July 28: The Paterson Silk Strike Ends

[caption id=“attachment_11256” align=“alignleft” width=“300”] Elizabeth Gurley Flynn rallying the Paterson strikers[/caption]
The six-month Paterson, New Jersey Silk Strike ended on this date in 1913. Approximately 1,850 workers, including many Jews, were arrested in the course of the strike, and their demand for a eight-hour workday took six more years to be fulfilled. Three key groups were responsible for sustaining the strike and turning it into an industry-wide mobilization: the workers themselves; the Industrial Workers of the World (Wobblies), whose charismatic leaders, Bill Haywood and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, were relentless in their agitation and their efforts to unify the various communities of workers into “One Big Union”; and a variety of Greenwich Village intellectuals and artists, who took up the cause of the silk workers, and raised funds for them and public awareness of the labor struggle. More than 600 children from strikers’ families were cared for by families in New York during the lean, hungry weeks of the strike. The silk manufacturers, however, had a considerable surplus of goods as well as factories with less labor unity in Pennsylvania. Ultimately, the strike was defeated by the manufacturers’ unity and the lack of an adequate strike fund. For a detailed history of these events by historian Steve Golin, click here. For a brief video about the strike, click here.
“The refusal of skilled weavers to be stepped on by the manufacturers made Paterson notorious as a center of labor militance and radicalism during the last decades of the 19th century and the first decade of the 20th. Throughout these years they struggled as well against their internal divisions by nationality, craft, and gender. Finally, in 1913, as a direct result of what they had learned from previous setbacks, they went on strike together: male and female weavers, English-speaking and Italian and Jewish weavers, skilled weavers and unskilled dyers’ helpers.” —Steve Golin