History of the United States II / Unit 8 USH2 1092 worked example, 60 to 90 seconds
Labour's Wartime Bargain
The idea
The no-strike pledge brought labour into the war effort on new terms. Union membership grew from two point six million in nineteen sixteen to four point one million in nineteen nineteen. But prices rose fifteen to twenty percent a year from nineteen seventeen to nineteen twenty, while corporate profits rose nearly a third. When the war ended and the pledge lapsed, workers struck in numbers never seen before or since.
In practice
Union cards multiplying while pay packets lost ground to prices.
Where people slip
Read the numbers as a sequence, not a single moment. Wartime gains in membership came with losses in real wages, and the pledge held labour's anger in check only until peace. The strike wave of nineteen nineteen, later in this unit, and the Red Scare that broke it, follow from this bargain.
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