while reading about leftist shit at work I came across
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_textile_strike
>The Lawrence textile strike was a strike of immigrant workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts in 1912 led by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Prompted by a two-hour pay cut corresponding to a new law shortening the workweek, the strike spread rapidly through the town, growing to more than twenty thousand workers and involving nearly every mill in Lawrence.[1]
>The strike united workers from more than 40 different nationalities.[2] Carried on throughout a brutally cold winter, the strike lasted more than two months, defying the assumptions of conservative trade unions within the American Federation of Labor (AFL) that immigrant, largely female and ethnically divided workers could not be organized. In late January, when a bystander was killed during a protest, IWW organizers Joseph Ettor and Arturo Giovannitti were arrested on charges of being accessories to the murder.[2]
>IWW leaders Bill Haywood and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn came to Lawrence to run the strike. Together they masterminded its signature move, sending hundreds of the strikers' hungry children to sympathetic families in New York, New Jersey, and Vermont. The move drew widespread sympathy, especially after police stopped a further exodus, leading to violence at the Lawrence train station.[2] Congressional hearings followed, resulting in exposure of shocking conditions in the Lawrence mills and calls for investigation of the "wool trust." Mill owners soon decided to settle the strike, giving workers in Lawrence and throughout New England raises of up to 20 percent. Within a year, however, the IWW had largely collapsed in Lawrence.[2]
>The Lawrence strike is often referred to as the "Bread and Roses" strike. It has also been called the "strike for three loaves".[3] The phrase "bread and roses" actually preceded the strike, appearing in a poem by James Oppenheim published in The Atlantic Monthly in December 1911. A 1916 labor anthology, The Cry for Justice: An Anthology of the Literature of Social Protest by Upton Sinclair, attributed the phrase to the Lawrence strike, and the association stuck. "Bread and roses" has also been attributed to socialist union organizer Rose Schneiderman.[2][4]
It's pretty interesting, and apparently there is still a Bread and Roses Festival in Lawrence to this day.
The conditions in the town before the strike sound truly, completely awful.
>Work in a textile mill took place at a grueling pace and the labor was repetitive and dangerous. In addition, a number of children under the age of 14 worked in the mills.[5] Half of the workers in the four Lawrence mills of the American Woolen Company, the leading employer in the industry and the town, were females between the ages of 14 and 18. By 1912, the Lawrence mills at maximum capacity employed about 32,000 men, women, and children.[6] Conditions had grown even worse for workers in the decade before the strike. The introduction of the two-loom system in the woolen mills led to a dramatic speedup in the pace of work. The increase in production enabled the factory owners to lay off large numbers of workers. Those who kept their jobs earned, on average, $8.76 for 56 hours of work.[7][8]
>The workers in Lawrence lived in crowded and dangerous apartment buildings, often with many families sharing each apartment. Many families 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". The mortality rate for children was 50% by age six; 36 out of every 100 men and women who worked in the mill died before they reached 25. The average life expectancy was 39.[9][10][11][5]