Loewe v. Lawlor

The background to Loewe v. Lawlor is a classic story of early labor history. The United Hatters were a union of some 9,000 members, primarily in the Northeast and Midwest, with some members in California and in Ontario, Canada. Six of the union's locals, with about 3,000 members, were located in Connecticut.

Following the union principles of "unity" and "strength in numbers," the United Hatters had affiliated with the American Federation of Labor (AFL), a group of unions that is the predecessor of today's AFL-CIO. In 1908, the AFL had over 1.4 million members in the United States and Canada--a small fraction of America's working people.

In those days, there was virtually no legislation that protected union activity, and union members were frequently fired or harassed in order to discourage them and their fellow workers from joining the union. Despite the adverse conditions, the United Hatters had managed to organize some 70 of the nation's 82 hat factories. That left only 12 unorganized shops, one of which was the Danbury Connecticut company, D. E. Loewe & Co., known as Danbury Hatters.

According to the union, Danbury Hatters had:

. . . discriminated against the union men in their employ, had thrown them out of employment because they refused to give up their union cards and teach boys, who were intended to take their places after seven months' instruction, and had driven their employes [sic] to extreme measures by their persistent, unfair and un-American policy of antagonizing union labor, forcing wages to a starvation scale and given boys and cheap, unskilled foreign labor preference over experienced and capable union workmen . . .

The union needed to decide how to respond to this apparent harassment. One approach might have been a strike. In those days, however, there was no law to prevent an employer from replacing striking workers with non-union labor. And while workers were on strike, they did not get paid.

So the United Hatters tried another tactic: they called a boycott. With the help of the AFL, they called on union members and sympathizers across the nation to refuse to buy hats that were made by Danbury Hatters, or indeed, any hat that did not have a union label.