The Lawrence Textile Strike, also known as the Bread and Roses Strike, began on this day in 1912 in Massachusetts. Workers, mostly immigrant women and children, won their demands after months of violence and national press campaigns.

The strike was led by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and united immigrant workers of over forty nationalities. 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.

National attention to the strike greatly increased when two IWW leaders, "Smiling Joe" Ettor and Arturo Giovannitti, were arrested on fabricated charges related to the murder of a striking worker. Upon their arrest, "Big Bill" Haywood and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn took over leadership of the strike. They further sensationalized the condition of the striking workers by ostentatiously sending their hungry children to stay with families and supporters in New York City.

Striking workers and families were brutalized by police. When authorities tried to prevent more children from leaving the city, the police attacked a crowd of parents and their children, causing one pregnant woman to miscarry. Growing national sympathy for the strikers finally led the mill owners to agree to worker demands, and the parties agreed on significant pay raises to return to work.

Ettor and Giovannitti were in prison for months after the strike ended, but were eventually acquitted of all charges.

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  • LoudMuffin [he/him]
    ·
    3 years ago

    Is there anything written from a Marxist perspective about how badly growing up in a disadvantaged/poor (PoC) family can fuck you up?

    Like I have been reminiscing a lot and keep thinking back to when I was in school and I remember feeling nothing but jealously at the way a lot of my classmates lived

    Like one my friends was always showing up to school with baller shit and I was like "how do you get all this stuff?" and he was like, "I don't, my dad buys me whatever because he is the county fire chief and makes bank" and when he wanted to learn how to play bass his dad just fucking bought him one.

    I had started playing drums two years before that because my middle school didn't have orchestra and I had to do SOMETHING because all the other electives were like Spanish and Computers and I actually had to practice on either the carpet, a textbook or the extremely disgusting and beat up leather recliner we used as a makeshift computer chair. I would have my Guns and Roses going on my Big Lots! chinesium (thanks Deng) headphones plugged into my HP from 2001 and I would play on the armrests. This felt nothing like a real drum whatsoever so I wound up having to steal a practice pad later on from my highschool to have something more suited to practice than the floor (I used to try to learn to blast beat on the carpet lmfao) and I was like bruh your dad just went and fucking bought you a $600 bass. My parents fought over buying my first pair of drumsticks, which were $7.50 at the time.

    Like, I wore Payless shoes, and I couldn't afford drum lessons because my dad blew all his money on booze and feeding my moms hoarding/shopping addiction so I just felt horrible envy at people going to birthday parties and like, later on having their parents buy them a car while I would walk home in 100 degree heat in the summer after riding the bus where all the black people from the hood would beat the shit out of each other everyday and it was hotter than it was outside

    I quite literally just wanted Nike Shoes, I remember going to Zumiez and my parents fought over the one name brand jacket I was going to be bought for the entire semester which was like $70 and I remember sitting on the couch they had there about to cry while the employees (all skater dudes from bougie families, I could tell lol) quietly snickered at me from far away

    That shit probably fucks you up in so many ways, having to eat ketchup packets because moving to avoid gentrification ate up literally all of your parents money and they had to go into debt

    I just get a deeper shade of Red remembering all of this shit, capitalism and poverty are unjust, literally murder anyone with over $25 USD in their pocket, eat the rich, kill all people regardless of political beliefs

    to top it all off neither of my parents spoke English and as much as I wanted to feel like I was American I always had the nagging feeling "no one here really looks like me or speaks my language and I'm lower on the pecking order than the other minorities here and everyone thinks we're backwards" and I remember going through a period of time where I was almost ashamed to admit that I spoke Spanish :agony-limitless:

    https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dVG-4Klw6mY