Silk, Strike, and Solidarity, The Paterson Nineteen Thirteen Walkout

On February twenty-fifth, nineteen thirteen, the weavers and dye-house workers of Paterson, New Jersey walked off the job. Within days, twenty-five thousand workers had joined them. The Paterson Silk Strike of nineteen thirteen would last five months and become one of the defining confrontations between American labor and American capital.

The silk workers were not asking for the impossible. They wanted an eight-hour workday, an end to a new system that forced weavers to tend four looms at once instead of two, and better pay for what was already dangerous work: breathing in fine silk fibers in poorly ventilated mills, standing for twelve-hour shifts, earning wages that barely covered rent in the crowded boarding houses near the Passaic. The Industrial Workers of the World, the Wobblies, sent their best organizers to Paterson, including Big Bill Haywood and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn.

The strike drew national attention. The journalist John Reed, who would later witness the Russian Revolution and write Ten Days That Shook the World, organized a pageant at Madison Square Garden in New York, staging the strike's events before an audience of fifteen thousand. Workers crossed the Hudson to perform their own story.

The mill owners refused to negotiate. They had the police, the courts, and the newspapers largely on their side. Strike leaders were arrested more than three hundred times over the course of the walkout.

By July, hunger and evictions broke the workers' resolve and they returned to the mills without winning their key demands. The strike was recorded as a defeat, but it changed things. It demonstrated the organizational capacity of immigrant workers, Italians, Jews, Poles, and Syrians marching together, and it embarrassed the mill owners before a national audience.

The eight-hour day would come eventually, though not soon enough for the silk workers of Paterson.