Nine Months on Strike: The 1922 Walkout

On February thirteenth, nineteen twenty-two, approximately fifteen thousand Amoskeag workers walked off the job. They were fighting two specific grievances: a wage cut of twenty percent imposed the previous year, stacked on top of an earlier cut of twenty-two and a half percent, and an extension of the working week from forty-eight hours to fifty-four. The math was blunt.

Workers were being paid significantly less to work significantly more. More than ninety-nine percent of union members had voted to strike. The walkout spread beyond Manchester to mill towns across New Hampshire, including Allenstown, Suncook, Nashua, Dover, Somersworth, and Newmarket.

It was the largest labor action in the state's history. The strike held for nine months. That is a long time for working families to sustain a household without wages in an era before unemployment insurance.

Labor historians have noted the role of the French-Canadian and Greek immigrant communities in holding picket lines together through the summer and fall. The settlement was partial. The company restored the earlier wage scale that August.

It did not agree to reduce the working week back to forty-eight hours. Historians who have studied the Amoskeag's arc generally mark nineteen twenty-two as the moment the institution began its terminal slide. Large numbers of workers left Manchester rather than return to the mills on those terms.

The machinery was aging. Southern mills were opening with lower labor costs and newer equipment. The strike did not destroy Amoskeag, but it stripped away whatever remained of the paternalistic compact between the company and its workers, and without that, there was not much left to hold the enterprise together.