social Movements Project states that, between 1869 and 1896, the Knights of Labor spanned the North American continent with 15,000 Local Assemblies. In the U.S., assemblies were organized in communities of every type, from mining camps and country crossroads to rural county seats; from small industrial towns to cities and metropolitan centers.
Of the three and a half thousand places in America with populations over 1,000 in the decade 1880-1890, half had at least one Local Assembly of the Knights of Labor sometime between 1869 and 1896. Of the communities with populations over 8,000, all but a dozen had Knights Assemblies. Many towns had several Assemblies, while important cities had more than one hundred.
K of L was notable in its ambition to organize across lines of gender and race and in the inclusion of both skilled and unskilled labor. Garlock describes numerous Assemblies as entirely formed of black, women workers, or workers of distinct ethnic origins, while in others, Assemblies membership cut across racial, gender, and ethnic lines.
An exception to this inclusiveness was discrimination against Chinese immigrant workers. The Knights strongly supported the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and violently targeted Chinese workers, such as in the 1885 Rock Springs Massacre, when white miners organized with the K of L killed scores of Chinese workers, hired as strikebreakers by their bosses, and drove the rest out of Wyoming.
After a rapid expansion in the mid-1880s, K of L went into decline, primarily losing members to the American Federation of Labor (AFL).
- Date: 1869-12-28
- Learn More: en.wikipedia.org, www.history.com, depts.washington.edu, www.lawcha.org.
- Tags: #Labor.
- Source: www.apeoplescalendar.org