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A History of America in Ten Strikes
A History of America in Ten Strikes
A History of America in Ten Strikes
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A History of America in Ten Strikes

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Recommended by The Nation, the New Republic, Current Affairs, Bustle, In These Times

An “entertaining, tough-minded, and strenuously argued” (The Nation) account of ten moments when workers fought to change the balance of power in America

“A brilliantly recounted American history through the prism of major labor struggles, with critically important lessons for those who seek a better future for working people and the world.” —Noam Chomsky

Powerful and accessible, A History of America in Ten Strikes challenges all of our contemporary assumptions around labor, unions, and American workers. In this brilliant book, labor historian Erik Loomis recounts ten critical workers' strikes in American labor history that everyone needs to know about (and then provides an annotated list of the 150 most important moments in American labor history in the appendix). From the Lowell Mill Girls strike in the 1830s to Justice for Janitors in 1990, these labor uprisings do not just reflect the times in which they occurred, but speak directly to the present moment.

For example, we often think that Lincoln ended slavery by proclaiming the slaves emancipated, but Loomis shows that they freed themselves during the Civil War by simply withdrawing their labor. He shows how the hopes and aspirations of a generation were made into demands at a GM plant in Lordstown in 1972. And he takes us to the forests of the Pacific Northwest in the early nineteenth century where the radical organizers known as the Wobblies made their biggest inroads against the power of bosses. But there were also moments when the movement was crushed by corporations and the government; Loomis helps us understand the present perilous condition of American workers and draws lessons from both the victories and defeats of the past.

In crystalline narratives, labor historian Erik Loomis lifts the curtain on workers' struggles, giving us a fresh perspective on American history from the boots up.

Strikes include:

Lowell Mill Girls Strike (Massachusetts, 1830–40)

Slaves on Strike (The Confederacy, 1861–65)

The Eight-Hour Day Strikes (Chicago, 1886)

The Anthracite Strike (Pennsylvania, 1902)

The Bread and Roses Strike (Massachusetts, 1912)

The Flint Sit-Down Strike (Michigan, 1937)

The Oakland General Strike (California, 1946)

Lordstown (Ohio, 1972)

Air Traffic Controllers (1981)

Justice for Janitors (Los Angeles, 1990)

LanguageEnglish
PublisherThe New Press
Release dateOct 2, 2018
ISBN9781620971628
Author

Erik Loomis

Erik Loomis is an assistant professor of history at the University of Rhode Island. He blogs at Lawyers, Guns, and Money on labor and environmental issues past and present. His work has also appeared in AlterNet, Truthout, and Salon. The author of Out of Sight: The Long and Disturbing Story of Corporations Outsourcing Catastrophe (The New Press) and Empire of Timber: Labor Unions and the Pacific Northwest Forests (Cambridge University Press), he lives in Providence, Rhode Island.

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  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Erik Loomis has written an informative history of labor strikes in the United States. Contrary to its title, the book is more a history of the U.S. labor movement than a more comprehensive history of America as perceived through the perspective of workers. Nonetheless, Loomis informs readers of an important and often neglected aspect of American history. Readers will learn of the violence, racism, and sexism that has permeated American society and labor from the country’s start. Loomis describes in detail the roles of government, employers, and workers in the history of labor in the United States. This is a book to be read by those interested in American history, politics, social movements, business, and labor. Those wanting a deeper understanding of current events and conflicts within American society will also find this book an informative read.

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A History of America in Ten Strikes - Erik Loomis

Also by Erik Loomis

Out of Sight: The Long and Disturbing Story of Corporations Outsourcing Catastrophe

Empire of Timber: Labor Unions and the Pacific Northwest Forests

© 2018 by Erik Loomis

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, in any form, without written permission from the publisher.

Requests for permission to reproduce selections from this book should be mailed to: Permissions Department, The New Press, 120 Wall Street, 31st floor, New York, NY 10005.

Published in the United States by The New Press, New York, 2018

Distributed by Two Rivers Distribution

ISBN 978-1-62097-162-8 (ebook)

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Names: Loomis, Erik, author.

Title: A History of America in Ten Strikes / Erik Loomis.

Description: New York: The New Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018017580

Subjects: LCSH: Strikes and lockouts—United States—History. | Labor disputes—United States—History.

