As businesses expanded and consolidated to secure advantages in the marketplace, workers tried to organize, and often succeeded, to exert leverage in the labor market. Changes in the workplace set imposing challenges for workers, who found themselves contending with increasingly large, concentrated, and distant employers. Periodic economic downturns also cut deeply into efforts to organize, as workers competed to survive. However, workers did organize and did take on management in often bitter efforts to secure or retain decent working conditions amid the dizzying process of industrial transformation.

Knights of Labor.

The first organization to attempt to unite workers of all industries and occupations, the Knights of Labor grew from small beginnings: when it was founded in 1869 it was envisioned as a secret organization, something like a labor equivalent to freemasonry. It eventually shed its trappings of secrecy, and under the leadership of Terence V. Powderly...