In early January of 1912, just over one hundred years ago, the workers in a textile mill in Lawrence, Massachusetts went on strike over thirty-two cents that had been cut from their weekly pay. Within a week, twenty thousand workers had joined the strike. Just thirty-two cents triggered one of the most prominent industrial strikes in the nation’s history, one that grew to have national attention and, perhaps international implications.
But, to those millworkers, most of them women, who earned less than nine dollars a week for a fifty-six hour work week, that thirty-two cents meant three loaves of bread that they desperately needed to feed their hungry families. Bread, beans and molasses were the staples of the millworkers diets, and the loss of money for three loaves of bread was more than they could bear.
Lawrence was a flourishing but deeply impoverished textile city that had been founded in 1845. With increased mechanization, the factory owners were able to eliminate many skilled workers and hire unskilled labor, mostly immigrants to work in the mills. The work itself was grueling and dangerous. Half the workers were under eighteen, many under the age of fourteen and they were expected to work fifty-six hours per week.
Workers and their families lived in crowded and dangerous conditions and the mortality rate for children under the age of six was fifty percent. One third of the women and men who worked in the mills died by the age of twenty-five. In Lawrence, like in other industrial cities, workers were divided along ethnic lines. The skilled jobs went to native-born people of English, Irish and German descent. The unskilled workforce was made of recent immigrants who were French Canadian, Italian, Portuguese, Syrian, and from the countries of Eastern Europe.
The strike was prompted by a reform that backfired. The Massachusetts State Legislature passed a bill that reduced the maximum work week from fifty-six to fifty four hours and the mill owners cut the workers’ pay accordingly.
Strikers were doused with fire hoses and the state militia was called in. There were mass arrests and severe sentences. A Boston lawyer was quoted as saying: “The strike should have been stopped in the first twenty-four hours. The militia should have been instructed to shoot. That is the way Napoleon did it.”
Joyce Kornbluh’s article titled “Bread and Roses: The 1912 Lawrence textile Strike” has been my reference for much of this material. In that article she writes that “less than a week after the strike started, the police found dynamite in three different places in Lawrence: in a tenement house, in an empty lot, and in a shoemaker’s shop next door to a print shop. . .The press and the police were quick to assign guilt to the strikers.
The I.W.W. claimed, however, that the BostonAmerican, a Hearst paper, was off the press and on sale in Lawrence with the details of the dynamite discovery before the sticks of dynamite were actually found. Soon after, John Breen, a local undertaker and a member of the Lawrence school board, was arrested and charged with planting the explosives in a plot to discredit the workers. He was fined $500 and released on bail. President Wood of the American Woolen Company was implicated, but cleared by the court although he could not explain why he had recently made a cash payment to Breen.”
There were protests throughout the country and a Committee in Congress held a hearing that took testimony from a group of strikers, some of them children. That hearing was attended by Helen Heron Taft, wife of President William Howard Taft. The President soon ordered an investigation of industrial working conditions throughout the nation.
The signs that some of the young female mill workers made had the words
“We want bread, and roses too.”
Kornbluh, Joyce, Rebel Voices: An IWW Anthology, Charles H. Kerr Publishing, Chicago, 1988
We want bread and roses too. We want, through the labor of our hands to be able to nourish not only our bodies but our spirits as well. We want our work to be appreciated for whatever level of skill it takes. We want our work to be recognized as important, as creative, as necessary and fulfilling and compensated accordingly.
Dateline: August 2009
Housekeepers at the three Boston area Hyatt hotels were asked to train some new workers. These trainees, they were told, would be filling in during vacations. Then on August 31, all of the housekeepers were fired and told that these new trainees were employed by a Georgia based company to whom the hotel chain had outsourced their housekeeping services.
The fired employees earned an average of fifteen dollars an hour and had benefits. The new housekeepers would earn eight dollars an hour with no benefits. Who here can live on eight dollars an hour?
“(Wanda) Rosario has had to cut back on everything,” wrote Kevin Cullen. “She gave up her cellphone, which is no small thing because she’s never needed it more. After she was out of work for six months, she got a job at the Park Plaza Hotel. On the bright side, unlike the Hyatt, it’s a union shop, Local 26, and the hotel can’t just fire her on a whim. But she was number two on the seniority list at the Hyatt. She’s number 93 at the Park Plaza. It’s as if her 23 years of work history didn’t happen.
So she has to settle for irregular shifts, and she’s always on call. She’s happy to have a job, but lucky to get two shifts a week. And so she sits by the phone in her East Boston apartment, waiting, hoping for it to ring.”
