The Journeymen Stonecutters' Association of North America (JSANA) was a

labor union A trade union (British English) or labor union (American English), often simply referred to as a union, is an organization of workers whose purpose is to maintain or improve the conditions of their employment, such as attaining better wages ...

representing workers involved in cutting and shaping stone for construction in the United States and Canada. The union was founded on December 5, 1887 at a conference in

Chicago Chicago is the List of municipalities in Illinois, most populous city in the U.S. state of Illinois and in the Midwestern United States. With a population of 2,746,388, as of the 2020 United States census, 2020 census, it is the List of Unite ...

. Stonecutters were one of the first trades to establish a national union in the United States. Early on, the stonecutters union advocated against the use of planers, a stonecutting device, and launched several strikes to limit the use of planers in stonecutting. The union achieved a maximum

eight hour day The eight-hour day movement (also known as the 40-hour week movement or the short-time movement) was a social movement to regulate the length of a working day, preventing excesses and abuses of working time. The modern movement originated i ...

in 1904, the first industry to do so. In 1907, it was chartered by the

American Federation of Labor The American Federation of Labor (A.F. of L.) was a national federation of labor unions in the United States that continues today as the AFL-CIO. It was founded in Columbus, Ohio, in 1886 by an alliance of craft unions eager to provide mutual ...

(AFL), and in 1915 it absorbed the New York Stone Cutters' Society and the Architectural Sculptors' and Carvers' Association of New York. By 1925, it had 5,075 members. The union affiliated to the new

AFL-CIO The American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) is a national trade union center that is the largest federation of unions in the United States. It is made up of 61 national and international unions, together r ...

in 1955, but by 1957, its membership had fallen to just 1,900. On February 19, 1968, it merged into the

Laborers' International Union of North America The Laborers' International Union of North America (LIUNA, stylized as LiUNA!), often shortened to just the Laborers' Union, is an American and Canadian labor union formed in 1903. As of 2017, they had about 500,000 members, about 80,000 of whom ...

.{{cite web , title=Inactive Organizations , url=https://umdlabor.weebly.com/uploads/2/9/3/9/29397087/inactive_organizations.pdf , website=UMD Labor Collections , publisher=University of Maryland , access-date=18 April 2022

References

Stonemasons' trade unions Trade unions established in 1887 Trade unions disestablished in 1968 Laborers' International Union of North America