The history of labor disputes in America substantially precedes the Revolutionary

period. In 1636, for instance, there was a fishermen's strike on an island off the coast
of Maine and in 1677 twelve carmen were fined for going on strike in New York
City.[1]However, most instances of labor unrest during the colonial period were
temporary and isolated, and rarely resulted in the formation of permanent groups of
laborers for negotiation purposes.[1] Little legal recourse was available to those injured
by the unrest, because strikes were not typically considered illegal.[1] The only known
case of criminal prosecution of workers in the colonial era occurred as a result of a
carpenters' strike in Savannah, Georgia in 1746.[1]
By the beginning of 19th-century, after the revolution, little had changed. The career
path for most artisans still involved apprenticeshipunder a master, followed by moving
into independent production.[2] However, over the course of the Industrial Revolution,
this model rapidly changed, particularly in the major metropolitan areas. For instance,
in Boston in 1790, the vast majority of the 1,300 artisans in the city described
themselves as "master workman". By 1815, journeymen workers without independent
means of production had displaced these "masters" as the majority.[3]By that time
journeymen also outnumbered masters in New York City and Philadelphia.[3]This shift
occurred as a result of large-scale transatlantic and rural-urban migration. Migration into
the coastal cities created a larger population of potential laborers, which in turn allowed
controllers of capital to invest in labor-intensive enterprises on a larger scale.[2] Craft
workers found that these changes launched them into competition with each other to a
degree that they had not experienced previously, which limited their opportunities and
created substantial risks of downward mobility that had not existed prior to that time.[2]