Why does the United States not have a Labor party?

In most countries around the western world, there exists a political party that centres around Labour based interests. These countries come in forms like social democratic parties, as with Germany’s SPD, socialist parties like the creatively named socialist party of France, and others, like in the UK and Australia which are simply called Labour/Labor parties respectively. 

These parties are considered of the same kind because their structure, ideology, and identity was designed for working people; and often formed international groups, such as the second international. 

These parties are deeply underrated movements of the 19th century. Responsible for most of the workers rights we, especially those of us in Australia, enjoy today. In Australia, when the first Labor Majority government was won in 1910 - that is, both the senate and lower house had mostly labor party members in it - The establishment of a maternity allowance, increased welfare, land tax reform and pension extensions, the kind of policies that were directly in the interest of most Australians at the time, were implemented. 

These are the biggest examples in the Western World of a movement that has actually done tangible good and continues to do good in the world, yet it seems the only inference of its existence in the entire history curriculum at school is a brief mention of the 8 hour work week.

There is one major exception among advanced capitalist countries on the matter of Labor parties, and that is the United States of America. The land of Freedom and democracy never had a successful political party that directly represented the biggest demographic (workers and potentially small farmers) and their interests (freedom).

 This is the odd question addressed in the paper called, quite quaintly: why there is no Labor party in the United States? By Robin Archer, going 260 pages deep into  detail, followed by enough pages of notes and references afterwards to reach page 369. 

There were some interesting conclusions as to why America is, it seems in this way exclusively, so exceptional. 

Archer compares the Union movement between Australia and the States around the late 19th century, in which labour based interests began forming. In Australia, in this wake of new found political support for workers, the Labor party was born. And in the same way, America represented these interests through a conference of the American Federation of Labor, or AFL, a union counsel that in spite of its name failed to kick the goal of party formation, though given it probably included a chef union contained many wooden spoons.

 The reason why this paper chose a comparison between the United States and Australia is because it shared many similar characteristics to the United States at the time.

In the 19ths century Both Australia and the United States were former/colonial British settlements with independent politics that developed a union movement considering the formation of a Labor party in the 1890s. 

This paper sought to compare Economic and Social factors like Prosperity, Union Organisation, Farmers, Race, and Immigration; Political factors like Suffrage, electoral and government systems, courts, and repression; and Ideas/Values such as Social Egalitarianism, Freedom, Religion, and Socialism, and try to figure out how they affect each respective country.

Before I read the conclusions of this study, here is the rundown this paper had for the respective nations history in the 1890s.

Australia

First unions in the 1830s, stabilised in the golden 1850s where craft unions managed to win victories like the 8 hour work week. Started organising into councils from 1856, and began including non-skilled and semi-skilled unions in mining, shearing, and port industries in the 1880s. 

Most important of these was the Amalgamated Shearers Union (ASU) in 1886, because apparently sheep was THE Australian economy at the time. As the 1890s began, Unions started organising major strikes, first one being the maritime strike which is a misleading name as it only partially involves maritime officers not wanting to leave the Melbourne trades hall, and largely involved shearers Unions who wanted to make sure only union-hiring shearers existed (known as a closed shop).

 This spread to all the major unions in the country, where the governments sided with employers and it fell apart after two months. Only After this strike did an epic fail, in 1891, did Unions agree with notable ounces of enthusiasm about forming a Labor party. 

First electoral test got a quarter of the vote giving the party the balance of power. The Labor party then split, reducing its vote to 16%, and reformed with stricter systems and rules in place. 

Queensland was the first colony to have a Labor government victory where Anderson Dawson formed a minority government…For onloy 6 days. 

It formed a minority government on the federal level with Chris Watson in 1904 (link to a video someone did on him here), and finally in 1908-1909 Labor formed its first majority government under Andrew Fisher.

United States of America 

First signs of union movement in the 1820s, unstable until the 1850s. First durable union was the Printers Union followed by other craft unions.

 Continuous trade councils formed after the 1870s recession. 1891 saw craft unions in Canada and North America form the predecessor of the American Federation of Labor (AFL). This is the national union organisation. 

unskilled workers began unionising at this time, mainly in mining and railroad industries.

