Skilled and Unskilled Workers.

The prosperity of the decade was generally shared by industrial workers in the form of relatively high wages and full employment; prosperity was not, however, universal, and certainly times were not good for unions. In part, unions did not thrive because they had for years concentrated their organizational efforts on workers who were members of skilled crafts—printers, carpenters, machinists, and the like; the group had, in fact, been the focus of the American Federation of Labor, which dated from the 1870s. As a consequence the unionized workers were concentrated in two major areas of the labor force, the railroads (through the railroad brotherhoods) and the skilled trades. The rising mass-production industries were not friendly to unions; their workers were largely unskilled (working on assembly lines was not a highly skilled trade), and many of these workers were recent arrivals from the rural...