- 25 Jul 2016 20:41
#14705446
In the pre-war era, it was the Democratic Party that promoted racial segregation and immigration restrictions from non-white countries, aligning itself with the AFL. In the same vein, the Australian Labour Party passed the White Australia Policy to protect Aussie jobs from Asian migrants. Strangely, these former racist parties are championing multiculturalism today.
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The AFL and Immigration Restriction
Although racism manifested in many forms throughout the Progressive Era, the American Federation of Labor (AFL) mounted perhaps one of the most organized and concerted efforts of xenophobic legislation against non-white immigration during this period. In its first years, the AFL admitted nearly every laboring group without discrimination. Samuel Gompers, founder of the AFL, opened the Federation to radical and socialist workers and to some semiskilled and unskilled workers. Women, African Americans, and immigrants also joined in small numbers. However in the 1890s, the Federation shifted its policy and began to organize only skilled workers in craft unions, quickly making it an organization of white men.
The AFL was at its most influential during Woodrow Wilson's administration. Particularly during World War I, both unions and the government sought cooperation between labor and capital as the best means of rationalizing and increasing American production on behalf of the war effort.
This rise in AFL prominence allowed it to not only strictly regulate its own members, but to influence the development of anti-immigration policy over the course of the early twentieth century. While the AFL preached a policy of egalitarianism in regard to African American workers, by 1912, it was actively discriminating against them. For instance, the AFL sanctioned the maintenance of segregated locals within its affiliates — particularly in the construction and railroad industries — a practice which often excluded black workers altogether from union membership and thus from employment in organized industries. Generally the AFL viewed women and black workers as competition, strikebreakers, or an unskilled labor reserve that kept wages low.
Source: Boundless. “Progressivism for Whites Only.” Boundless U.S. History. Boundless, 28 Jun. 2016. Retrieved 25 Jul. 2016 from https://www.boundless.com/u-s-history/t ... -955-5258/
In the pre-war era, it was the Democratic Party that promoted racial segregation and immigration restrictions from non-white countries, aligning itself with the AFL. In the same vein, the Australian Labour Party passed the White Australia Policy to protect Aussie jobs from Asian migrants. Strangely, these former racist parties are championing multiculturalism today.
Сделайте Америку Снова Bеликой