The Massachusetts Supreme Court makes strikes and…

March 1842 CE

The Massachusetts Supreme Court makes strikes and unions legal in the United States in Commonwealth v. Hunt.

Prior to Hunt, the legality of labor combinations in America was uncertain.

In March 1842, Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw rules that labor combinations are legal provided that they are organized for a legal purpose and use legal means to achieve their goals.

The history of labor disputes in America substantially precedes the Revolutionary period.

In 1636, for instance, there was a fishermen's strike on an island off the coast of Maine, and in 1677 twelve carmen were fined for going on strike in New York City.

However, most instances of labor unrest during the colonial period were temporary and isolated, and rarely resulted in the formation of permanent groups of laborers for negotiation purposes.

Little legal recourse was available to those injured by the unrest because strikes were not typically considered illegal.

The only known case of a criminal prosecution of workers in the colonial era occurred as a result of a carpenters' strike in Savannah, Georgia in 1746.

By the beginning of the nineteenth century, after the revolution, little had changed.

The career path for most artisans still involved apprenticeship under a master, followed by a move into independent production.

However, over the course of the Industrial Revolution, this model rapidly changed, particularly in the major metropolitan areas.

For instance, in Boston in 1790, the vast majority of the thirteen hundred artisans in the city described themselves as "master workman".

By 1815, journeymen workers without independent means of production had displaced these "masters" as the majority.

By that time journeymen also outnumbered masters in New York City and Philadelphia.

This shift occurred as a result of large-scale transatlantic and rural-urban migration.

Migration into the coastal cities created a larger population of potential laborers, which in turn allowed controllers of capital to invest in labor-intensive enterprises on a larger scale.

Craft workers found that these changes launched them into competition with each other to a degree that they had not experienced previously, which limited their opportunities and created substantial risks of downward mobility that had not existed prior to that time.

These conditions led to the first labor combination cases in America. Over the first half of the nineteenth century, there sre twenty-three known cases of indictment and prosecution for criminal conspiracy, taking place in six states: Pennsylvania, Maryland, New York, Louisiana, Massachusetts and Virginia.

The central question in these cases is invariably whether workmen in combination will be permitted to use their collective bargaining power to obtain benefits—increased wages, decreased hours, or improved conditions—which are beyond their ability to obtain as individuals.

The cases overwhelmingly result in convictions.

However, in most instances the plaintiffs' desire is to establish favorable precedent, not to impose harsh penalties, and the fines are typically modest.

One of the central themes of the cases prior to the landmark decision in Commonwealth vs. Hunt was the applicability of the English common law in post-revolutionary America. Whether the English common law applied—and in particular whether the common law notion that a conspiracy to raise wages was illegal applied—was frequently the subject of debate between the defense and the prosecution.

For instance, in Commonwealth v. Pullis, a case in 1806 against a combination of journeymen cordwainers in Philadelphia for conspiring to raise their wages, the defense attorneys referred to the common law as arbitrary and unknowable and instead praised the legislature as the embodiment of the democratic promise of the revolution.

In ruling that a combination to raise wages was per se illegal, Recorder Moses Levy strongly disagreed, writing that "[t]he acts of the legislature form but a small part of that code from which the citizen is to learn his duties... [i]t is in the volumes of the common law we are to seek for information in the far greater number, as well as the most important causes that come before our tribunals."]

As a result of the spate of convictions against combinations of laborers, the typical narrative of early American labor law states that, prior to Hunt in Massachusetts in 1842, peaceable combinations of workingmen to raise wages, shorten hours or ensure employment were illegal in the United States, as they had been under English common law.

In England, criminal conspiracy laws were first held to include combinations in restraint of trade in the Court of the Star Chamber early in the seventeenth century.

The precedent was solidified in 1721 by The King v. Journeymen Tailors of Cambridge, which found tailors guilty of a conspiracy to raise wages.

Pullis was actually unusual in strictly following the English common law and holding that a combination to raise wages was by itself illegal.

More often combination cases prior to Hunt did not hold that unions were illegal per se, but rather found some other justification for a conviction.

After Pullis in 1806, eighteen other prosecutions of laborers for conspiracies followed within the next three decades.

However, only one such case, People v. Fisher, also held that a combination for the purpose of raising wages was illegal.

Several other cases held that the methods used by the unions, rather than the unions themselves, were illegal.