EMPLOYEE RELATIONS

Employee Relations: Bread and Roses (2000)

Employee Relations: Bread and Roses (2000)

Introduction

Strike means temporary stoppages of work by a group of employees in order to express a grievance or enforce a demand. The strike is a basic sanction possessed by employees, the threat of which plays a large part in industrial relations. However, it is typically an act of last resort, and only one of the means by which industrial conflict is expressed. This paper discusses Jeremy Brecher's following statement in the light of “Bread and Roses (2000)” which was based on Lawrence Strike. The labour historian Jeremy Brecher (1997: 275) claims that:

“In periods of the mass strike, workers act outside of institutionally prescribed roles. They reinvent themselves as historical actors and as part of a group making history together. When workers strike and otherwise withdraw their cooperation from existing institutions, they reveal that those institutions are not the fixed things they appear - that in reality they depend on the living human beings whose activity makes them up. Win or lose, mass strikes reveal the truth about social relations hidden in an alienated society”.

Discussion

One of the oldest concerns of labour history has been the study of strikes. More than any other, this area has produced interdisciplinary exchanges between historians and social scientists, but these exchanges have not been as complete as they might. A look at studies of strike propensity by sociologists and economists may bear more on debates among historians than is generally realized. While the origins of the strike can be traced to far antiquity, strikes did not become a routine form of protest until the nineteenth century. The rise of the strike form of protest is roughly correlated with the growth of the wage labour force that became the focus of labour historians. In all European countries, the collective cessation of work became the universal weapon of labour protest. Whether demanding higher wages, the eight-hour day, the suffrage, or the end of colonialism, workers struck.

Bread and Roses (2000)

The slogan “bread and roses” captured the goals and dreams of the impoverished, mostly immigrant workers in the dramatic Lawrence textile strike of 1912 led by the Industrial Workers of the World. More than half of the strikers in the prosperous American Woolen Mills in Lawrence, Massachusetts, were women; more than half, young girls between the ages of fourteen and eighteen. Protesting the “sweated” conditions of their work and their lives and pursuing the dream of beauty as well as an adequate standard of living, the men and women of Lawrence pioneered the dramatic strike techniques of singing, mass picketing, and sending their children to safe homes in other cities. The strike appealed to the conscience of the nation to redress the appalling conditions faced by immigrants, women, and child labourers. Their picket-sign slogan of “bread and roses” became a song that inspired their own as well as future generations of working women, participants in movements for social justice, musicians, and artists. (Silver 2003,84)

The Lawrence strike was the outstanding victory of the IWW's history, and yet within a year its power among the workers had ...