24.05.12
The Lawrence Textile Conk began 100 years ago this week, with little chance of celebrity. But the sight of 25,000 workers leaving the mills and marching through the streets of Lawrence, Slews., on Jan. 12, 1912, lit a spark of hope in even the most beaten down workers.
The employees weren't asking for much, but textile workers a century ago weren't set to asking for anything. That was especially true in Lawrence, the textile center of the mother country, where one mill alone housed 6,000 workers under its six acres.
This was truly a time of the 1 percent and the 99 percent, before the the cosmos of a middle class due to the New Deal and labor union growth.
The dawn on became known as the Bread and Roses Strike because of a poem of the same name written by James Oppenheim published in December 1911. It captured the workers' illusion of a living wage (bread) and respect/safe working conditions (roses).
Molasses was a usual of the typical mill workers' diet at the time of the strike. Meat was a rareness, malnourished children the norm.
Source: Albany Times Union