International Typographical Union
US trade union for the printing trade
The International Typographical Union (ITU) was a North American trade union for the printing trade of newspapers and other media. It was founded on May 3, 1852, in the United States as the National Typographical Union. It changed its name to the International Typographical Union at its Albany, New York, convention in 1869 after it began organizing members in Canada. The ITU was one of the first unions to admit female members, admitting women members such as Augusta Lewis, Mary Moore and Eva Howard in 1869.
Typographers were educated, economically mobile, and in every major urban center with newspapers, and they had the unique possibility to influence publicity in favour of their cause. This led the union to the forefront of improving working conditions. ITU President W. B. Prescott led the ITU in 1897 to win a 48-hour work week and a standard wage scale for all printers. During the Great Depression, the ITU introduced the 40-hour work week across the industry at no cost to employers as a way to share the fewer jobs available. That ITU initiative spread to other unions and has since been codified across the labor sector by federal legislation in the US establishing the 40-hour work week.
The ITU had a unique system of factional opposition in its democratic elections, documented by Seymour Martin Lipset in his co-authored book Union Democracy: The Internal Politics of the International Typographical Union (1957).
“International Typographical Union” enters the record as uS trade union for the printing trade. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what International, Typographical and Union can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “International Typographical Union” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.