Thursday, May 01, 2008

May Day

As we celebrate spring and our adoration of yarn and all things fibrous, please remember the textile workers who perhaps cannot enjoy our enthusiasm because of harsh working conditions and/or poor wages. May Day is International Workers Day:

The mill owners often took in orphans to their workhouses, they lived at the mill and were worked as hard as possible. They spent most of their working hours at the machines with little time for fresh air or exercise. Even part of Sunday was spent cleaning machines. There were some serious accidents, some children were scalped when their hair was caught in the machine, hands were crushed and some children were killed when they went to sleep and fell into the machine.

In the late nineteenth century, the working class was in constant struggle to gain the 8-hour work day. Working conditions were severe and it was quite common to work 10 to 16 hour days in unsafe conditions. Death and injury were commonplace at many work places and inspired such books as Upton Sinclair's The Jungle and Jack London's The Iron Heel. As early as the 1860's, working people agitated to shorten the workday without a cut in pay, but it wasn't until the late 1880's that organized labor was able to garner enough strength to declare the 8-hour workday. This proclamation was without consent of employers, yet demanded by many of the working class.


In the spring of 1911, a fire at the Triangle Waist Company in New York City, claimed the lives of 146 young immigrant workers. It is one of the worst disasters since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. This incident should be remembered because it reminds us of the inhumane working conditions many industrial workers endure in order to have a job. Factories, for many, epitomizes the extremes of industrialism and greed.
Many of the Triangle factory workers were women, some as young as 15 years old. They were, for the most part, recent Italian and European Jewish immigrants who had come to the United States with their families to seek a better life. Instead, they faced lives of grinding poverty and horrifying working conditions. As recent immigrants struggling with a new language and culture, the working poor were ready victims for the factory owners. For these workers, speaking out could end with the loss of desperately needed jobs, a prospect that forced them to endure personal indignities and severe exploitation.

5 comments:

Torhild Reidardatter said...

So nice of you to remember may 1.
In Norway we do keep may 1 as a national holiday!!!.

Anonymous said...

I think many of us forget how hard people had it here in this country. Unfortunately, there are still people in other parts of the world where this is routine. :-( Thanks for the reminder.

BrownBerry said...

Hi love! I couldn't get your email to accept this message, so forgive the long comment here:

What a treat to go back and catch up on the blog posts I had missed.
Phew! Love, love, love reading about what you've been up to - and that has been A LOT missy! So great that you've been doing other blogger meetups too...that is just the best.

You made a cry for help aaaaages ago for baby knitting for your neice?? Sorry I missed that at the time; is there still anything I can do?? :)
I will say that some of those buttons you got would make excellent trim for baby or mommy gifts.

Let's chat again soon!

Sheila said...

Thanks for the reminder that we shouldn't forget about the fight for the eight-hour work day and the many that suffered.

Ina said...

Thank you for the May Day reminder. The building the shirtwaist factory was in still stands; it bears a discreet plaque.