Classification: LCC HD5324 .L56 2018 | DDC 331.892/973—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018017580

The New Press publishes books that promote and enrich public discussion and understanding of the issues vital to our democracy and to a more equitable world. These books are made possible by the enthusiasm of our readers; the support of a committed group of donors, large and small; the collaboration of our many partners in the independent media and the not-for-profit sector; booksellers, who often hand-sell New Press books; librarians; and above all by our authors.

www.thenewpress.com

Book design and composition by Bookbright Media

This book was set in Bembo and Gotham

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To my departed mentors:

Richard Maxwell Brown,

Susan Becker,

and

Tim Moy

Contents

Introduction: Strikes and American History

1.Lowell Mill Girls and the Development of American Capitalism

2.Slaves on Strike

3.The Eight-Hour-Day Strikes

4.The Anthracite Strike and the Progressive State

5.The Bread and Roses Strike

6.The Flint Sit-Down Strike and the New Deal

7.The Oakland General Strike and Cold War America

8.Lordstown and Workers in a Rebellious Age

9.Air Traffic Controllers and the New Assault on Unions

10.Justice for Janitors and Immigrant Unionism

Conclusion: Take Back Power

Acknowledgments

Appendix: 150 Major Events in U.S. Labor History

Notes

Index

Introduction: Strikes and American History

Everyone has a limit. West Virginia teachers had struggled for years to make ends meet, finding themselves the butt of lawmakers’ attacks on the budget. They worked in underfunded school districts, in buildings that were falling apart, and for less money than any teachers in the country except for three other states. Despite their pathetic salaries, they bought school supplies out of their own pockets.

While the teachers had unions, those institutions had struggled to fight back and were tired. West Virginia became a so-called right to work state in 2016, allowing workers to opt out of their unions and still receive all the benefits the unions won. This reduced union power, but it did not mean that workers considered themselves powerless. Seeing that the union officers would not lead a counterattack, teachers Emily Comer and Jay O’Neal started a secret Facebook group to organize their fellow workers throughout the state’s schools. Comer said, We thought this would be an easier way to get in touch with people, and keep people updated on what was going on.¹

The Facebook group caught on like wildfire, attracting even teachers who had left their union. After Governor Jim Justice signed legislation capping teacher pay well below the cost of living increases, teachers across West Virginia went on strike on February 22, 2018. They didn’t want to go on strike. But they felt they had no choice, not if they wanted to be able to teach their students effectively. Rebecca Diamond, an elementary school teacher who spends her weekends working a second job at the local Hardee’s, said, I have lived in West Virginia my whole life. I have two children who I don’t want to leave the state. What I’m fighting for is the future of West Virginia.² She joined thirty-four thousand teachers who put down their chalk and their grading pens and decided to fight for themselves and their students. This strike was illegal. The teachers figured it didn’t matter. What did they have to lose when conditions were this bad?

West Virginia’s parents saw the conditions of their schools. They knew and liked the teachers. Many parents joined the rallies. Huge marches on the state capitol in Charleston by teachers wearing red T-shirts, which has become the symbol of the teachers’ movements nationwide, gained national media attention. Some had signs reading, Will Teach for Insurance.³ Even when an initial agreement convinced leadership to send workers back on the job, teachers from all of the state’s fifty-five counties rejected it and stayed on strike.

After nine days the teachers won all their major demands. They pushed back against a state proposal to expand the charter schools that undermine public education. Governor Justice agreed to veto all anti-union legislation and create a health care task force with representatives from organized labor. Teachers won a 5 percent pay raise—very small, but a step in the right direction. Most importantly, as teacher Jay O’Neal said, We made it so thousands of eyes will be watching everything the task force does.⁴ The fight is nowhere near over. Teachers want a reversal of the corporate tax breaks that have underfunded schools in their state, a problem across the country. They are fighting for themselves, their students, and the future of their state. Though they won their immediate demands, they know that their strike was one skirmish in an endless push and pull between workers and bosses in America.

Only a few experiences tie us all together as people. One is that we almost all work or have worked. Whether in a factory, on a farm, at McDonald’s, or as an unpaid housewife, work is as much a central experience to human society as eating and family. For the unemployed, the absence of work not only impoverishes but shames and isolates. Work fills the hours of our lives, it provides us with sustenance, and it can give us satisfaction with a job well done. Work is so central to human existence that we hardly know what to do without it. We long toward a well-deserved retirement, but when we get there, most people have to find new things to do, and that often includes part-time work.

