There were few labor disputes of enough importance to provoke collective action by workers at Springfield Armory. Instead, the workers seemed to take into their stride the complications of piece rates, varying hours, and changes in management, to say nothing of the fluctuations in scale of production between the times of peace and war.1

Two Armory workers star gauging rifles to inspect the rifling of the barrel

After the Civil War, the armorers found themselves in a growing category of federal government employees, which was subject to across-the-board Congressional action that did not always suit the local conditions of work at the Armory, such as the law limiting working hours to eight a day. The armorers somehow managed in the 1880s to get an exception allowed so they could work ten hours a day. A channel of conflict resolution open to armorers was by way of political influence in Washington and involved the direct intervention of local congressmen responsive to the petitions of civilian Armory workers in their Congressional district. Superintendents and workers alike perceived Congressional political interest as setting limits to superintendents' scope of control over armory procedures.

Armory correspondence in mid-summer 1892 shows that the Congressional channel was still functioning: when Armory workers in Springfield suspected that the "customary" two-week closing of the shops at the end of the fiscal year for inventory and clean-up would be followed by a major reduction in the workforce or work hours, they told their local Congressman, who promptly wrote to the Chief of Ordnance about it, who in turn wrote to the Armory superintendent, Colonel Mordecai, for explanation. Similarly, when the practice of piece-work was threatened by provisions of the 1915 and 1916 appropriations acts, an exception was made by the Controller General – surely not against the desire of the Armory workers – to allow the type of piece-work prevalent at Springfield.

By this time, however, a tentative move toward a labor organization of more usual and less ad hoc type had begun at the Armory: the 1912 Annual Report of the Chief of Ordnance took note of the recently provided lunchroom as a meeting place for two unnamed associations of workmen. It was not until the early 1930s, however, that a union was actually named--the National Federation of Federal Employees, local #101, -- and it was small and inconsequential. Following the revelation in 1937 of widespread worker dissatisfaction with wages, workers formed a new union, Lodge 431 of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), which differed from most other American Federation of Labor units in being organized on industrial rather than trade lines. Any civilian employee could join, and it resisted attempts by trade unions (e.g. electricians) to move in, by arguing against splitting the ranks of the workers. As mentioned above, this union succeeded in getting an employee representative to accompany the investigations of the wage board that conducted a general wage survey and obtained increases for some 45 jobs by June 1939.