Glass Bottle Blowers' Association
In 1842, craftsmen in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, formed a glass blowers' union that represented workers throughout the region.[3] The AFGWU formed in Pittsburgh in 1878, and within four short years had locals throughout West Virginia and Ohio and was spreading east.[7] Feeling threatened by the new union, the Glass Blowers waged several bitter jurisdictional strikes against the AFGWU in the 1880s and 1890s.Glass blowers, however, made 60 to 100 percent more than the average worker, and were considered the "cream" of the working class.Distinct differences between glassworks in the east and west emerged, and the union created an eastern and western division in 1884 to accommodate these industry changes.[11] After the merger with the Knights of Labor in 1886, the glass workers' union struck to win control over the apprenticeship system.[19] In 1906, one scholar of trade union activity noted that the GBBA tended to hold regional or national strikes, and only rarely struck individual employers.Bottle and fruit jar manufacturing had long been "green glass work", but now the two unions enter into a bitter dispute over who should represent workers in this section of the industry.[3] But as bottle-making became an unskilled profession, the GBBA responded by allowing union wage rates to fall dramatically.As more and more states and large cities adopted Prohibition laws, the need for bottles fell drastically, causing even more unemployment and membership losses for the union.,[26] Mechanization worsened the unemployment situation, as companies developed procedures that allowed molten glass to flow directly from the furnace into the molding and blowing machines.Although the union had organized 95 percent of worksites employing hand-blown or hand-operated machines, it had but a single contract at an automated company.[27] To counteract the membership problem, the GBBA began organizing all workers in glass factories, not just blowers.These highly paid workers generated significant dues, and their specialized skills and homogeneous socio-economic and ethnic backgrounds made them easy to organize.Organizing successes included those at the Whitall-Tatum plant in East Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania, and the George Jonas Glass Co. in Minotola, New Jersey—both of which had resisted unionization for decades.At Congressional hearings in 1926, few witnesses spoke against Prohibition, and those who did emphasized the law's impact on personal liberty (rather than employment).By 1930, the Glass Blowers and Brewery Workers had organized a much larger coalition of labor unions—which included, at last, the AFL itself—to speak out against the amendment, and they began emphasizing the negative economic, employment, and tax revenue impacts of the law.[33] The invention of the neon sign and its immense popularity not only generated an intense demand for skilled glass workers, but also boosted wages.Several CIO unions—including the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, the Federation of Flat Glass Workers, the International Union of Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers, and United Mine Workers—all challenged the GBBA during organizing elections, and attempted to raid existing GBBA locals.In March 1957, the CIO's 32,000-member United Glass and Ceramic Workers of North America merged with the 52,000-member GBBA.[56] The Lanesborough Building was deteriorating by 1975, so the union sold it and moved to space at 608 East Baltimore Pike in Media, Pennsylvania.