Labor
Fraser Ottanelli (University of South Florida) and Ferdinando Fasce (Independent Scholar)
Immigrants from the Italian peninsula and the Island of Sicily had been coming to North America since early colonial days. These early arrivals were explorers followed by small numbers of craftsmen, merchants, artists, and members of the clergy. However, the bulk of Italian migration to the United States took place in the years between Italian unification and the onset of World War I. During this period over 4 million Italians crossed the Atlantic heading for the United States, representing approximately twenty percent of all immigrant arrivals. Unlike earlier migrants, the vast majority of those who settled in the United States between the end of the 19th and the first two decades of the 20th centuries were landless peasants and manual laborers, predominantly male and mostly from the southern regions. Along with migrants from Eastern Europe and the Balkans, they became a vital component of the U.S. working class, human ‘steam shovels’ that helped build the infrastructure for the country’s burgeoning industrial economy.
Like the immigrants who preceded them, Italians worked menial jobs. Most were blue-collar workers chiefly in the needle trades, and the mining, steel, and construction industries. They settled primarily in major industrial centers, chief among them the New York City metropolitan area. They were also a significant presence in other industrial areas along the eastern seaboard and the Midwest as well as in mining centers from Pennsylvania to southern Colorado and Utah, fishing communities, and wine-producing areas in California. Some settled in communities in the deep South.
In the early days, Italian immigrants looking for employment relied on the padrone system in which co-nationals, or paesani, acted as labor agents. These agents charged high fees for their services and the system was rife with abuse and exploitation. Eventually, as the number of Italians in the U.S. increased, exploitative recruitment was replaced by “migration chains” in which new immigrants were aided by family, friends, and neighbors who had preceded them.
Italian immigrants faced ethnoracial discrimination, low wages, and terrible working conditions at the hands of employers. In addition, they experienced widespread hostility from trade unions founded by earlier German and Irish immigrants along with opposition from the national leadership of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) who resisted organizing unskilled laborers and opposed unrestricted immigration. Italian immigrant workers were seen as competitors for jobs and blamed for lowering salaries by accepting lower wages; they were also accused of being tools of employers who used them as scabs to defeat strikes and unionization drives.
Many new arrivals had already experienced and participated in organized forms of class struggle before leaving in Italy. The years following Italian unification had been marked by an exodus of anarchists, syndicalists, and socialists fleeing government repression. Leaders of these movements, including Pietro Gori, Luigi Campolonghi, Giacinto Menotti Serrati, Alceste de Ambris, Errico Malatesta, Francesco Saverio Merlino, Edmondo Rossoni, Luigi Galleani, Arturo Giovannitti, Giuseppe Bertelli, Arturo Caroti, Carlo Tresca, and Giuseppe Ciancabilla, settled alongside Italian immigrants and experienced first-hand the hardships and isolation of their compatriots. These leaders became what Elisabetta Vezzosi has termed "radical ethnic brokers" who helped Italian workers organize ethnic based political groups, labor organizations, and mutual aid societies and, when possible, join local multi-ethnic industrial unions such as the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) and, most notably, the revolutionary Industrial Workers of the World (IWW.) In 1912, thousands of Italian textile workers united with workers representing other ethnic groups in strikes in the Mesabi Iron Range in Minnesota; Barre, Vermont; Lawrence, Massachusetts; Paterson, New Jersey; Ybor City, Florida; and Ludlow, Colorado. Eventually, as industrial unions for unskilled workers developed within the AFL, Italians joined the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers (ACW). Within these organizations, they formed Italian-language locals no. 89 and 48 to assert leadership in unions dominated by English and Yiddish-speakers These unions won the support of Italian immigrant women, who comprised most of the workers in the dress and shirtwaist industries.