The workplace is a site where people struggle for power. Under a capitalist economy such as that of the United States, employers profit by working their employees as hard as they can for as many hours as possible and for as little pay as they can get away with. Their goal is to exploit us. Our lives reflect that reality. Many of us don’t enjoy our work. We don’t get paid enough. We have to work two or three jobs to make ends meet if we have a job at all. Our bosses treat us like garbage and we don’t feel like there is anything we can do about it. We face the threat that machines will replace us. Our jobs have moved overseas, where employers can generate even higher profits. Sometimes a job at Walmart is the only option we have.

In our exploitation, we share common experiences with hundreds of millions of Americans, past and present. Our ancestors resisted. So do we, sometimes by forming a union, sometimes by taking a couple extra minutes on our break or by checking social media on the job. All of these activities take back our time and our dignity from our employer. Class struggle—framed through transformations in capitalism, through other struggles for racial and gendered justice, and through changes in American politics and society—has played a central role in American history. Future historians will see this in our lives as well.

This book places the struggle for worker justice at the heart of American history. This is necessary because we don’t teach class conflict in our public schools. Textbooks have little material about workers. As colleges and universities have devalued the study of the past in favor of emphasizing majors in business and engineering, fewer students take any history courses, including in labor history. Labor unions and stories of work are a footnote at best in most of our public discussions about American history. Most history documentaries on television focus on wars, politicians, and famous leaders, not workers. Labor Day was created as a conservative holiday so that American workers would not celebrate the radical international workers’ holiday May Day. Yet today, we do not remember our workers on Labor Day like we remember our veterans on Veterans Day. Instead, Labor Day just serves as the end of summer, a last weekend of vacation before the fall begins. That erasure of workers from our collective sense of ourselves as Americans is a political act. Americans’ shared memory—shaped by teachers, textbook writers, the media, public monuments, and the stories about the past we tell in our own families, churches, and workplaces—too often erases or downplays critical stories of workplace struggle.

Instead, our shared history tells myths about our economy meant to undermine class conflict. We are told that we are all middle class, that class conflict is something only scary socialists talk about and has no relevance to the United States today. Our culture deifies the rich and blames the poor for their own suffering. Why don’t they pull themselves up by their bootstraps? so many people say. This ignores the fact that millions of Americans never had boots to pull up. Most of us are not wealthy and never will be wealthy. We are workers, laboring for a few rich and powerful people, mostly white men who are the sons and grandsons of other rich white men. We have a hierarchical society that has used propaganda to get Americans to believe everyone is equal. We are not equal. The law routinely favors the rich, the white, and the male.

During the twentieth century, workers fought and died to solve some of these problems, even though white men still benefited more than women or people of color. Workers formed unions, joined them by the millions, and convinced the government to pressure companies to negotiate with them. Unfortunately, the period of union success ended in the 1970s. So did the rising tide for American workers that created the middle class. With the decimation of unions, the fall of the middle class and the evisceration of the working class have followed. Politicians talk about the middle class during elections, but they too often pursue policies that increase inequality and give power to the rich. This has transformed the fundamentals of the American Dream. The idea of getting a job and staying with it your whole life, working hard to feed your family and educate your children, and then retiring with dignity is gone. Now, we are expected to take on massive student debt, enter an uncertain job market, and change jobs every few years, all the while being told by our parents and the media that we should stop eating avocado toast and instead buy a house, as if a $7 appetizer and not $50,000 in student loan debt is why young people suffer financial instability. Pensions are dead, and the idea of retiring seems impossible even for many baby boomers, who have significant consumer debt and shaky finances as they reach their later years.

We cannot fight against pro-capitalist mythology in American society if we do not know our shared history of class struggle. This book reconsiders American history from the perspective of class struggle not by erasing the other critical parts of our history—the politics, the social change, and the struggles around race and gender—but rather by demonstrating how the history of worker uprisings shines a light on these other issues. Some of these strikes fought for justice for all. Sometimes they made America a better place and gave us things we may take for granted today, such as the weekend and the minimum wage. But we also should not romanticize strikes. Some workers went on strike to keep workplaces all white. Sometimes strikes backfire and hurt workers in the end. Working Americans do not always agree with each other. Race, gender, religion, region, ethnicity, and many other identities divide us. Just because a Mexican immigrant and a fourth-generation Italian American work in the same place does not mean that they like each other or see eye-to-eye on any issue, including their own union, if they have one.

