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The term organized labor refers to a group of workers who join together to negotiate better wages, working conditions, and benefits. Workers unions (or trade unions) used strikes to force employers to improve conditions, and as the number of workers in the United States increased in the early twentieth century, so did the strength and success of their organizations.

The Pullman Strike of 1894 was one of the farthest reaching labor-management disputes in United States history. Conducted in the midst of the most catastrophic depression to date, it was the most dramatic of a large number of strikes affecting the nation. The labor upheaval started in Pullman, Illinois, nine miles south of Chicago. What began as a dispute between the Pullman Palace Car Company (PPCC) and three thousand employees developed into a bitter struggle between twenty-four railroads serving Chicago and the American Railway Union (ARU), whose members voted to support their striking brethren in Pullman by boycotting Pullman cars. Before the strike ended, railroad traffic was stopped from Ohio to California, and the federal government had intervened in support of the PPCC and the railroads.

A Democrat, Harry S. Truman ran for public office on a prolabor platform and acted on those ideas while he was in office as president from 1945 until 1953. His actions included vetoing the Taft-Hartley Act (Labor-Management Relations Act) of 1947, though it passed over his veto. He thought that the act restricted too many labor activities, while giving too much power to management. Despite his objections to this law, Truman invoked it twelve times during his seven-year presidency.