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Labor Day: Acknowledge the Worker
Take a moment to remember this is the day to acknowledge workers. Remember what this day meant to so many at the turn of the 20th century.
No unions in the workplace. No child labor laws. 56 hour work weeks, no benefits, no paid days off.
I grew up next door to Lawrence, Massachusetts. Site of the Bread and Roses labor strike in 1912.
Half of all the workers in the four Lawrence mills of the American Woolen Company were girls between ages fourteen and eighteen. Dr. Elizabeth Shapleigh, a Lawrence physician, wrote: 'A considerable number of the boys and girls die within the first two or three years after beginning work . . . thirty-six out of every 100 of all the men and women who work in the mill die before or by the time they are twenty-five years of age,'
That year [1912], when a Massachusetts state law reduced the work week at Lawrence's textile mills from 56 to 54 hours, the mills cut the workers’ pay. The majority of Lawrence’s 30,000 textile workers walked off their job, and stayed out on strike for almost ten weeks during the winter.
Many families [at that time] survived on bread, molasses, and beans; as one worker testified before the March 1912 congressional investigation of the Lawrence strike, "When we eat meat it seems like a holiday, especially for the children." That difference in wages would amount to several loaves of bread for hard-pressed workers.
The Lawrence strike is noteworthy for a number of reasons, including the degree of cooperation that developed among immigrant workers of 51 different nationalities, the role of women, and the strikers’ expressing themselves in poetry and song, according to the Festival's Web site. Though it has never been proven, the story has long been told of women strikers who carried signs saying “We want bread, and roses, too.” [The slogan "Bread and Roses" originated in a poem of that name by James Oppenheim, 1911.] Thus the Lawrence strike has always been known as the “Bread and Roses Strike.”
The strike — and the solidarity of the mill workers — panicked mill owners and city authorities who called in the state militia, jailed strikers and attempted to discredit the workers and their leaders, including "Big Bill" Haywood and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn of the Industrial Workers of the World (aka the I.W.W and the Wobblies). Conditions in the community during the strike were so dire, that many strikers sent their children away to sympathetic families in other Eastern cities, until the police finally used force to prevent them from continuing to do so. When city authorities tried to prevent another hundred children from going to Philadelphia on February 24 by sending police and the militia to the station to detain the children and arrest their parents, the police began clubbing both the children and their mothers while dragging them off to be taken away by truck; one pregnant mother miscarried. The press, there to photograph the event, reported extensively on the attack. Moreover, when the women and children were taken to the Police Court, most of them refused to pay the fines levied and opted for a jail cell, some with babies in arms.
This clash between mothers and the police was the turning point of the Lawrence strike, as people around the country read in their newspapers what was happening. Victor Berger, the great Socialist Congressman from Milwaukee, was among those who called for a Congressional investigation of the events in Lawrence. Ultimately public opinion, and the investigation sought by Berger, forced the mill owners to give in to most of the strikers’ demands.
The gains won in that strike, were lost in the next few years. But the workers had learned; unionizing activities took hold, and led to better, and long lived, improvements in work conditions.
Every year, Lawrence still commemorate the Bread and Roses strike, on Monday, Labor Day. It is something I attended annually, growing up. Lawrence History Center: Immigrant City Archives and Museum has photos of what the workers - again, many of them young children - endured.
THIS is what Labor Day is all about.
