1912 textile strike stirs up debate over union strategy

Scan page 4

Strike leaders Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Bill Haywood, and Joseph Ettor Hormel contract fraud LAWRENCE, Mass.—Twenty thousand people gathered here this past Labor Day to celebrate the 75th anniversary of one of the most important and successful strikes in the United States-the Lawrence textile workers' strike of 1912, also known as the Bread and Roses strike.

On Jan. 12, 1912, women weavers in Lawrence, faced with pay-cuts, walked off their jobs at the American Woolen Company. They were soon followed by more than 10,000 other Lawrence textile workers, all of them from a score of diverse nationalities.

For more than 10 weeks the strikers, organized by the Industrial Workers of the World (I.W.W.), resisted attacks and provocations by the mill owners, the cops, the courts, and the local and state governments. They set up democratically elected strike committees and soup kitchens, and organized daily mass strike meetings.

The strikers demanded a 15-percent increase in wages on the 54-hour basis, double pay for overtime work, the abolition of the premium system, and the return of all the strikers to work without discrimination.

On March 14, after 10 weeks of struggle, the 10,000 strikers accepted the mill owners' offer—which met all their demands in full or in part. The strikers returned to work, overjoyed at having won a tremendous victory.

More important, it was a victory for textile workers throughout New England: The mill owners, fearing similar strikes in other states, were forced to grant the same wage increases to between 175,000 and 250,000 textile workers.

Controversy and falsifications The 1986 Labor Day Bread and Roses Heritage Festival was a time for both proponents and opponents of union struggles to air their views on this historic "For the rest of the country, the Bread and Roses strike is historic," said John Corliss Jr., president of the Bread and Roses Heritage Committee. "But in Lawrence it is still debated whether it was a good idea."

Three workers from the 1912 strike, two of whom scabbed throughout the strike, voiced anger over the use of the "Bread and Roses" title for the Labor Day festivity. "The strike was no bed of roses," said James Perry, "people were afraid to walk the streets." Rosario Conparino said, "There were no roses. There was no food, no butter to buy, no milk."

Others have attempted to portray the leadership of the 1912 as irresponsible "hot-heads" —much in the same manner the mainstream press today is portraying the leadership of the striking Hormel workers in Austin, Minn.

For example, the "Backtalk" section of the Sept. 14, 1986, issue of the Lawrence Eagle-Tribune published a letter from Jane J. Perry, which lashes out at Joseph Ettor, Memoirs of a Radical Rank & Filer The story of one who turned radical Juring the Great Depression and wa 1 militant, rank-and-filer, through th '40s, '50s, and '60s. Today, in his seventies, he marches to the same drummer.

Price: $7.95. (189 pages)

Send check or money order to:

Prometheus Press, Box 318 Gracie Station, New York, N.Y. 10028 4 SOCIALIST ACTION the I.W.W. leader who was eler ited chairman of the Lawrence Sti ike Committee. "Apparently Ettor and his cohorts didn't want to tangle with the Guards," Perry stated, "so they left Lawrence, and shortly after some of the cooler-headed strikers sat down with the mill owners and settled the strike."

In reality, Joseph Ettor and Arturo Giovannitti, the two I.W.W. leaders at Lawrence, were unable to negotiate the settlement because they had been framed and jailed two weeks after the strike began for the shooting death of Anna Lo Pizzo, an Italian striker.

On Nov. 26, Ettor and Giovannitti were exonerated of the crime and were freed after 10 months in jail. In a display of the international's procedure of recommending a vote without allowing the membership to read the final contract. In 1981, on the strength of a summary submitted by the UFCW, the P-gers understood they were accepting a wage freeze in return for contractual recognition of their right to strike in 1984, when the wage freeze was to have ended.

But under the contract terms released after the vote, the strike weapon was not allowed until August 1985. Hormel imposed a 23percent wage cut in October 1984 based on the language of the final contract, although the summary the UFCW had released before voting made no mention of this proviso.

As a result of this experience, P-9 members voted last year to never again ratify a contract solely on the basis of incomplete summaries.

The Original P-9 leadership has also OCTOBER 1986 solidarity, 10,000 workers in Lawrence held a mass meeting to acknowledge their help in the strike and to celebrate their freedom.

Blaming the victims

Another widely echoed slander against the Lawrence strikers is that they were responsible for the violence during the strike. This accusation has also been raised by the bosses, the cops, and the courts against the striking Hormel workers, 18 of whom have been framed on trumped-up charges.

