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In the early 1900's Lawrence, Massachusetts was a center for the textile industry in the United States. The woolen and cotton mills there had hired large numbers of unskilled immigrant workers to perform sometimes dangerous jobs at low wages. Many of the workers were young women and some were children.
Conditions for the people working in the mills and their families were abysmal, one half of the children died before reaching the age of six, and 36 out of a hundred workers died before reaching the age of 25. Workers earned between 6 and 9 dollars for 60 hours of work a week.
The Lawrence Textile Workers Strike of 1912 began after mill owners cut workers pay when the Massachusetts legislature passed a law limiting the work week to 54 hours. Prior to this time the workers had been unsuccessful in organizing, but the Industrial Workers of the World were successful in Lawrence, partly because the IWW created a strike committee with two representatives from each of the 25 nationalities working in the factories and also because they were able to support the strikers with money collected by the IWW throughout America.
The Lawrence Textile Workers Strike became known as the strike for Bread and Roses because it was reported that a striker carried a sign that read "We want bread, but we want roses too", the point being that they wanted fair wages and dignified living conditions.
Upton Sinclair was the first to attribute the term "bread and roses" to the Lawrence strikers in his 1916 book The Cry for Justice: An Anthology of the Literature of Social Protest
.The strikers were successful in getting their demands for higher wages and overtime pay and showed that a diverse workforce could organize to counter the forces of unfettered capitalism.
These are some surreal photos from the Library of Congress archives that show a glimpse of working conditions in the U.S. in the early 1900's.
January 1909 - Bibb Mill No. 1 in Macon Georgia - "Many youngsters here. Some boys were so small they had to climb up on the spinning frame to mend the broken threads and put back the empty bobbins."
August 1910 - Young "doffers" in North Pownal, Vermont.
A "doffer" was usually a young boy or girl who took off (doffed) the bobbins.
Lawrence textile strike - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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From the book No Logo: No Space, No Choice, No Jobs by Naomi Klein
-"Labor groups agree that a living wage for an assembly-line worker in China would be approximately 87 cents an hour. In the United States and Germany, where multinationals have closed down hundreds of domestic textile factories to move to zone production, garment workers are paid an average of $10 and $18.50 an hour respectively. Yet even with those massive savings in labor costs, those who manufacture for the most prominent and richest brands in the world are still refusing to pay workers in China the 87 cents that would cover their cost of living, stave off illness and even allow them to send a little money home to their families. A 1998 study of brand-name manufacturing in the Chinese special economic zones found that Wal-Mart, Ralph Lauren, Ann Taylor, Espirit, Liz Claiborne, Kmart, Nike, Adidas, J.C. Penney and the Limited were only paying a fraction of that miserable 87 cents - some were paying as little as 13 cents an hour."Also from the book "No Logo", speaking of Charles Kernaghan head of the National Labor Committee, the author writes -
"So Kernaghan lays out the facts and figures of the global economy in Disney pajamas, Nike running shoes, Wal-Mart aisles and the personal riches of the individuals involved - and crunches the numbers into homemade statistical contraptions that he then yields like a mallet. For example: all 50,000 workers at the Yue Yen Nike Factory in China would have to work for nineteen years to earn what Nike spends on advertising in one year. Wal-Mart's annual sales are worth 120 times more than Haiti's entire annual budget; Disney CEO Michael Eisner earns $9,783 an hour while a Haitian worker earns 28 cents an hour; it would take a Haitian worker 16.8 years to earn Eisner's hourly income; the $181 million in stock options Eisner exercised in 1996 is enough to take care of his 19,000 Haitian workers and their families for fourteen years."The book "No Logo" is a bit dated having been written in 1999, but there is no shortage of horror stories in the current globalized world of work. For example this December 2006 article from the The National Labor Committee on the production of Bratz dolls. The article says of the Bratz dolls,
"They are made in a sweatshop in China, where women are routinely forced to work seven days and 94 ½ hours a week, for wages of just 51 ½ cents an hour, $4.13 a day.As bad as conditions are now, they are about to get worse. The factory wants to fire all the workers and then bring them back as temporary workers with contracts of just one to eight months, which would strip them of any legal rights they might have. As it is, the workers are denied sick days as well as work injury and health insurance.
In January 2007, out of desperation, the Bratz doll makers will go out on a wildcat strike."
This is a youtube video about girls who make Bratz dolls -
This National Labor Committee linktv.org/Outsourcing - Video copy says, "Charles Kernaghan and Barbara Briggs are working to improve conditions in the overseas garment factories where U.S. companies make our clothing."
The video is a summary of the "race to the bottom" in the search to find the cheapest labor in the world. It involves Disney, Wal Mart, and others including the now infamous Kathy Lee Gifford clothing line.
For example the video talks about Selena, a 13 year old girl from Bangladesh, who is paid 7 cents an hour which works out to $3.32 a week to make NFL garments that are sold at Wal Mart. Selena is making about 1/3 what the Lawrence textile workers were paid in 1912.
In this factory, the workers are paid 19 cents to make a garment that is then sold by Wal Mart for 75 dollars. A fire in 2000 in a Bangladesh textile factory that had the fire exits blocked killed 51 young women. In 2006 the same thing happened, this time 84 people died.
They are hanging their hats (lives) on Byron Dorgan, Senator for North Dakota who is "currently working on legislation that would restrict the importation of products made in countries that do not enforce labor laws. The bill would give U.S. companies the ability to go to court and seek damages when their competitors move their production to countries that exploit their workers."
The National Labor Committee has a second (amongst many) eye-opening video about worker exploitation. In this case it was in Amman Jordan where workers from Bangladesh were promised a fair wage and ended having their passports taken away upon arrival in Jordon, not given the wages they were promised, forced to work 14 to 16 hours a day, tortured and in some cases sent home with no money - and large debts owed to those who lent them money to get to Jordan.
Be sure and watch the middle part of the video where they show the bathroom, it's a hole in the floor - with a huge rat walking around in it.
You can tell the person in the video is not lying. They made fleece jackets for sale at Wal-Mart in the factory he worked in.
So what's a person to do?
I think it's probably impossible, and in any event not very effective, to try and avoid all items made or sold by people who are not paid a living wage, and given basic protections of human dignity. Even my new pair of New Balance sneakers are tinged with sweat-shop allegations.
I think the best one could do is to be educated and use that knowledge to help people organize to stand up for basic human rights. You might want to start close to home, since I hear tell the people selling merchandise at Wal-Mart, McDonald's or The Gap aren't paid a living wage.
