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The Lawrence textile strike took place in Lawrence, Massachusetts in 1912. It involved over 20,000 employees, who demanded increased wages and improvements in work conditions. In the clashes, an Italian woman was shot and a young Armenian woman was bayoneted to death. In the end, the demands of the workers were met.
Founded in 1845, Lawrence was a flourishing textile city. By 1900 the Industrial Revolution had allowed owners to eliminate skilled workers and employ large numbers of unskilled immigrant workers, mostly women.
The workers lived in crowded apartment buildings, often with many families sharing each apartment. Children age 14 and younger were forced to work in the mills. The work was difficult, dangerous, and fast-paced. The mortality rate for children was fifty percent by age six.
The strike received no support from the American Federation of Labor, which at the time was a group of craft unions run by white men who declined to organize women or non-whites. Instead, it was led by the anarcho-syndicalist Industrial Workers of the World, and, notably, by then-21-year-old organizer Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. Flynn, Joseph Ettor, Big Bill Haywood and other IWW leaders helped to organize the strike, under their program of industry-wide organizing and their slogan of One Big Union.
Hoping to discredit the strikers, a Lawrence business man planted dynamite in several places. As a result, Ettor and Arturo Giovanitti were arrested. However, despite the provocations, Ettor and Haywood kept their followers in order.
See also: Bread and Roses
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