Cool USA Facts!

In 1912, immigrant workers began a Textile Strike in Lawrence Massachusetts, lead by the IWW, prompted by a two-hour pay-cut. The strike united workers from more than 40 different nationalities.[2] Carried on throughout a brutally cold winter, the strike lasted more than two months, defying the assumptions of conservative trade unions within the American Federation of Labor (AFL) that immigrant, largely female and ethnically divided workers could not be organized. Lawrence police killed 2 people, beat a pregnant woman to miscarriage, and arrested >250. Congressional hearings followed, resulting in exposure of shocking conditions in the Lawrence mills and calls for investigation of the "wool trust." Mill owners soon decided to settle the strike, giving workers in Lawrence and throughout New England raises of up to 20 percent. Within a year, however, the IWW had largely collapsed in Lawrence.1