In the interwar years and particularly during the Great Depression, hundreds of thousands of first and second-generation Italian Americans employed in mass production industries took an active role in the labor struggles of the period. They supported the large multi-ethnic industrial unions of the era, many of which affiliated with the newly formed Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO.) The resulting decline of independent ethnic-based labor organizations in favor of mainstream unions, combined with their active role in support of the U.S. during World War II and the economic prosperity of the post-war years, were important factors in the incorporation of Italians into U.S. society. Having represented the army’s largest ethnic group, Italian men were among the main beneficiaries of the 1944 G.I. Bill, which paid a substantial part of the costs of veterans’ education, opening up unprecedented opportunities in professional and technical occupations. With that, starting in the 1960s came the gradual move of Italian Americans out of the urban enclaves they had occupied for decades into newly sprawling suburbs.
Resources
Barbata Jackson, Jessica, 2020, Dixie’s Italians: Sicilians, Race, and Citizenship in the Jim Crow Gulf South, Louisiana State University Press.
Bencivenni, Marcella, “The Italian Immigrant Working-Class Experience in the United States,” The Oxford Research Encyclopedia, American History, Oxford University Press USA, 2020. Accessed online on November 21, 2022. oxfordre.com/americanhistory.
Brier, Stephen and Fasce, Ferdinando, 2011, “Italian Militants and Migrants and the Language of Solidarity in the Early-Twentieth-Century Western Coalfields” LABOR. Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas, 8/2, 88-122.
Cartosio, Bruno, 1983, "Gli emigrati italiani e l’Industrial Workers of the World," in Bezza, Gli italiani fuori d'Italia. Gli emigrati italiani nei movimenti operai dei paesi d’adozione (1880-1940), Franco Angeli, 359-397.
Fenton, Edwin, 1957, Immigrants and Unions: A Case Study: Italians and American Labor, 1870-1920, Harvard University Press
Fraser, Steve, 1986, "'Landslayt' and 'Paesani': Ethnic Conflict and Cooperation in the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America," in Dirk Hoerder, ed., Struggle a Hard Battle. Essays on Working-class Immigrants. Northern Illinois University Press, 280-303
Gabaccia, Donna, 1988, Militants and Migrants: Rural Sicilians Become American Workers, Rutgers University Press
Gabaccia, Donna and Ottanelli, Fraser, 2001, Italian Workers of the World: Labor Migration and the Formation of Multiethnic States, University of Illinois Press. Mormino, Gary,and
Pozzetta, George E., 1987, The Immigrant world of Ybor City, Italians and Their Latin Neighbors in Tampa, 1885-1985, University of Illinois Press
Ramirez , Bruno, 1990 , “Immigration, Ethnicity, and Political Militance: Patterns of Radicalism in the Italian-American Left, 1880-1930,” in From “Melting Pot” to Multiculturalism: The Evolution of Ethnic Relations in the United States and Canada, Valeria Gennaro Lerda editor, Bulzoni, 115-141.
Topp, Michael M., 2001, Those Without a Country. The Political Culture of Italian American Syndicalists, University of Minnesota Press.
Vecoli, Rudolph J. , 1983, “The Italian Immigrants in the United States Labor Movement from 1880 to 1929,” in Gli italiani fuori d’Italia: Gli emigrati italiani nei movimenti operai dei paesi d’adozione (1880-1940), Bruno Bezza editor, 257-306.
Vezzosi, Elisabetta, 1991, Il socialismo indifferente: immigrati italiani e Socialist Party negli Stati Uniti del primo novecento, Edizioni Lavoro, ch 4.
Zimmer, Kenyon, 2015, Immigrants Against the State, University of Illinois Press.
Videos
Bird, Stewart, and Shaffer, Deborah, dir. 1979. The Wobblies, Libcom Dot Org on Vimeo https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=375331150736625
Crialese, Emanuele, dir. 2006. Nuovomondo - The Golden Door, Raicinema DVD
Maggio, John, dir. 2015. Becoming Americans, 1910-1930, PBS Series, The Italian Americans, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCOeQibXwqQ
Miller Peter, dir. 2006. Sacco e Vanzetti, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wkKsfOklrbA
Sayles, John, dir. 1987. Matewan, DVD.