And 57-year-old Wanda Rosario, at a time when she was just starting to think about retirement, had to start over and make due with far less. We were sitting in her apartment the other day when the phone rang and her son handed it to her. It was the Park Plaza, and she brightened because she thought it meant more work. In fact, it meant less. A scheduled shift fell through. Kevin Cullen. Boston Globe, September 7, 2010
Before Serandou Kamara lost her job at the Hyatt Harborside, she was saving up to buy a home. Now she and her husband are using that money to help pay the rent on the cramped $950-a-month Chelsea apartment where they live with their four children. They rely on Kamara’s $717 bimonthly unemployment checks and her husband’s $13-an-hour salary as a home health aide.
“Everything went into the garbage,” said Kamara, 32, who was almost eight months pregnant when she got fired.
Kamara spent a recent morning at Child Care Choices of Boston trying to secure a voucher to pay a baby sitter so she could look for work. Afterward, she walked through Downtown Crossing to see whether any stores were hiring. At Payless, Macy’s, Tello’s, and the food court, the answer was the same: no.
“I want a job,” said Kamara, a native of Sierra Leone who is taking a computer class and an English as a second language course at Bunker Hill Community College. “Sitting down at home, it’s not good for me.” Katie Johnston Chase, Boston Globe, April 2, 2010
“I want a job.” Don’t we all want to be involved in something that has some meaning and fulfillment? What I wonder is how many Hyatt executives were willing to cut their pay in half and give up their benefits?
The explosion ripped through Building A5 on a Friday evening last May, an eruption of fire and noise that twisted metal pipes as if they were discarded straws. When workers in the cafeteria ran outside, they saw black smoke pouring from shattered windows. It came from the area where employees polished thousands of iPad cases a day.
Two people were killed immediately, and over a dozen others hurt. As the injured were rushed into ambulances, one in particular stood out. His features had been smeared by the blast, scrubbed by heat and violence until a mat of red and black had replaced his mouth and nose.
“Are you Lai Xiaodong’s father?” a caller asked when the phone rang at Mr. Lai’s childhood home. Six months earlier, the 22-year-old had moved to Chengdu, in southwest China, to become one of the millions of human cogs powering the largest, fastest and most sophisticated manufacturing system on earth. That system has made it possible for Apple and hundreds of other companies to build devices almost as quickly as they can be dreamed up.
“He’s in trouble,” the caller told Mr. Lai’s father. “Get to the hospital as soon as possible.”
The article goes on to say how workers in China who assemble these devices “often labor in harsh conditions” and that the work environments have “serious – and sometimes deadly – safety problems.”
“Employees work excessive overtime, in some cases seven days a week, and live in crowded dorms. Some say they stand so long that their legs swell until they can hardly walk. Under-age workers have helped build Apple’s products, and the company’s suppliers have improperly disposed of hazardous waste and falsified records, according to company reports and advocacy groups that, within China, are often considered reliable, independent monitors.”
“More troubling, the groups say, is some suppliers’ disregard for workers’ health. Two years ago, 137 workers at an Apple supplier in eastern China were injured after they were ordered to use a poisonous chemical to clean iPhone screens. Within seven months last year, two explosions at iPad factories, including in Chengdu, killed four people and injured 77.”
Charles Duhigg and David Barboza, In China, Human Costs Are Built Into an iPad, New York Times, Jan 25, 2012
And on and on it goes. But, let me be clear. This is not about Apple or any specific manufacturer. This just happens to be the recent story that I found to illustrate my sermon. It could be some other electronics company. It could about toy manufacturers. This story could be coming from another part of the world. And, it could even be about garment workers, still, for the clothing that we wear today, that we have probably bought without knowing its origins, was likely made by people who didn’t earn a living wage and toiled in deplorable conditions, or at least, in conditions that we would never work in.
In the book “To Work and To Love,” which I excerpted as our reading, the authors offer a stinging critique of our capitalist system. They argue that through the work of our hands and our minds we are engaged in the work of creation that began, according to the Biblical book of Genesis, when God created the universe and pronounced that it was “Good.” That pronouncement refers not only to the outcome but also to the process of creation.
Whether we see ourselves as created in the image of God or made out of particles of dust from the stars and planets that fill the universe, it is equally true that we are called to further the work of the universe, the ongoing work of creation. Our labor is an important way that we participate with God, with the universe, in this co-creation.
Yes, here in the United States, working conditions have improved in the last hundred years. But we continue to participate in a system where the gift of human labor, of human creativity is not valued; a system where the bottom line and profit margin are what is most important.
If the “inherent worth and dignity of every person” is a principle that we are going to affirm and promote, then we will always need to think about how we use our own productivity, how we spend our resources, and how we stand with those whose labor is devalued in whatever way. If we can learn to see every person as having a role in the ongoing work of creation then we will build an economic system where all people and all labor are valued and adequately compensated.
We will always want and deserve “bread, and roses too,” resources to nourish both our bodies and spirits.
Amen, Blessed Be