Major Strikes occurred in the early 1890s, which saw governments deploy military and allow private militias on behalf of employers to completely defeat the unions, often violently. Meanwhile Farmers formed a party which was pro-labor, gaining a bit of traction in specific areas. As all this occurred America sank into the 19th century's worst depression. 

In this context the AFL became the closest they ever were to forming a labor-based party where in the 1893 convention they voted on whether to form a “political program” modelled after the British labour party, possibly having an alliance with small farmers.

 This was a contentious prospect, and a lot of dirty infighting occurred between the anti-party AFL president Gompers and his allies, versus pro-party unionists primarily from Chicago. Gompers won and a labor party never formed. 

Context out of the way

So now that context is out of the way, let us finally bring about the conclusions. This document splits it's conclusions into negative findings - Possibilities that can be eliminated - and positive findings - findings which couldn’t - 

Reasons that aren’t the reason America has no labor party:

Negative Findings

Prosperity

One argument for why the US had no Labor party is because they lacked economic grievances. However the findings when compared to Australia show that the US had inferior prosperity.

 When it comes to the gap between expected and actual living standards, which is primarily driven by commoners looking at the living standard of the wealthy, the standard that is promoted in their country, and the standard in the country they came from. These were also considered to be functionally the same in both the USA and Oz.

Farmers alliance:

Labor-populist alliance between workers and farmers  was present in Australia and would have been the likely form of labor-party in the USA given both had access to farmers through certain unions.

Racism: 

Racism played a role in the labor movement at the time. Hostility against Black and Chinese people was present in both. This was in part because such labor was exploited by owners and made it more difficult for workers to demand better wages. 

In Australia this ended up boosting labor party popularity as racism was rife and the targets of racism, the Chinese, were yet to be present enough to make a difference electorally. This was also the case in the Northern Industrial areas of the USA. 

Racism essentially gave both movements a platform beyond workers rights, and to similar effect. Southern and Eastern European immigration and the growth in racism against them had not yet reached a point in either nation to have a notable effect on the movement. 

Suffrage

White Male privilege, in the most literal sense possible: suffrage was well established in both countries at the time, where it was used by the labour movements to legitimise and provide a means for their movements to grow on a political stage, and the threat of class-based systems or potential of those systems being re-imposed gave the movement the ability to fight on pro-democratic grounds, further expanding the avenues of campaign for them. 

Electoral system: Australia is pretty well known for its interesting electoral system of preferential voting, but in the 1890s, both America and Australia shared the first-past-the-post electoral system where you can only vote for one candidate, making it hard for a third party to win seats. 

This problem was present for many countries that did end up forming labor-based parties. Not just Australia, but much of europe. This was successful in those countries because Labor-based party voters were concentrated highly in certain areas, which would allow them to win seats in certain electorates, starting the base for the party to then expand. This was also the case in the US however, having had heavily concentrated worker electorates. 

Egalitarianism

The idea of everyone being equal in America is often one explanation proposed for why it hasn’t formed a Labor party. 

The reasoning is that this idea prevented that class-based mindset, and thus grievance that Labor movements are based on. 

The presence of Egalitarian views was also extremely present in Australia, however, and still is, as every person in the country would occasionally utter the term “a fair go” when they have even the slightest sense of getting ripped off.

 Additionally, this mindset only served to strengthen the movement as people were able to point at the disparity or threat of disparity between this ideal and the reality. 

Freedom and liberty

One theory proposed is that Americans' value of individuality and liberty reduced collective action such as that done by the Labor movement. Again However ideas of liberty were present both in Australia and America. 

Such ideas were touted by their respective labour movements as a reason on why you should join your unions and take collective action, as not doing so would put individual freedoms under threat by preventing a person from the freedom to develop their capacities by not giving them a good enough living. Both nations more or less argued in this manner to the same extent.

These are all the negative factors that were present in both nations, however there were some factors that this paper considered not significant but were distinct between Australia and the United States.

System of government: 

The United States had a presidential system of government, whereas Australia was parliamentary. These government types both fostered a two-party system, and both were structured in a way that labor-based parties could win the balance of power and expand from there, and thus the difference isn’t major enough.