Taking a hard look at the history of strikes helps us in the present. This book argues for two interlocking necessities for workers to succeed in the past, present, and future. First, workers have to organize collectively to fight employers. Through American history, workers have fought to make their jobs better paid, fought for the right to negotiate a contract with their employer, fought to feed their children or have the chance to send them to college, fought for a completely new society that valued work as it deserved. Like the Chicago Teachers Union in 2012, workers of the past two hundred years also had to strike to win their struggles. Strikes take place when workers collectively decide to stop working in order to win their goals. Usually that happens with a labor union, which is an organization that workers create to represent them collectively. In the United States, this has usually meant the strikers have the aim of the union winning a written contract from the employer that lays out the rules of work and gives workers set wages, working hours, and benefits. But strikes happen with or without unions. They can be spontaneous acts by workers—paid or unpaid, with their union’s support or without it—when they throw down their tools or their washrags or their chalk and they walk off the job for whatever reason they want.

Strikes are special moments. They shut down production, whether of manufacturing cars or manufacturing educated citizens. The strike, the withholding of our labor from our bosses, is the greatest power we have as workers. As unions have weakened in recent decades, we have far fewer strikes today than we did forty years ago. During the 1970s, there were an average of 289 major strikes per year in the United States. By the 1990s, that fell to 35 per year. In 2003, there were only 13 major strikes.⁵ When a strike like the CTU action takes place, it forces people who claim to support the working class to announce which side they are on. Do they really believe in workers’ rights or will they side with employers if a subway strike blocks their commute to work or a teachers’ strike forces them to find something to do with their children for the day? Strikes are moments of tremendous power precisely because they raise the stakes, bringing private moments of poverty and workplace indignity into the public spotlight. And unless you are a millionaire boss, we are all workers with a tremendous amount in common with other workers, if we only realize that all of us—farmworkers and teachers, insurance agents and construction workers, graduate students and union staffers—face bad bosses, financial instability, and the desperate need for dignity and respect on the job.

We might like to believe that if all workers got together and acted for our rights, we could win whatever we want. In theory, if every worker walked off the job, that might happen. Unfortunately, real life does not work that way. Given that we are divided by race, gender, religion, country of origin, sexuality, and many other factors, class identity will never become a universal sign of solidarity. Employers know this and act to divide us upon these bases. For most of American history, the government has served the interests of wealthy employers over those of everyday workers like you and me, sometimes even using the military against us. At the local, state, and national levels, employers have far greater power than workers to implement their agenda, especially unorganized workers who lack a union. Therefore, in addition to worker action, organizers and union leaders have discovered a second requirement for success: Workers have to neutralize the government-employer alliance. After decades of struggle, in the 1930s, a new era of government passed labor legislation that gave workers the right to organize, the minimum wage, and other pillars of dignified work for the first time. While employers’ power never waned in the halls of government, the growing power of unions neutralized the worst corporate attacks until the 1980s. Since then, the decline of unions and a revived, aggressive lobby attempting to drive unions to their death have rolled back many of our gains. Once again we live in a country where the government conspires with employers to make our work lives increasingly miserable. Unions are the only institution in American history to give working people a voice in political life. This is precisely why corporations and conservative politicians want to eliminate them.

There is simply no evidence from American history that unions can succeed if the government and employers combine to crush them. All the other factors are secondary: the structure of a union, how democratic it is, how radical its leaders or the rank-and-file are, their tactics. The potent and often interlocking strategies of the state and bosses build a tremendous amount of power against workers. That was true in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and it is true under the Trump administration. Workers were and are denied basic rights to organize, income inequality is rampant, and the future of unions seems hopeless. Workers and their unions have to be as involved in politics as they are in organizing if they are to create conditions by which they can win. To stop involvement with the two-party political system would be tantamount to suicide. Having friends in government, or at least not having enemies there, makes all the difference in the history of American workers.

In Donald Trump, we face the most racist and misogynistic president in a century, a fascist Islamophobe who has demonstrated his utter contempt for the Constitution and the values that have made the United States the best it can be, even if it was never great for many of its citizens. Trump won in 2016 in part because he tapped into white Americans’ anxiety about their unstable economic futures. Video footage from Carrier’s announcement that it would close its Indiana heating and air-conditioning manufacturing plant to move its production to Mexico touched home for millions of Americans who do not see a path to a better future. For them, the American Dream is dead. Of course, African American, Asian American, Native American, Middle Eastern, and Latino workers also share those economic anxieties. But as has happened so often throughout American history, Trump managed to divide workers by race, empowering white people to blame workers of color for their problems instead of pointing a finger at who is really responsible for our economic problems: capitalists.

