gotsnowgotslush
skates like Eck
- Joined
- Dec 24, 2007
- Posts
- 25,720
100 Years ago Ugly Greed arrives in America
Desperate immigrants are worked to death
These were the days, when the state did not step in and look after the welfare of children, women, the elderly, the desperate or the ill.
Congress stepped in, because greed knew no bounds.
In 1912, a new state law went into effect reducing the work week of women and children from 56 to 54 hours. But because so many women and
children worked in the mills, men’s hours were also reduced. When the first paychecks of the year revealed a cut in pay, thousands of workers,
already barely surviving on an average pay of $8.76 a week, walked out of the mills, and the Great Strike had begun.
How far were the mill owners willing to go, in order to keep obscene high profits? According to a congressional inquiry, 36 out of every 100 men
and women who worked in cotton mills died by the time they reached 25. The men, women and children, died of lung diseases from cloth dust.
They died of illness from lack of food, clean water, acceptable living conditions. They died of exhaustion. Victorian England 's misery of Dickens,
came to America with the power loom and coal fueled steam engines.14 year old Carmela Teoli, had her hair became entangled in a machine and
it ripped her hair and scalp from her head.
The strike lasted 9 weeks. That winter, Augusta, Maine, temperatures reached 38 below zero. The mill strikers were close to the New Hampshire border.
The people that were united for a subsistence living wage, faced state militia armed with guns and clubs. The mill workers were not the only union to
suffer from the ugly tactics used by the mill owners. One thousand scab workers came up from New York to help break a strike on the Boston docks.
A cache of dynamite, first attributed to the strikers, turned out to be planted by mill owners and their friends in a clumsy plot to discredit the
strikers and their radical union, the Industrial Workers of the World. The tide turned against the mill owners when police, attempting to prevent
strikers from sending their children to the care of sympathetic families in other cities, caused a melee at the train station which received inter-
national press attention.
Bread and Roses- Massachusetts September 3, 2012 Monument dedicated
Desperate immigrants are worked to death
These were the days, when the state did not step in and look after the welfare of children, women, the elderly, the desperate or the ill.
Congress stepped in, because greed knew no bounds.
In 1912, a new state law went into effect reducing the work week of women and children from 56 to 54 hours. But because so many women and
children worked in the mills, men’s hours were also reduced. When the first paychecks of the year revealed a cut in pay, thousands of workers,
already barely surviving on an average pay of $8.76 a week, walked out of the mills, and the Great Strike had begun.
How far were the mill owners willing to go, in order to keep obscene high profits? According to a congressional inquiry, 36 out of every 100 men
and women who worked in cotton mills died by the time they reached 25. The men, women and children, died of lung diseases from cloth dust.
They died of illness from lack of food, clean water, acceptable living conditions. They died of exhaustion. Victorian England 's misery of Dickens,
came to America with the power loom and coal fueled steam engines.14 year old Carmela Teoli, had her hair became entangled in a machine and
it ripped her hair and scalp from her head.
The strike lasted 9 weeks. That winter, Augusta, Maine, temperatures reached 38 below zero. The mill strikers were close to the New Hampshire border.
The people that were united for a subsistence living wage, faced state militia armed with guns and clubs. The mill workers were not the only union to
suffer from the ugly tactics used by the mill owners. One thousand scab workers came up from New York to help break a strike on the Boston docks.
A cache of dynamite, first attributed to the strikers, turned out to be planted by mill owners and their friends in a clumsy plot to discredit the
strikers and their radical union, the Industrial Workers of the World. The tide turned against the mill owners when police, attempting to prevent
strikers from sending their children to the care of sympathetic families in other cities, caused a melee at the train station which received inter-
national press attention.
Bread and Roses- Massachusetts September 3, 2012 Monument dedicated