Federalism

 The US had a federal system of government, where Australia had yet to establish a government in 1890. This however would not have stopped a labor party from forming as a federal system, although typically harder for making change when in power, is easier for the labor party to gain a foothold in the system as it had more points of access for a new party to enter and supported the ability to start footholds in strongly labor supportive areas to start off the movement. 

Courts

The US has weirdly powerful courts, where in Australia courts could be overruled by legislation. 

Courts were used in America to suppress unions, and they were a very effective silencer, some argue that due to this, it would have pushed Unions to not establish a party, as it would lead to even worse suppression. However this argument is not supported by the fact that one of the only ways to influence the courts legally in the US is through electoral pressure, politicians elect the judges, so unions had an incentive to become electorally significant in order to put pressure on courts to be less hostile to them.

So, to quote Robin Archer: 

"Explanations based on the level of prosperity, the

prospects for a labor-populist alliance, the intense racial hostility towards

black and Chinese people, the emergence of similar attitudes towards new European

immigrants, the early introduction of manhood suffrage for whites, the

electoral system, the strength of social egalitarianism, and the prevalence of

ideas about individual freedom can all be ruled out"

Positive findings.

Five possible explanations explored in this paper remain: Weakness of New Unionism, extent of union repression, importance of religion, and socialist sectarianism. 

New Unionism

This refers to the growth of semi-skilled and non-skilled unions, which were dubbed “new unions', things like mine, rail, and port workers, who were quite different to specialist unions which comprised workers with skills like cigarette makers. 

Both Australia and America started off with mostly craft Unions, and both countries grew in unskilled unions in the late 19th century. 

In the United States however, these unions were far more stunted in growth than their Australian counterparts. They were but a portion of America’s unionised workforce by 1893 when the decision was made not to establish a labor party.

 In Australia on the other hand, New Unions were the main founders of the Labor party. They pushed pro-worker policies and ideas, were the main unions behind the major strikes that caused unions to support the labor party (think shearers and railway unions in the maritime strike), and they were the base for the actual party’s organisation, which allowed it to survive early setbacks. 

New Unions in the USA also supported a labor party, but they lacked a lot of the above to push for it.

This was because of:

Repression.

Although both countries repressed unions, the scale of difference between the two was insane. 

The US didn’t have just judicial repression as discussed earlier, when government’s in both countries send police and troops to break up the major strikes of the 1890s, there was often 4 times more armed men sent to break up American unions than Australia, and in every instance more Armed men per strike, which always ended far more violently.

Repression existed in both countries. In Australia repression helped because it defeated the union movement and gave them a reason to invest their resources into politics rather than just strikes.

 In America Repression hindered because the unions were destroyed. They were weakened to a point where, although motivated, were completely unable to push the AFL to form a Labor party because they lacked numbers, money, and influence. 

It was violently taken from them, allowing craft unionists like AFL president Gompers to hold most of the power.  This repression also succeeded in reducing the legitimacy of the labor movement and hence reducing electoral outcomes if the party were to form and access to political allies as the government conducted propaganda campaigns to justify their violence 

The document compares multiple strikes between Australia and the United states, and they all show the striking contrast in how workers were treated between the two countries.

 I will show you one example here, comparing the 1892 Broken Hill Miners Strike and the Coeur D’Alene Miners strike of the same year. 

In Broken hill 6000 strikers were met with 285 police officers, in Coeur D’Alene 4000 strikers were met with 1500 state and federal troops, making 188 far more heavily armed forces per 100 strikers. 

The result? 25 arrests and 0 deaths in Australia’s Broken Hill, and Coeur D’Alene strikers suffered 600 arrests and 6 deaths. Quoting from the Robin Archers paper:

The NSW government resisted company-pressure to deploy soldiers in 

Broken Hill, and instead relied solely on a buildup of

police. In both cases, all the strike leaders were arrested and charged with conspiracy.

But while union members in Broken Hill were continually harassed and

sometimes arrested by a partisan police magistrate, their counterparts in Coeur

d’Alene were arrested en masse. With the exception of those who managed to

escape across the border to Montana, nearly every union member and every

union sympathizer was rounded up and held in a makeshift “bull pen.” Martial

law was declared and remained in force for four months, and it was the publicly stated goal of the military to destroy the union and drive its members from the region. Military commanders offered

to free imprisoned miners who resigned from the union, and two mines

that were continuing to employ unionists were forced to close down and reopen

with non-union labor (Cooper, 1980, 166–70, Jensen, 1950, 36, and

Smith, 1961, 93). In addition, only in Coeur d’Alene were workers killed.

