Labor History: The First Factory Strike

[Omaha Steve]

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http://inthesetimes.com/article/17050/the_mother_of_all_strikes




Ian G. Cozzen’s installation spells out ‘Autonomía,’ but only when viewed from one corner of the historic Slater Mill. (Courtesy of Ian G. Cozzens)

CULTURE » SEPTEMBER 1, 2014

In 1824 in Pawtucket, R.I., women weavers led the mother of all strikes.
BY JOEY L. DEFRANCESCO AND DAVID SEGAL


In May 1824, 102 women workers in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, left their looms after the mill’s owners announced a wage cut. The workers voted to refuse to return until their old wages were restored. Then, they united with other factory workers—children and some groups of men—as well as local farmers and artisans who joined the cause. Soon, workers at nearly every one of the village’s eight mills were on strike, physically blocking doors so that no one else could enter. For a week, the village descended into chaos. Workers and farmers marched en masse to the mill owners’ houses, hurling rocks and insults. It was the first factory strike in the United States and the first strike of any kind involving women.

The Slater Mill, which employed some of the strikers, is now a national landmark and museum, and a new hybrid art/history exhibit there—The Mother of All Strikes: The 1824 Textile Worker Turnout—focuses on that week-long walkout.

> What the bosses failed to foresee was that the women workers could not be as easily controlled as the children. <

Built in 1793, Slater Mill was the first textile factory in the United States. Over the next few decades, dozens more mills were built in Pawtucket, and the town played a key role in the maturation of U.S. industrial capitalism. The mill instituted innovative systems for controlling workers: highly regimented factory time (whereby work hours were counted down to the minute), factory bells and a company store.

The immediate cause of the “turn-out,” as the strike was then called, was a decision by Pawtucket’s mill owners to cut female mill workers’ wages by 25 percent and extend the working day by one hour for all workers. But resentment of the mill owners had been building for years, not just among mill workers but among other townspeople as well. Even before the first mill was built, Pawtucket residents tried to sabotage the construction of the dams that would power the factories. They were suspicious of the wealthy outsiders buying up huge pieces of land and making massive changes to the landscape. Tension mounted over the next decade, as the mill owners called on taxpayers to bankroll local projects that mostly benefited the mills.

FULL story at link.