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Article: Injunctions, Labor
- Article from:
- Dictionary of American History
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INJUNCTIONS, LABOR
INJUNCTIONS, LABOR.
In the late nineteenth century, America saw a dramatic increase in state intervention against labor protest. Beginning with the railway strikes of the 1870s and spreading to every major industry by century's end, the nation's courts vastly enlarged their role in regulating and policing industrial conflict through labor injunctions.
The substantive law governing the bounds of workers' collective action changed little from the beginning of the nineteenth century until the first and second decades of the twentieth century. Strikes to improve wages and working conditions at individual workplaces were legal, but boycotting or striking to gain union ...