Capitalism is an economic system developed to create private profits. Within that broader definition, there are many forms of capitalism, some with socialist tendencies to ensure that the benefits of the economy are distributed relatively equally throughout all of society. In the modern United States, business and the government have dedicated themselves to a more fundamentalist version that uses the state to promote profit and keep workers subjugated under employer control. That has led to the income inequality that defines modern society. Whether some form of capitalism can work for everybody is a question people have debated for nearly two centuries. Some radicals reject capitalism entirely as a system that will never treat workers fairly. Others believe the state, businesses, and unions can all work together to create a form of capitalism where everyone benefits. We should be debating what the future of American and global capitalism looks like, or whether we should replace it entirely. I argue that at the very least we can use the government to create equitable laws and regulations to ensure that everyone lives a dignified life under a broadly capitalist economy. But that can only happen when workers reject the fundamentalist capitalist propaganda, such as from Ayn Rand and Fox News, and instead stand up for the rights not only of themselves, but of their friends, families, and co-workers. Solidarity is the answer for the future, which means sacrificing for others as they sacrifice for you. The extent that we will stand up for the rights of others, including at the workplace, will determine whether we will continue to see growing inequality and political instability in our world or we will see the world get better in our lifetimes.

This book focuses on ten major strikes in American history to tell the story of the United States through an emphasis on class and worker struggle. Combined, they weave a tale of a nation that promised life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, but that routinely denied that to workers, whether slave or free, men or women, black or white. They tell a story of a nation divided by race, gender, and national origin, as well as by class. They place work at the center of American history. This book sees the struggles for the dignity of workers, the rights of people of color, and the need to fight racism, misogyny, and homophobia as part of the same struggle.

Each chapter centers on one strike that accounts for about one-third of the chapter. The rest of the chapter places that strike in context of the broader issues affecting Americans at the time. The first chapter, on the Lowell Mill Girls strikes of the 1830s and 1840s, demonstrates how the Industrial Revolution transformed life for the new nation. Chapter 2, on slave self-emancipation, establishes the centrality of slave labor in American history and shows how slaves themselves helped win the Civil War for the Union, even if racism undermined their economic freedom after the war. The third chapter, on the 1886 eight-hour-day strikes, explores how workers responded to the rapid growth of capitalism that created a shocking world of inequality and exploitation after the Civil War. Chapter 4, on the 1902 anthracite coal strike in Pennsylvania, explains the central role of the government in deciding the fate of a strike, with both great possibilities and great peril for workers. Chapter 5 examines the Bread and Roses strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts, in 1912 as a window into those fighting for an alternative to capitalism entirely.

The sixth chapter investigates the Flint sit-down strike of 1937 to demonstrate what workers can win when conditions and organizing allow them to elect politicians who will help them and how small numbers of brave people can transform the world. Chapter 7 examines the Oakland General Strike of 1946 to show how workers won a fair share of the economic pie after World War II but also how fears of radicalism and unions’ inability to organize nonunion parts of the nation laid the groundwork for the repeal of labor rights later in the twentieth century. Chapter 8 focuses on the Lordstown, Ohio, autoworkers strike of 1972 as a window into the tumultuous years of the 1960s and 1970s. Chapter 9 surveys the air traffic controllers strike of 1981 and how President Ronald Reagan reoriented the American government to crush unions instead of acting as a neutral arbiter between unions and employers, laying the groundwork for the attack on labor that continues today. Finally, chapter 10 discusses the Justice for Janitors actions in American cities during the late 1980s and early 1990s, focusing on the rise of immigration and how unions transformed from opposing immigration to being on the front lines of fighting President Trump’s attacks on immigrants today.

We all want to live the American Dream. That can happen only if we combine organizing and solidarity with electing politicians who will fight for us instead of for out employers. Getting into the street to stand up for our rights must play a central role in these struggles. We cannot rely on others to fight for us. We have to do it for ourselves, in the streets and at the ballot box, at our workplaces and in our homes. The strike is the best weapon we have as everyday people to win our rights. Taken together, these strikes tell a broader story of workers in the scope of American history that I hope inspires you to fight for justice in your own life, just as so many people have done in the past and continue to do today. A better tomorrow is possible, but only if you demand it.

1

Lowell Mill Girls and the Development of American Capitalism

Outside of the very rich, everyone is a worker.

