The National Industrial Congress, organized first in New York in 1845, and which met yearly for the next ten years, was supposed to stand for all the interests of the workingman and woman, but gave most of its attention to the land question and other subjects of general reform.  This scattered the energies of the organizations and weakened their power as trade unions.  But in the long anti-slavery agitation, which was just then rising to its height on the eve of the Civil War, even the land question was forgotten, and the voice of the trade unionists, speaking for man or woman, was utterly unheeded.

Imperfect as are the accounts that have come down to us, it is clear that this second generation of trade unionists were educating themselves to more competent methods of handling the industrial problem.  The women workers of Pittsburgh cooeperated with the women of New England in trying to obtain from the manufacturers of their respective centers a promise that neither group would work their establishments longer than ten hours a day—­this, to meet the ready objection so familiar in our ears still, that the competition of other mills would make the concession in one center ruinous to the manufacturers who should grant it.  This was the crowning effort of the Pittsburgh mill-workers to obtain improvement.  Strikes for higher wages had failed.  Strikes for a ten-hour day had failed.  And now it is pitiful to write that even this interstate cooeperation on the part of the girls for relief by a peaceful trade agreement failed, too, the employers falling back upon their “undoubted right” to run their factories as many hours as they pleased.

The women then appealed to the legislatures, and between 1847 and 1851, New Hampshire, New Jersey and Pennsylvania all passed ten-hour laws.[A] But they were not passed simultaneously, which gave the employers in the particular state dealt with, the excuse that under such legislation they could not face interstate competition in their business, and since every law contained a saving clause permitting contracting out by individual employers and employes, all these beneficial acts were so much waste paper.  The manufacturers expressed themselves as willing enough to stand for the shorter work-day, but absolutely declined to risk the loss of their business in competing with those rival manufacturers who might take advantage of the “saving clause.”

[Footnote A:  In the same year, 1847, a ten-hour law was passed in New Hampshire and in Great Britain, with, however, very different outcome, for in Great Britain the law was enforced, there being no complication of state and national control there.]

For nearly fifty years after this period, the right to overwork and the “right” to be overworked remained untouched by legislative interference.  And yet the need for labor legislation, restricting hours, and for uniform federal legislation was as clearly evident then as it is to us today, to meet the industrial needs and to satisfy the undoubted rights of the working folk of the twentieth century.