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of the most technologically advanced industries, and 38.2% were employed in
construction, which depended on largely traditional work processes. In the former
case, laborers coexisted with large numbers of semi-skilled as well as skilled
workers, in the latter case there was virtually no semi-skilled buffer between them
and some of the most aristocratic craft workers. Trade-union traditions and
organization were even weaker among the laborers than among the operatives,
although the laborers in the ranks of construction showed a greater tendency to
organize than those in newer, larger industry throughout the years leading up to the
Crash.12
Transportation and communication workers who, like manufacturing
workers, were a component of the industrial working class, made up only about
one-eighth of the workers employed in Baltimore in this period. Despite their
relatively small numbers, these workers were among the most "strategically" placed
in the Baltimore economy - strategic from the point of view of business, for they
were crucial to the movement of goods, people, and information that the industrial
port of Baltimore required; strategic from the point of view of the labor movement
because of their potential to disrupt the economy with protests. Divided among the
categories of water transport, railroad, road and street, and various types of
communications, these workers displayed a variety of skill levels and experienced a
range of working conditions analogous to those in manufacturing. At the skilled
pole there were, for example, the engineers, firemen, and conductors of the
national railroads like the Baltimore and Ohio, and the motormen of the street
railways; like skilled construction workers, they were an extremely aristocratic and
exclusivistic craft group. At the opposite pole were unskilled workers of little status
or income, including laborers, porters, and baggagemen (the latter two occupations
sharing characteristics of low-status personal service workers). At a more middling
level were the sailors, seamen, longshoremen, drivers, teamsters, telegraph and
telephone operators. Proportionately speaking, trade-union traditions were
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