page_title: 1912 Lawrence textile strike
section_title: Strike
hierarchical_section_title: 1912 Lawrence textile strike / Strike
caption_attribution_description: English: Children of Lawrence, MA strikers sent to live with sympathizers in New York City during the work stoppage 1912 news photo, ex-Bain News Service Digitized from the original negative by the Library of Congress http://memory.loc.gov/service/pnp/cph/3c10000/3c18000/3c18600/3c18677v.jpg Digital ID: cph 3c18677 Source: b&amp;w film copy neg. Reproduction Number: LC-USZ62-118677 (b&amp;w film copy neg.) Repository: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA LoC: "RIGHTS INFORMATION: No known restrictions on publication." Additional digital editing by Tim Davenport for Wikipedia, no copyright claimed
context_page_description: The Lawrence Textile Strike, also known as the Bread and Roses Strike, was a strike of immigrant workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts, in 1912 led by the Industrial Workers of the World. Prompted by a two-hour pay cut corresponding to a new law shortening the workweek for women, the strike spread rapidly through the town, growing to more than twenty thousand workers and involving nearly every mill in Lawrence. On January 1, 1912, the Massachusetts government enforced a law that cut mill workers' hours in a single work week from 56 hours, to 54 hours. Ten days later, they found out that pay had been reduced along with the cut in hours.
  The strike united workers from more than 40 different nationalities. Carried on throughout a brutally cold winter, the strike lasted more than two months, from January to March, defying the assumptions of conservative trade unions within the American Federation of Labor that immigrant, largely female and ethnically divided workers could not be organized.
context_section_description: On January 1, 1912, a new labor law took effect in Massachusetts reducing the working week of 56 hours to 54 hours for women and children.  Workers opposed the reduction if it reduced their weekly home pay. The first two weeks of 1912, the unions tried to learn how the owners of the mills would deal with the new law. On January 11, a group of Polish women textile workers in Lawrence discovered that their employer at the Everett Mill had reduced about $0.32 from their total wages and walked out.
  On January 12, workers in the Washington Mill of the American Woolen Company also found that their wages had been cut. Prepared for the events by weeks of discussion, they walked out, calling "short pay, all out."
  Joseph Ettor of the IWW had been organizing in Lawrence for some time before the strike; he and Arturo Giovannitti of the Italian Socialist Federation of the Socialist Party of America quickly assumed leadership of the strike by forming a strike committee of 56 people, four representatives of fourteen nationalities, which took responsibility for all major decisions. The committee, which arranged for its strike meetings to be translated into 25 different languages, put forward a set of demands: a 15% increase in wages for a 54-hour work week, double pay for overtime work, and no discrimination against workers for their strike activity.
  The city responded to the strike by ringing the city's alarm bell for the first time in its history; the mayor ordered a company of the local militia to patrol the streets. When mill owners turned fire hoses on the picketers gathered in front of the mills, they responded by throwing ice at the plants, breaking a number of windows. The court sentenced 24 workers to a year in jail for throwing ice; as the judge stated, "The only way we can teach them is to deal out the severest sentences." Governor Eugene Foss then ordered out the state militia and state police. Mass arrests followed.
  At the same time, the United Textile Workers (UTW) attempted to break the strike by claiming to speak for the workers of Lawrence. The striking operatives ignored the UTW, as the IWW had successfully united the operatives behind ethnic-based leaders, who were members of the strike committee and able to communicate Ettor's message to avoid violence at demonstrations. Ettor did not consider intimidating operatives who were trying to enter the mills as breaking the peace.
  The IWW was successful, even with AFL-affiliated operatives, as it defended the grievances of all operatives from all the mills. Conversely, the AFL and the mill owners preferred to keep negotiations between separate mills and their own operatives. However, in a move that frustrated the UTW, Oliver Christian, the national secretary of the Loomfixers Association and an AFL affiliate itself, said he believed John Golden, the Massachusetts UTW president, was a detriment to the cause of labor. That statement and missteps by William Madison Wood quickly shifted public sentiment to favor the strikers.
  A local undertaker and a member of the Lawrence school board attempted to frame the strike leadership by planting dynamite in several locations in town a week after the strike began. He was fined $500 and released without jail time. Later, William M. Wood, the president of the American Woolen Company, was shown to have made an unexplained large payment to the defendant shortly before the dynamite was found.
  The authorities later charged Ettor and Giovannitti as accomplices to murder for the death of striker Anna LoPizzo, who was likely shot by the police. Ettor and Giovannitti had been 3 mi (4.8 km) away, where they spoke to another group of workers. They and a third defendant, who had not even heard of either Ettor or Giovannitti at the time of his arrest, were held in jail for the duration of the strike and several months thereafter. The authorities declared martial law, banned all public meetings, and called out 22 more militia companies to patrol the streets.
  The IWW responded by sending Bill Haywood, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, and a number of other organ
caption: Parents sending their children to live with supporters in other cities.
exif: {"Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image XResolution": "300", "Image YResolution": "300", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop CS3 Macintosh", "Image DateTime": "2010:03:06 10:42:29", "Image ExifOffset": "164", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "302", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "7061", "EXIF ColorSpace": "sRGB", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "3061", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "2400"}