Robert L. Tyler, writing in The Cotton History Review, typifies this smear campaign. He states:

"The unrestrained radical press charged that women and children were attacked on protested the international's procedure of holding an unsupervised mail-in referendum. International officials have refused to state why they authorized mail-in balloting for the striking Austin, Minn., plant and voting-booth balloting in all other Hormel units around the country.

The court affidavit submitted by Jim Guyette points out that "the UFCW has used a mail-referendum procedure in the past in Austin when it was dissatisfied wịth the decisions which members had reached through normal balloting procedures."

In January 1986, after the P-9 membership voted down a "mediator's proposal," the international arranged a re-vote by mail—in spite of the protests of the local. An independent accounting firm later reported that approximately 225 more ballots were printed than there were members entitled to cast votes.

Any suspicions about irregularities in the voting process were reinforced by an item

PUIT

THE LABOR MARKET IS THE MAIN CAUSE OF LOW WAGES!

AGITATE • EDUCATE • ORGANIZE •M THE INOUSTRIAL WORXERS OF THE WORLD THE ONE BIG UNION OF ALL WAGE WORKERS 19/591 OAT TE OF MAY TAKE the train platform of the Lawrence depot by club-swinging police and that one pregnant woman even suffered a miscarriage from the effects of a police beating. In actuality the 'atrocity' probably involved nothing more brutal than the difficult and exasperating hustling of noisy and resistant women and children into an army truck."

Tyler goes on to blame the strikers for the "real violence."

It is well documented that "no violence" was strike policy. Joseph Ettor told the strikers, "They cannot weave cloth with bayonets...By all means, make this strike as peacefull as possible. In the last analysis all the blood spilled will be your blood."

The police and the militia working for the mill owners were the ones who practiced whole-sale violence. Richard Washburn Child, in the March 1912 issue of Collier's magazine, quoted a stockholder who said that "the way to settle this strike is to shoot down 40 or 50 of them." Mayor Scanlon of Lawrence is also quoted as saying, "We will either break this strike or break the strikers' heads."

Unity of exploited and oppressed Putting aside the prejudices between the nationalities, the Lawrence textile workers united against the common enemy of their standard of living: the mill owners.

Joseph Ettor told the strikers that solidarity was necessary. He said, "Division is the surest means to lose the strike. Among workers there is only one nationality, one race, one creed."

The unity of all the textile workers was necessary to fight a system united against them. "The power of the capitalists is based on property," said Ettor. "They have the laws, the army, everything! In spite of all that, the workers' power is the common bond of solidarity."

The 1986 Labor Day message from Lawrence was clear: Workers today, as the striking textile workers of 1912, must identify a common goal and unite against the common enemy: a system of big business that enlists the courts, the government, and the press in its plan to increase its profits at the expense of the workers' way of life.

The strike of 1912 gives today's workers hope that with courage and purpose, the bosses' war against their standards of living can be defeated in the Dec. 30, 1985, Longbeach Telegram. The newspaper quoted UFCW International President Wynn as saying that if the Austin strikers rejected the upcoming proposed contract, "the International will order a mail-in referendum in which the outcome will be assured."

Boycott Hormel products!

Meanwhile, a National Labor Relations Board election is pending in which workers in Austin can vote to have either NAMPU, the UFCW, or no union certified as their bargaining agent.

On Oct. 11, Original P-9 supporters from across the country are invited to Austin for a celebration of the United Support Group's one-year anniversary. According to Guyette, the gathering will be a working meeting where "boycott efforts will be redoubled."

"We want to focus on another National Boycott Hormel Day," Guyette told Twin Cities supporters. "Right now the company is hurting, and they have to be made to realize that the only way this is going to go away is to put everybody back to work."

Scan page 5

Uss Gary Works NGRUENTIFI SELMALE -LOCKED ONE OUr LOCKOUT HE LON Socialist Action/Tina Beacock Sandinista government for "restricting free speech, curtailing trade-union rights, and harassing critics in the Church."

When a few delegates said they welcomed the resolution's condemnation of U.S. intervention, but disagreed with its negative portrayal of the Nicaraguan government, Williams made it clear that this statement is as far as the USWA International officers are prepared to go in opposing U.S. foreign policy in Latin America.

Much convention time was allocated to a detailed line-by-line review of the USWA constitution. Although most changes were technical in nature, one which drew considerable discussion will allow super -visory personnel into the USWA with the approval of the International Executive Board.

Although Williams and other International officers asserted this change was simply to aid organizing drives in the public sector and promised that it would certainly not apply to steel mills, many delegates were concerned over the wording which didn't rule out any group of supervisors.

USWA's PATCO

There was a general recognition of the seriousness of the ruling-class attacks on steelworkers and other working people.