Injunctions were an old remedy, but not
until the eighties did they figure in the struggles between labor and
capital. In England an injunction was issued in a labor dispute as early
as 1868;[31] but this case was not noticed in the United States and had
nothing whatever to do with the use of injunctions in this country. When
and where the first labor injunction was issued in the United States is
not known. An injunction was applied for in a New York case as early as
1880 but was denied.[32] An injunction was granted in Iowa in 1884, but
not until the Southwest railway strike in 1886 were injunctions used
extensively. By 1890 the public had yet heard little of injunctions in
connection with labor disputes, but such use was already fortified by
numerous precedents.
The first injunctions that attained wide publicity were those issued by
Federal courts during the strike of engineers against the Chicago,
Burlington, & Quincy Railroad[33] in 1888 and during the railway strikes
of the early nineties. Justification for these injunctions was found in
the provisions of the Interstate Commerce Act and the Sherman Anti-Trust
Act.
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