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What does Labor Day mean to you? Is it hot dogs and swimming and shopping for school supplies? The history of that holiday goes deeply into what working in America is really about.

REAL LABOR DAY LINKS

Samuel Gompers got it wrong. The founder and longtime president of the American Federation of Labor once said that Labor Day is different from other American holidays because it is not a symbol of battle and conflict. The day is not, Gompers noted, about "strife and discord for greed and power, of glories achieved by one nation over another."

I don’t know what history of American labor this guy was talking about. Rather than hot dogs and backyard badminton, Labor Day makes me think of stifling New England factories where 12-year old girls might earn 47 cents a day for 12 crippling hours of work. Those who showed up late were fined 12 cents. It happened right here in the brick mill buildings that still dominate most of our towns. If these were not battlegrounds, then what were they? It was the nation of the rich versus the nation of the poor, and it is a war that continues today.

Dover, New Hampshire is remembered as the site of the first labor strike by women in the United States. That was in 1828. Between 600 and 800 female cotton mill employees bravely protested the inhuman working conditions at the Cocheco Manufacturing Company. Their story was re-enacted recently inside the old mill building. But the banners and marches all came to nothing; owners quickly forced the women and girls back to work without making a single concession.

Conditions were not much improved when Lawrence, Massachusetts workers staged a walk-out in the winter of 1912. The workers had come to America by the millions – from Poland, Canada, Italy, Lithuania, Greece, Russia, Germany and more. They came, not by accident, but because American factory owners solicited them with leaflets showing happy workers taking home bags of money. What they discovered, at the turn of the 20th century, were harsh conditions, repetitive unskilled tasks, deafening and dangerous machinery and slum tenement housing. Wages of $5 to $8 a week, minus rent to the factory-owned boarding house, made it possible to survive only if large families worked impossible hours. If you wanted a drink of water during a 58-hour work week, the mill owner charged a fee.

The Lawrence "Bread and Roses" strike is historic because it was successful. Thousands of workers refused to return to the woolen mills. The national media turned the spotlight on "The Plains" in Lawrence where up to 60 people lived in each squalid high-rise apartment building. Buildings were packed so closely together that the sun could not reach them. When an Italian woman was shot during a protest and a man run through with a national guard bayonet, the media paid attention. When a protester accused of trying to dynamite the factory turned out to have been hired by the mill owner himself, the feds stepped in. In an investigation following the strike, a 14 year old girl testified to Congress about how her scalp had been torn off when her hair was caught in a "twisting" machine in the textile mill. People got the message – immigrants were human beings too.

THE UP SHOT

The more one reads about labor struggles in the United States, the more clear the pattern becomes. Some oppressed group has always done our dirty work. The first American leaders learned this lesson well from our British rulers. They founded the nation on the labor of indentured servants. Some of our earliest fishermen, sailors, soldiers and farmers were pressed into service or working off prison terms or debt. Our forefathers learned from their oppressors. They replaced British colonial rule with an even more oppressive system of slavery and the creation of a permanent working class in which the children of enslaved African Americans were themselves bred into slavery. It was slave labor that built Jefferson’s Monticello and Washington’s Mount Vernon and most of the colonial mansions in Portsmouth and surrounding towns.

The original factory owners in the American Industrial Revolution had a better idea. Rather than import potentially dangerous foreigners, they would tap another underclass. The early New England textile mills at Dover, Lawrence, Lowell, Manchester and elsewhere were to be run by efficient, low-paid New England women. Girls were imported from local farms and trained to run looms and other machinery powered by a system of river-fed canals. The women lived under highly supervised conditions in designated boarding houses. Most worked only a few years and moved on. Initially, it was not a terrible idea.

But technology never goes backwards. Even faster machines couldn’t meet the demand for our famous textiles that were exported around the world. Factory owners finally relented and began hiring foreign workers, especially millions of destitute Irish. When they moved on to better jobs, destitute people from other nations took their places.

Things aren’t as bad as they used to be, at least not in the United States where labor unions and federal regulations keep an eye on working conditions. As we’re celebrating Labor Day, workers in Mexico and China and elsewhere are working under harsh conditions to make our clothes and shoes and electronic toys. Starving immigrant families are harvesting our crops. The pattern is pretty much unchanged, although our corporate factory owners have learned an important lesson. Now they go where the poverty is. Importing poverty is bad for business. Out of sight, out of mind.

THE WEB SITE MAKERS

I learned everything in the essay above on the Internet in a few hours. The fascinating part in this case, is how widely diverse the sources were. Here’s an annotated bibliography that shows how richly useful the Internet has become for research.

It all started out when I asked Google.com about the origin of Labor Day.
The quote from Samuel Gompers that riled me up came directly from "The Origin of Labor Day" on the United States Department of Labor web site.

The material about the Dover Mill Girls comes from librarian Cathy Beaudoin and is in the history section of the Dover Public Library web site.

The material about the 1912 "Bread and Roses" strike came from a wide range of amazing online sources. One web site focused on "Women and Social Movements".

An even more incredible resource on the Lawrence Strike includes a PDF file of nearly 50 original 1912 newspaper articles. I was able to read the events as if they were just happening. That material is made available by a web site devoted to a history of Marxism, since it was Socialist activists that started the strike and thus forced both better factory conditions from owners and new United States legislation. The web site is available in 34 languages.

If you want to learn about factory working conditions in New England, you can study up at a number of locations, including the Lawrence History Center or the American Textile History Museum, also in Lawrence.

If you want to feel what it was like inside the factories themselves, you can still hear and see the machines clattering away at the nation’s only urban national park. It’s right nearby in Lowell..

In fact, it is a great place to take the kids to teach them the true meaning of the holiday. We recently toured the old mills and boarding houses and heard the stories of immigrant families. Happy Labor Day!