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100th Anniversary of Bread and Roses Strike— Was It the First Occupy?
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Today in Lawrence, Mass., union members and their allies will gather at a historic mill building for a re-enactment of the historic Bread and Roses strike that moved the conscience of the nation, bringing national attention to the plight of the families, including young children, who toiled in the dirty and dangerous factories of Lawrence and throughout the country.
The re-enactment kicks off a yearlong celebration of the Bread and Roses centennial, which will commemorate change-making events in Lawrence that gave rise to the U.S. labor movement.
On Jan. 12, 1912, some 25,000 workers at the mills of the American Woolen Company in Lawrence walked off the job when the company cut their pay—already a mere $8 a week for the men, and less for the women and children—after the state legislature passed a law shortening the length of their workweek from 56 hours to 54 hours. Workers stayed off the job for months, enduring beatings from police and the Massachusetts militia, who spared not even women and children.
Some see in the conditions that led to the Bread and Roses strike parallels to today’s growing income disparity between the wealthy and the rest of us, as well as the exploitation of America’s workers by financial interests. Robert Forrant, a history professor at the University of Massachusetts, calls it “the first Occupy movement.” Says Massachusetts AFL-CIO President Steven Tolman:
It’s an unfortunate irony that we have come full circle since 1912. The strikers then were immigrant workers barely able to survive on low wages. Today Lawrence, like many industrial cities, is a place where immigrant workers are really struggling in an unfair economy.
The strikers were mostly immigrants who had crossed the ocean on a promise of prosperity, only to find themselves and their children brutally exploited by the textile tycoons.
Ethan Snow, a member of the Centennial Committee and a UMass graduate student, noted that the Bread and Roses strike spelled the beginning of the end for child labor in America, and the start of real workplace reforms. He added:
The strike is notable because it was the first time that over 25,000 people from 50 nationalities speaking 27 different languages united to win rights in the workplace. The labor movement in 1912 was very young and no decisive victory had really been achieved until the 1912 strike in Lawrence.
Before the strike, the mill owners had effectively pitted the various ethnic groups against one another, and set different conditions for the skilled workers of the AFL’s craft unions and the so-called unskilled workers who had no union representation until the strike drew the organizers of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). In solidarity with the unskilled workers, the AFL supported the strike.
Coined by a mid-19th century French philosopher, ”One may live without bread, but not without roses,” today continues to mean that people are due more in their life than toil. “Bread and Roses” also has been immortalized in a song.
More information about events sponsored by the Bread & Roses Centennial Committee is here. For more on the history of the Bread and Roses strike, see this video on the website of the Massachusetts AFL-CIO.
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4 Comments
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Thank the socialists, who stood with the Lawrence strikers when AFL would not. Thank the strikers, who hung in there no matter what. We can thank them all by standing up for workers’ rights today–against the “Right to Work” legislation, against wage theft, against the dreadful conditions of warehouse work, and all the unwarranted burdens placed on workers by capital. To paraphrase, if we are not for ourselves, then who will be for us? If we are only for ourselves, then what are we? Let us thank the Lawrence strikers through our solidarity.
From Opportunity blog (www.sharoncornu.net) on my 1982 research project into labor-community coalitions in the Lawrence strike:
…This strike is remembered for innovative organizing techniques, the leadership of immigrant and women workers, and the “bread and roses” power of community-labor collaboration…Under the category everything old is new again: my angle was how community organizations’ resources supported the IWW strike and resulted in different organizing tactics.
What I think I failed to understand was that there wasn’t a meaningful difference between the union and community organizations. The cooperatives, mutual aid associations, soup kitchens, and relief committees were a set of tools and resources very similar to the union for workers. The IWW had a strategy, and a national network, but the immigrant self-help societies had meeting space, some funds, and their own organizing traditions…
A better lens for looking at the strike would have been, not how community and labor supported each other, but how workers used both their community organizations and the union network they could access to win the fight. As we face a future with fewer legal protections for recognition organizing, multiple forms of organization are needed to help low-wage and immigrant workers achieve sustainable income levels and a strong sense of community.
Occupy organizers take note: Lawrence strikers served 10,000 meals a day and made arrangements to send young children out-of-state to protect them from the police.
The Bread and Roses strike was a great struggle, but it was not the first Occupy in Massachusetts history. In 1787 thousands of citizens calling themselves “regulators” (later slimed by their victorious enemies as Shays’ Rebels) occupied five county courthouses in central and western Massachusetts to stop legal proceedings against debtors, including foreclosures of their small farms. The background is a classic story of the aggressive greed of the 1% against the 99%. In this case the 1% were financial speculators who had bought up the depreciated certificates with which soldiers in the Revolutionary War were paid. The Massachusetts constitution of 1780 (passed because heavy snows kept backcountry opponents from reaching Boston to vote against it) guaranteed full payment of these certificates and therewith enormous windfall profits to the speculators. The irony was that many small farmers who had fought in the Revolution could not scrape together the hard cash needed to pay the taxes levied to reward the speculators. The regulators that closed the couthouses were often led by the most responsible and solid citizens of the neighboring communities, many of them militia captains like Job Shatuck of Groton. The speculators financed a private army that crushed the occupations, and harsh retaliation followed. But fearing the unrest the conservatives had to allow the Bill of Rights to amend the Constitution.
The current occupiers are part of a great stream of American history that includes Bread and Roses and the Civil Rights’ Movement.
Lobor history has the most exciting stories immqgable. Lobor
stories are more entertaining than moves. I wish Hollywood would
put on the labor stories.