Unions
Life in the mills was difficult. Workers in the mills were on the job at 5:00 am. At 6:00 am they could stop for breakfast for an hour. Dinner came at 12:15 pm for 45 minutes. At 6:30 pm, workers got another 45 minutes for supper. They often worked until 9:00 pm for six days a week.
There were no legal regulations of hours or conditions of labor in Massachusetts before 1874. It was a person’s privilege, an inherent liberty, to work as many hours as he chose – but of course, you had to buy food and shelter! To some extent, all immigrant groups shared the problems of low wages, long hours and poor working conditions.
In many paper mills employees were allowed to rise in the ranks and sometimes to share in a company’s fortune. Whereas cotton mills were owned by absentee Boston capitalists who rarely reinvested money in the mills and allowed the industry, not the local economy, to set wage rates, paper mill owners were hands-on people, often living in Holyoke. Cotton mill wages for Holyoke workers were determined in Boston where the rates were kept in line with what was paid elsewhere and paper manufacturers in Holyoke agreed informally among themselves what wages should prevail.
Textile mill hands were more likely to find themselves not working several days of the week due to slumps in the textile business. However, when workers were on their feet, they were in an environment where ventilation and sanitary arrangements were primitive. Though mill work is sometimes romanticized, girls frequently fainted at the spinning frames. When the mills were finally equipped with ventilators, it was a source of pride to the management that women no longer collapsed at their work.
Mills could be dangerous. With the lint in the air of the cotton mills and flare of the gasoline that lit the rooms, it is a wonder that mill fires were the exception rather than the rule. No requirements were put upon factories to supply fire escapes and only the insurance regulations made those precautions obligatory.
Mill management was unique in Holyoke. Most mill owners lived and worked locally. They were at the factories daily and oversaw superintendents, foreman and workmen. Knowing their workers would be more efficient if they were taken care of, many mill owners provided company housing, recreation space like auditoriums, and health clinics. During work slumps in both paper and textile mills, local owners of mills would reduce everyone’s hours and allow the sharing of working rather than laying employees off. Kin hiring was also quite popular in paper and textile mills. If your mother, father, sister or brother worked at a certain mill, you were likely to be hired there as well. These systems were in place largely to stave off unionization.
Labor unions took time to spring up in Holyoke. Newcomers willing to work for less stimulated the birth of labor organizations in Holyoke around 1880. Building trades and cigar makers organized first. The first Holyoke local assembly of the Knights of Labor was organized in November 1882 with 14 members. The activities of the Holyoke Knights were directed toward the passage of a weekly payments law, shortening the hours of the paper mill workers and arbitration of strikes. The Knights of Labor got involved in the paper mill workers’ campaign to shorten their weekend hours. Hours of labor were much on the minds of workers in post-Civil War Massachusetts. From Eagle Lodge, formed in Holyoke in 1884, sprang the International Brotherhood of Paper Makers. In 1890, the Central Labor Union was established in Holyoke as a clearing house for issues affecting all organized labor in the community.
Anna Sullivan was a leader in the organizing drive of the Amalgamated Textile Workers Union during the 1930s. The union brought the first 40 hour week to Skinner in 1936; she was hired by the Congress of Industrial Organization (CIO) in 1938 as a full-time organizer, and she eventually became the vice-president of the Massachusetts CIO: “I organized in Easthampton, Ludlow, door-to-door and leafleting factories. I had three types of leaflets - - in Polish, in French and in English. The people came out and waited to get their leaflet…From that, we built up. We came up a whole lot compared to what we ever had.”