So much for freedom unna?

This destruction of the unions is what fuelled a lot of the opposition by craft unionists like Gompers, who along with others often cited the need to prevent complete destruction by keeping an apolitical stance. Such fears that did not exist in Australia. 

Unions were never fearful about destruction in the antipodes. In America mostly unions that were already essentially destroyed to support political action, and they at the time held little sway.

Religious zealousness

America was far more religious than Australia, and religious groups were far more hostile to unions than Australia.

Union leaders were fearful that taking a partisan approach would emaciate their union membership as workers already had loyalties to existing parties that step from either religious ties or civil war ties, which in both instances were strong.

 In Australia the main two political parties at the time were less cemented, and tied to purely economic policies (whether tariffs should be low or high), which although still could still cause problems between unions, was no threat to unions existence.

Unions in the USA were worried that taking sides in politics would destroy their movement because it would be seen as them taking sides on matters of religion which defined politics at the time, possibly utterly fracturing the movement as a whole because Americans were strongly religious. 

Loyalties to democratic and republican parties can best be described by this quote from a bricklayer union secretary. “We have excellent trades’ unionists, who are warm Democrats and zealous Republicans . . . and who are ready to point with suspicion to every movement on our part towards the formation of political organizations. . . . The only way we can be successful with our local and national trades unions is by excluding politics from them.”

From what I gathered in this paper, America’s political sphere seems to define itself by a completely different realm of thinking to Australia. 

Where in Australia issues were defined around economy (free trade versus protectionism, and later big businesses interest versus public interest) America’s entire battlefield was defined between zealous religious “moralists” that stemmed from republican movements, and zealous, hard core “Liberals”. 

In Australia such questions of religious morals versus personal liberty were side questions that rarely got the spotlight compared to issues of how we should distribute and manage wealth, whereas in the United States, questioning where America’s wealth went was rarely able to enter discussion, and such issues as banning alcohol became prime issues of the day. 

When economic philosophy was pushed, such as laissez faire capitalism, or isolationism, it came wrapped in pretexts like liberalism, or moral zealousness, not based on the economic merits of the issue itself.

socialist sectarianism

Unlike Australia, where socialists were simply a supportive side-line to the actual union movement, American unions were divided into many various progress-based ideologies and factions.

The worry from Americans was that the conflicts between these groups of people would make maintaining a Labor party impossible and unstable, causing factional breaks within the hypothetical party. 

Australia’s socialist ideologies came mostly from America, and conflicts between those ideologies were also present in Australia. Oddly enough, the most destructive socialist groups in America were those who subscribed to European socialist thought, something that was not really present in Australia.

 The battle between pro-party and anti-party advocates in the AFL circles caused the question to become bitter, and transform into a “either-or”  dogma between either union based politics or party based politics, never both. 

While pure-and-simple unionists in America saw establishing a political party in America as undermining the union movement, pure-and-simple unionists in Australia established a political party.

The two broad reasons for why there was no Labor party in the United states: Repression of new unions, and fear of disruption and destruction due to dogmatic loyalties that came from religion and decades old socialist debates. The conclusion of this paper quotes as follows: 

“Paradoxically then, in a land that often defines itself as democratic, secular, and liberal, it is the importance of repression, religion, and socialism that helps explain the failure to establish a Labor party.”

My broad conclusions are thus. One of the greatest gifts of Australia’s political movements is an unshakable aspect of our culture being both impossible to take seriously, and impossible to destroy. 

We are a nation founded on an ideology of lax pragmatism and a sheer political disinterest. The labor movement in Australia contrasts itself from the destructive two way street of America because we for the most part used our political platforms to serve what we considered the best path at the time. 

Where the United States was stewing in deep debates about fundamental concepts and philosophy, Australians navigated the many thoughts and ideas at the time and implemented the best ones they could find and place. 

I finished reading this paper with an immense feeling of pride for this part of our mindset in Australia. I worry that the zealous and narrow definitions that American media portray politics to us will destroy that extremely productive culture of debate down under. I sincerely hope, however, that it doesn’t.