When Christopher Columbus stumbled across the Americas in 1492, he had specific ideas about work, who would do it, and who would benefit. So did the European nations that followed him: Spain and Portugal, France and England. Europeans colonized the Americas to get rich, and that would happen through other people doing work for them. In most colonies, they would enslave Native Americans and then Africans. Conquest, slavery, dispossession, and racism have defined much of American history, creating the inequalities we face today. Later chapters of this book will return to these issues repeatedly.

However, to tell American history through ten strikes, we need to examine the exception in American colonization. In New England, a different type of colonist arrived with a different type of labor system. Puritans, a Protestant separatist group seeking to reform the Church of England, settled in relatively close-knit communities revolving around their churches. The land of New England was rocky and soil poor. This led to a work culture centered around small farming and artisanship. The Puritans had little objection to slavery, and some New England colonists did own African slaves, but the economic system did not produce the wealth required for large-scale slavery such as in Virginia or Jamaica. New England was an economic backwater; logging and fishing were its important economic contributions to the British colonial project. As the English colonies moved toward independence in the eighteenth century, the economic basis of New England changed little. Growing cities, particularly Boston, created slightly more wealth, but this was still a region of small farms. But this geography, with a dense population and significant water sources close to large ports, paid off by 1800, with the Industrial Revolution transforming American work forever.¹

The Industrial Revolution began in Britain in the mid-eighteenth century, when small-scale manufacturing underwent a radical transformation with the development of new technology that used waterpower to generate energy that moved machines, in the process shifting work from people’s homes into factories. Mechanized cotton spinning, with the development of the power loom, drastically increased the productivity of a single worker; better technologies to produce iron rapidly lowered its cost; and the development of steam power provided energy sources to run the new factories. The British, realizing the enormous economic advantages these new technologies provided, banned their export and even limited the foreign travel of those familiar with the processes.²

But the British could not keep their technology under wraps. Americans, wanting to compete with their former motherland in the years after the American Revolution severed those ties, looked to build factories of their own. More than anyone else, Samuel Slater, a British factory worker who migrated to the United States with a memory full of how English mills worked, made this happen. He made a deal with a Rhode Island investor named Moses Brown, who wanted to replicate the British factory system. By 1793, Slater had a fully operational factory in Pawtucket, and American textile production was on the precipice of a revolution.³

That revolution required a second technological advancement: the cotton gin. Invented by Eli Whitney, this simple machine could separate cotton seeds from the boll where they grew far faster than human hands could. This allowed for the mass production of cotton on southern plantations to feed the ever more powerful textile mills of New England. It meant the transition from agricultural to industrial labor in the North and the rapid expansion and intensification of slavery in the South to produce the cotton. The cotton gin went far to create the nineteenth-century American economy and sharpened the divides between work and labor in different regions of the United States, problems that would eventually lead to the Civil War. Its impact still shapes the global cotton and textile industries today.

For New England, mass production meant child labor in the mills. Children worked during the eighteenth century, usually on their parents’ farms, but sometimes as apprentices to craftsmen in cities. Benjamin Franklin, for instance, worked as his brother’s apprentice in a print shop in Boston starting at the age of twelve, before he ran away to Philadelphia, eventually becoming one of the most important Founding Fathers. Slater had started working in a British mill as a child and hired children in his own mills. Child labor scaled up with the factory system. It placed thousands of people in cities with no care to their living or working conditions. Americans’ feared importing the filth, dire poverty, and crime of the British industrial city along with its factory system. Those fears quickly became justified. The entire labor system of the American economy soon revolved around an ever more exploitable labor force, both in the North and in the South, setting the stage for the justice movements that would slowly transform the lives of working people throughout American history.

By 1815, 140 mills had opened within 30 miles of Providence, employing 26,000 people. The mill owners demanded incredible levels of work from their new, young laborers. Farmers labored hard, but they controlled their own time. Factory owners demanded punctuality and submission to the clock. Samuel Slater enforced his seventy-two-hour workweek by firing laborers who resisted. And resist they did. As early as 1817, mill workers possibly invented the idea of overtime by demanding extra pay for even five minutes of extra work over their allotted seventy-two hours.

With the Industrial Revolution, young workers began moving to the mill towns from the farms where they had labored turning the raw products of nature into economic survival. These children often faced physical punishment. By the late 1830s, factory overseers faced criminal charges for the brutal beatings of child workers. It became the American version of the British factory-town nightmare. These children could not attend school; as Seth Luther, a former carpenter turned educational reformer said of his tour of Rhode Island mill towns in the 1830s: "In Pawtucket there are at

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