When is the best time to reread a difficult passage in a text?
Read the excerpt from We Shall Not Be Moved.Nobody had, since this was the first "general strike" in the garment trades, also the largest strike of women workers ever known in the United States until that moment.
Read the excerpt from We Shall Not Be Moved.Twenty-four halls were rented all over the Lower East Side. Each shop was to have its own meeting room, with separate rooms for Yiddish, Italian, and English groups wherever possible.
Read the excerpt from We Shall Not Be Moved.The League, like Local 25, had expected a turnout of four or five thousand. They were bowled over by this army, utterly unprepared for it. They had organized strikes in the garment trade, small ones, usually confined to a single shop, but never before had they undertaken something on so vast a scale. They might fail, might be laughed at by the whole of New York as well as John Dyche and the ILGWU men, and all the same they knew this was the challenge they'd been hoping for — their chance to show the world they were more than highbrow butters-in, just as the shirtwaist makers were more than irresponsible little girls.
Read the excerpt from We Shall Not Be Moved.Publicity was another vital need — photos and eyewitness accounts of workers on the picket lines being harassed by gorillas and police. The picket lines themselves would have to be organized.
Read the excerpt from We Shall Not Be Moved.League women came and went, usually at a run. Some were "ladies,” like Mary Dreier, others were worker-members, like Rose Schneiderman, a former cap maker, and Leonora O’Reilly, who had started work in a collar factory at the age of eleven. Another League member, Rose Pastor Stokes, known as the red Yiddish Cinderella, used to work in a cigar factory. When she became engaged to the son of a millionaire — they had met at a settlement house — front page headlines in the New York Times announced J. G. Phelps Stokes to Wed Young Jewess. At strike headquarters Mrs. Stokes delivered fiery speeches about freeing workers from the shackles of the bosses.
Read and reread the excerpt from We Shall Not Be Moved.A strike fund would have to be raised, an information bureau set up where strikers could register for relief, or for help with legal and personal problems. Publicity was another vital need — photos and eyewitness accounts of workers on the picket lines being harassed by gorillas and police. The picket lines themselves would have to be organized.
Read the excerpt from We Shall Not Be Moved.Yet what they wanted was modest enough: a fifty-two-hour week with extra pay for overtime, an end to the fines and petty tyrannies, and a living wage. These were the demands that were hammered out by the shop groups behind the closed doors of the meeting halls. The officers of Local 25 sent them on to the owners — along with one more demand, recognition of the union.
Read the excerpt from We Shall Not Be Moved.Traffic, both horses and autos, had been stopped cold, and some two hundred police reserves and plainclothesmen had been called out to maintain order. It seemed the army might at any moment erupt into the rest of Manhattan, invading Wall Street and the Bowery. By ten o’-clock 15,000 workers had left their machines. By nightfall, 25,000. Within the next few days the number rose to nearly 30,000, and it included some cutters, pressers, and finishers.
Read and reread the excerpt from We Shall Not Be Moved.The officers of Local 25 sent them on to the owners — along with one more demand, recognition of the union. This came to mean the "closed shop." Only union members can work in a closed shop, since the only way to set uniform wages and standards is to have the union do it; otherwise employers would always try to undercut one another. And the union can standardize the industry only when it controls the supply of labor through the union shop.
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