By Bob Plain in RIFuture.org
Happy Labor Day, Rhode Island.
Here’s to all the workers, and all the people and events that helped make life
a little easier for those who management hasn’t always treated so good.
For some good Labor Day journalism, please read the Providence Journal editorial this morning,
in which they make some surprising statements for the normally very
conservative ed. board:
“Consider that U.S. government data
indicate that per-capita productivity has more than doubled since 1968,” they
write. “And yet 60 percent of the income gains went to the top 1 percent in
1979-2007. And that was before the Panic of 2008. Lower- and middle-income
people ought to get slices of the economic pie more commensurate with their
contributions.”
Some will be continuing the fight for better workplace rights this
Labor Day, like the janitors and food service workers at Brown University who
will march today to draw attention to their impending contract negotiations.
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| Scott Molloy |
The ProJo also profiles Scott Molloy this morning. He’s a
professor of labor history at URI and the founder and president of the Rhode
Island Labor History Society. Pat Crowley just wrote this piece about Molloy a
few weeks back. And Ted Nesi dug up a piece written by Molloy on the history of Labor Day in Rhode Island.
Traditionally, the Ocean State
honors Labor Day with a memorial at the site in Central Falls where four
factory workers were killed during the Saylesville labor strike in 1934. Here’s a preview of the event, which is today at 10:30
a.m., and here’s the story I wrote on it last year for WPRO (needless
to say I’m guessing this audience will appreciate this story more than did my
audience at WPRO!):
President Grover Cleveland pushed
through the legislation to make Labor Day a national holiday in 1894, just days
after the violent break-up of the Pullman Rail Strike – a walk-out led by
Eugene Debs that started with 3,000 workers in Pullman, Illinois and grew to
almost 250,000 by the time the president deployed some 12,000 army troops to
dismantle the protests.
The holiday declaration was meant as
an appeasement to organized labor; 13 strikers were killed and 57 were wounded
during the insurrection.
Some 40 Labor Days later, Rhode
Island would leave its mark with regard to famous organized labor insurrections
in what has become known as the Saylesville Massacre – although it really
wasn’t so much of a massacre as it was a 48-hour stand-off, spanning two
cities, between union workers and the Rhode Island National Guard.
Textile workers from all over the
Eastern Seaboard had gone on strike for better wages and mill owners responded
by hiring non-union laborers to keep their businesses in operation. On Monday,
September 10, at the Sayles Finishing Company in Central Falls, 600 union
supporters had gathered in front of the textile mill that was now making due
with non-union workers.
John A.
Salmond describes the events that then transpired in his 2002 research paper “The
General Textile Strike of 1934: From Maine to Alabama”:
“Minor scuffles turned more serious
as the shifts changed at 3 and 11 p.m. The state police, augmented by special
deputies lost control at the second change, and, as the crowd surged forward to
invade the plant, they fired blindly into it. Two strikers were hit with
buckshot while a score or more were injured by bricks, rocks and billy-clubs as
the police added ‘to the uproar the thump of swinging nightsticks and exploding
teargas bombs.’ One, Louis Fercki, was critically hurt, his skull fractured by
a club during a fracas at the mill gate. The strikers prevailed, however,
trapping seven hundred workers inside the mill until first light.”
The next day, September 11, Governor
Theodore Francis Green called in the National Guard, but Salmond wrote that “he
was too late to prevent an escalation in violence at Saylesville.”
Local and state police were joined
by some 260 national guard troops, who could not keep in control the reported
4,000 people who were continually charging the gates of the Sayles Finishing
Company throughout the day and into the next evening. They threw rocks
and pieces of headstones from a nearby cemetery at the troops, according
to Salmond.
“Indeed, the local cemetery had
become a battleground. Troops, firing machine guns from the mill roof,
eventually drove the crowd away from the gates. Eight strikers were shot, none
fatally, due to the determination of the guard commander to use only buckshot
and to fire, for the most part, safely over the heads of those in the crowd.
More than 100 were injured by clubs or missiles, however, including 18
guardsmen, before the fighting ceased. Governor Green, meantime, had placed the
whole Saylesville district under martial law.”
Bullet
holes in headstones can still be found at the Moshassuck Cemetery in Central
Falls, 978 Lonsdale Ave, where today’s crop of local labor leaders will hold a
vigil at 11 a.m. to honor the event and the people who took part. You can watch
some old news footage of the events by clicking here.
But the real massacre occurred the
next day in Woonsocket, at the Rayon Plant. There, guard troops fired on
striking workers again. One, 19-year-old Jude Courtemanche, was killed and four
others were seriously-wounded.
“This time there was no shooting
over the heads. Faced by an angry mob of nearly 10,000, guardsmen shot to
wound, if not kill. ‘The screams of the wounded stopped the strikers,’ ran one
report. They beat a disorderly retreat to the town’s business district, where
for three hours they laid waste, looting stores, setting fires, and hurling
stones and other missiles before the guard was able to restore order. Governor
Green, by now thoroughly shaken, closed all of Woonsocket’s nightclubs,
saloons, dance halls and stores until further notice, and an uneasy calm
returned to the city.”
Bob Plain is the editor/publisher of Rhode Island's Future. Previously, he's
worked as a reporter for several different news organizations both in Rhode
Island and across the country.