World War I Effects

10 Pages 2432 Words

acceptable for young, employed, single middle-class women to have
their own apartments, to go out without chaperones, and to smoke in
public. It was only a matter of time before women received the right
to vote in many belligerent countries. Strong forces were shaping the
power and legal status of labor unions, too. The right of workers to
organize was relatively new, about half a century. Employers fought
to keep union organizers out of their plants and armed force was often
used against striking workers. The universal rallying of workers
towards their flag at the beginning of the war led to wider acceptance
of unions. It was more of a bureaucratic route than a parliamentary
route that integrated organized labor into government, however. A
long war was not possible without complete cooperation of the workers
with respect to putting in longers hours and increasing productivity.
Strike activity had reached its highest levels in history just before
the war. There had been over 1,500 diffent work stoppages in France
and 3,000 in Germany during 1910. More than a million British workers
stopped at one time or another in 1912. In Britain, France, and
Germany, deals were struck between unions and government to eliminate
strikes and less favorable work conditions in exchange for immediate
integration into the government process. This integration was at the
cost of having to act more as managers of labor than as the voice of
the labor. Suddenly, the strikes stopped during the first year of the
war. Soon the enthusiasm died down, though. The revival of strike
activity in 1916 shows that the social peace was already wearing thin.
Work stoppages and the number of people on strike in France
quadrupled in 1916 compared to 1915. In Germany, in May 1916, 50,000
Berlin works held a three-day walkout to protest the arrest of the
pacifist Karl Liebknecht. By the end of the war most had...