Just as the struggle between the Knights of
Labor and the trade unions on the outside had been fundamentally a
struggle between the unskilled and the skilled portions of the
wage-earning class, so the aspiration toward the national trade assembly
within the Order represented the effort of the more or less skilled men
for emancipation from the dominance of the unskilled. But the Order
successfully fought off such attempts until after the defeat of the
mixed district assemblies, or in other words of the unskilled class, in
the struggle with the employers. With the withdrawal of a very large
portion of this class, as shown in 1887,[27] the demand for the national
trade assembly revived and there soon began a veritable rush to organize
by trades. The stampede was strongest in the city of New York where the
incompetence of the mixed District Assembly 49 had become patent. At the
General Assembly in 1887 at Minneapolis all obstacles were removed from
forming national trade assemblies, but this came too late to stem the
exodus of the skilled element from the order into the American
Federation of Labor.
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