This Day in Labor History: July 3, 1835. Children employed in Paterson, New Jersey’s textile mills went on strike, demanding an 11 hour day and 6 day week. Let's talk about this little known strike and how the textile industry still exploits the same workers today globally.
The textile factory system that had begun in the late 18th century in New England might have originally attracted a “better class of labor,” with factory owners in Lowell, Massachusetts bringing in young women to work but also to be educated and supervised closely.
But growing competition and immigration combined with greed to undermine those more humane conditions. The Lowell Mill Girl phenomenon was relatively short and by the 1830s, a lot of the textile labor force was immigrants, children, and immigrant children.
It's not as if children didn't work in the early 19th century and before. They did, usually on farms or as apprentices. But factory labor was a whole different type of work.
Although the big wave of Irish immigration had only just begun, the Irish already had taken over much of the labor force in the textile industry, where they were easily exploited. This was as true in Paterson, New Jersey as anywhere else in the northeast.
Paterson, along with Lowell and Worcester in Massachusetts and Pawtucket, Rhode Island, was one of the centers of the pre-Civil War textile industry. It was well-placed, being near New York City and blessed with a magnificent waterfall that provided the power industry needed.
But working conditions were abysmal. The work day was 13 1/2 hours. For this, they made $2 a week. Employers fined workers for mistakes or not working hard enough. The mills also opened a company store and forced workers to shop there.
Some of the tradesmen in Paterson, including the fathers of some of the mill workers, organized earlier that year and successfully won a 10 hour day.
The Paterson mill workers, organizing based on their fathers' success, decided to make this their prime demand with the fines, wage withholding, company store, and pay as less central issues.
More than 2000 workers from 20 mills, largely young girls, walked off the job on July 3, 1835. Support from workers around the region allowed the strike to continue for nearly 2 months.
Donations came in from workers in Newark and New York City and the Paterson Association for the Protection of the Working Class formed to organize relief. But workers really did not have the financial ability to keep up a strike for very long, which is still true today.
Newark workers created an investigating committee to look into the working conditions in the cotton mills, described as “more congenial to the climate of the autocrat of all the Russias than to this ‘land of the free and home of the brave.'”
Employers refused to negotiate and did bust the strike, but only after giving in to several of the workers’ demands, including reducing the workday to 12 hours Monday-Friday and 9 hours on Saturday, a 69 hour week.
That might still seem pretty bad and it was, but it also meant about 12 hours returned to workers each week, a significant improvement in their lives.
By August 24, most workers had returned to the mills on the new schedule. Unfortunately, strike leaders were blacklisted and forced to move from Paterson to work.
I don't have a whole lot more on this strike because it's hard to research early 19th century labor struggles without doing the real research myself. And I have real work to do. But this sort of struggle in textiles would happen over and over again, and continues to do so today.
There's a reason that the apparel industry was the true pioneer in capital mobility. Textile factories have always wanted to exploit. Department stores--19th century and today--want products with low costs and no responsibility.
The hideousness of the supply chain system system, which should not be normalized by liberals today, starts here. These supply chains largely exist to maximize exploitation of workers without companies taking any responsibility. No one does this more than textiles.
In 1835, these firms exploited kids in New Jersey. Today, it exploits them in Bangladesh. Otherwise, the only real difference is that when the workers protest, we don't see it because it is in another country, another advantage to the department stores.
My first book explores this outsourcing phenomenon and suggests how we can move ahead to tame the evils of global capitalism.
amazon.com/Out-Sight-Corp…
amazon.com/Out-Sight-Corp…
Assuming I survive the river I am about to spend the next few hours on and can squeeze in some time after tomorrow's 9 hour drive, will be back then with a discussion the Populists, focusing on the 1892 Omaha Convention.
