Jan. 12, 1912, Prior to this day the idea of “Power To The People,”
was an idea, a possible suggestion after it became a very viable way to
overcome the oppressor.
On this day the women who worked at the looms in many mills in Lawrence, Massachusetts found out they had lost 32 cents a week and they
decided to walk off the job. Because of a new law limiting the hour's children
and women could work the textile companies automatically cut these women’s pay,
and that wasn’t acceptable.
Lawrence, Massachusetts was a factory town with tenement
housing for the mill workers. It was also a solid immigrant town full of people
who came to the United States for a better life. From Eastern and Southern
Europe, from Southwest Asia, these families came, and they had a powerful work
ethic, but they wanted to be paid for it so when the companies tried to cut wages the
workers stepped away, immigrants from 51 countries were recognized as union
members during the strike.
The walkout spread quickly from mill to mill across the city.
Strikers defied the assumptions of conservative trade unions within the
American Federation of Labor that immigrant, largely female, and ethnically
diverse workers could not be organized.
Polish women were the first to shut down their looms and leave
the mill. As they marched through the streets, workers from all the city's
ethnic groups joined them. the turn of the twentieth century, New
England's factory towns were generally miserable places. Wages were low, rents
were high, and living conditions were crowded and unhealthy. The factory floors
were brutally hot in summer and painfully cold in winter. The machinery was
dangerous; pressure to speed up production increased the risk of accident and
injury. The workers who walked off marched through the streets of Lawrence
shouting "short pay!"
Initially, the owners were unconcerned. Without the
assistance of the more conservative and craft-skilled based American
Federation of Labor, they felt they could easily break the strike. They had underestimated
the commitment of the more radical Industrial Workers of the World, (I.W.W.) and their own workers. The IWW stepped in and
sent organizers to Lawrence. Relief committees were formed to provide food,
medical care, and clothing to strikers and their families. everyone predicted
that it would be impossible to mold these divergent people together, Yet every
morning thousands of strikers, their numb feet crunching on the snow, chanted
and sang protest songs as they paraded through the streets. Lines of state
militiamen protected the massive brick mills with the spears of their bayonets
pointed squarely at the picket lines of strikers who protested outside. Women
didn’t shy away from the protests. They delivered fiery rally speeches and
marched in picket lines and parades. The banners they carried demanded both
living wages and dignity, “we want bread, and roses, too,” which gave the work
stoppage its name, the Bread and Roses Strike.
For two months the mills stood nearly still and strikebreakers
became more violent and abusive but the unity of the workers didn’t break. After
a particularly violent weekend in Feb, 10th the workers gathered their children
and sent them to live with family and supporters in New York, and Philadelphia. A
riot broke out when parents were loading their children on the trains and hired
thugs tried to stop them. The national reaction to this violence was harsh leading
to congress holding hearings.
At the hearings, striking workers, including children described
the brutal working conditions and poor pay inside the Lawrence mills. A third
of mill workers, whose life expectancy was less than 40 years, died within a
decade of taking their jobs. President William Howard Taft ordered an
investigation into industrial conditions in Lawrence and throughout the nation.
William Wood and the American Woolen Company agreed to most of
the strikers’ demands on March 12, 1912. Other manufacturers followed by the
end of the month and many textile companies throughout New England, anxious to
avoid a similar confrontation, followed suit.
At the end of the strike, IWW leader William ‘Big Bill’
Haywood addressed the strikers on the Lawrence Common on March 14, “You
are the heart and soul of the working class. Single-handedly you are helpless but
united you can win everything. You have won over the opposed power of the city,
state, and national administrations, against the opposition of the combined
forces of capitalism, in face of the armed forces. You have won by your
solidarity and brains and muscle.”
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