BREAD & ROSES
The strike led and won by women
By Lyn Neeley
Jan. 12 was the anniversary of the start of the
1912 Bread and Roses strike-one of the most significant
struggles in the history of the U.S. working class-in Lawrence,
Mass.
A new state law had reduced the work week from 56 to 54
hours. A small gain for workers? Sounds like it. But of course
the bosses found a way to gain the advantage.
They speeded up the looms and cut the average measly wage of
$6 a week-a last straw for workers living on the edge of
starvation.
When the wage cut was announced, workers shouted: "Short
pay! Short pay!" Thousands of women and men started a
spontaneous strike that rippled through two dozen textile
factories in Lawrence.
Some 23,000 people left the mills and poured into the
streets.
Immediately the National Guard was called out, along with 22
militia companies and 50 thugs disguised as strikers. They
overturned trolley cars, smashed windows, assaulted people and
planted dynamite near the strike headquarters.
But even quicker on the scene was Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, a
21-year-old organizer for the Industrial Workers of the
World-the Wobblies. Flynn, Big Bill Haywood and other IWW
leaders moved in to help organize the strike.
An early death
Lawrence was founded in 1845 as a textile city. By the turn
of the century, advanced technology had enabled the owners to
bring in lower-paid workers and force the skilled workers
out.
In 1905 the American Woolen Company built the world's
biggest textile plant in Lawrence, hiring Arab, Russian and
East European immigrants. By 1912, people of 25 different
nationalities lived within a one-mile radius of the mill.
They lived in crowded company-owned tenements. Eight to 10
people from different families shared one living space. Whole
families-including children under 14 years old-worked in the
mills.
The mills were hot and humid. The work was fast paced, with
high accident rates.
Bosses made ethnic slurs. They sexually harassed the
women.
Workers froze in the winter because they couldn't afford the
clothes they produced. Rickets were common among children for
lack of milk. Nearly half died before they were 6 years
old.
Over one-third of the mill workers died before age 25,
mostly from tuberculosis and other respiratory illnesses.
Protesting in 25 languages
In 1912, the American Federation of Labor was a grouping of
weak craft unions, made up of white men organized by trade. The
AFL refused to organize Black workers. Until 1918, the
federation barred women from membership-even in an industry
like textiles with twice as many female workers as male.
The AFL opposed the Lawrence strike, calling it
revolutionary and anarchistic.
The IWW, in contrast, was formed by socialists like Eugene
Debs. They called for industry-wide unions and even one big
union for the whole country. The IWW emphasized unity and
solidarity.
The Lawrence strike broke new ground in two ways. Women led
it. And there was a conscious effort to unite workers of all
nationalities.
Every union meeting was translated into 25 different
languages.
There were four demands: a 15-percent wage increase, a
54-hour work week, double pay for overtime, and rehiring of all
strikers without discrimination.
But the workers saw the strike as really a broader struggle.
They wanted to fight for socialism.
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn had grown up poor in New England mill
towns. She watched starving mill workers leave before daylight
and return after dark. She was familiar with the rats,
cockroaches, lice and disease that plagued their families.
The strikers had a strong spirit of class struggle. They
sang, put on shows, dances, debates and parades.
The Lawrence strikers are remembered for inventing the
moving picket line. Police had been arresting them for
loitering-so they linked arms and formed a moving human chain
that wove around the mills 24 hours a day, preventing scabs
from getting in.
Flynn led meetings about the special oppression facing women
and immigrants. Women led the picket lines and were better at
intimidating scabs.
Cops threw the women in jail but they refused to pay the
fines. As soon as they were released they returned to the
picket lines.
One freezing morning, cops drenched the strikers with fire
hoses. The women caught a cop on a bridge, stripped off his
uniform and nearly succeeded in throwing him into the icy
river. One lawyer commented, "One policeman can handle 10 men,
while it takes 10 police to handle one woman."
The children grew weak as the strike continued into February
and March. Flynn gathered food and set up soup kitchens.
Arrangements were made for hundreds of children to be sent
to the homes of socialists in other cities for the duration of
the strike. This drew national and international publicity, and
donations began to pour in.
The cops responded by attacking women and children at the
train station so the children couldn't leave. Cops clubbed
them, threw them into a heap and dragged them into military
trucks, clubbing them again if they cried out.
They beat one pregnant women so hard she had a miscarriage.
That was the turning point. The national and international
outcry forced Congress to open an investigation. The pressure
on the bosses built.
The better things in life
On March 14, the strikers won a 25-percent raise for the
lowest-paid workers and smaller increases for higher-paid
workers, time-and-a-quarter pay for overtime, and no
discrimination against strikers.
The workers celebrated their victory by singing "The
International," the communist anthem.
The IWW kept the strike committee going to fight for the
release of Ettor and Giovanitti, leaders who had been framed
soon after the walkout began. They were charged with the death
of a woman whom 19 witnesses said was shot by a soldier.
The strike victory resulted in easily won wage increases in
mill towns throughout New England. But once the Lawrence
struggle ended and the IWW left town, the bosses stabbed the
workers in the back. They instigated a 50-percent speed-up in
the mills.
The Catholic Church joined the bosses in a campaign to
discredit the IWW and harass union members. By the fall of
1913, IWW membership in Lawrence had fallen to 700.
An economic recession in 1913-1914 brought wage cuts and
unemployment to the mill workers.
Later, after the Russian Revolution, the Wobblies faded from
the scene. The IWW's best, including Flynn, left to form the
Communist Party, while others turned toward anarchism.
However, the Lawrence strike had shown that low-paid,
oppressed workers of diverse nationalities could unite,
organize and wage a powerful struggle to win concessions from
the bosses. It stands as a shining example of how to build
multinational, anti-racist unity with women in the lead.
Today, labor is turning toward organizing these same
groups-low-wage workers, women, immigrants. The struggle to
organize workfare workers is in the tradition of the Lawrence
strike.
One reporter wrote of the Lawrence strike: "It was the
spirit of the workers that seemed dangerous. ... They were
always marching and singing.
"The gray, tired crowds, ebbing and flowing perpetually into
the mills, had awakened and opened their mouths to sing, the
different nationalities all speaking one language when they
sang together."
The strikers wanted not only decent pay, but a chance to
enjoy the good things of life. They carried signs saying, "We
want bread and roses too!"
And they sang: "As we come marching, marching, we bring the
greater days. The rising of the women means the rising of the
[human] race.
"No more the drudge and idler, 10 that toil where one
reposes-but a sharing of life's glories: Bread and roses! Bread
and roses!"
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
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