AN EXCERPT

 

“You’ve Never Met a Family Like This”

 

 

It is hard to imagine a more challenging time and place to open a grocery than 1917 in Lowell. But that’s when Market Basket got its start in this mill city on the Merrimack River about twenty-five miles north of Boston. In the late 1800s, Lowell had been heralded as a beacon of the Northeast. The first two decades of the twentieth century were a different story. Lowell’s fortunes were on a downturn. The city had previously relied on the Merrimack River to generate endless, relatively low-cost  hydropower. This enabled decades of growth, turning the Merrimack Valley into a stalwart of the textile industry. But the rise of coal as a cheap alternative energy source turned Lowell’s competitive advantage into a competitive shortcoming. Its infrastructure was inflexible, and the mills began to close one by one. Textile companies moved their mills to seaport locations, which could receive coal shipments more cheaply.

 

As jobs dried up, unease hung heavy in the region. The unease fueled a number of worker strikes at mills in the region, the most famous of which is the Bread and Roses Strike in nearby Lawrence, Massachusetts. During that strike, about thirty thousand textile workers walked off their jobs for two-and-a-half months during a bitter winter in 1912. The struggle began on New Year’s Day, when legislation took effect reducing the workweek from fifty-six to fifty-four hours. The law was supposed to provide relief for workers. But companies responded by reducing overall weekly pay. A group of workers at the Everett Mill opened their paychecks to find a pay reduction of $0.32 (the average weekly pay for these workers was $8.76). The cut translated into roughly four loaves of bread per week for families of mill employees. They walked off the job and demonstrated, chanting, “Short pay! Short pay!”

 

The Industrial Workers of the World (known as the Wobblies) appealed to a wide range of workers affected by the pay cut. Mostly the workers were immigrants from southern and eastern European countries, as well as parts of the Middle East. They were separated by cultural, religious, and linguistic differences. Determined not to let those differences interfere with their resolve, the Wobblies recruited representatives from English, Polish, Greek, Italian, and other backgrounds.

 

The protesters became bound by a common need to improve their living and working conditions. A walkout at the Everett Mill quickly spread to others in Lawrence as more and more disgruntled workers joined in. Within a week, their numbers had swelled to ten thousand. Their demands were straightforward: a 15 percent increase in wages, double pay for overtime work, and a pledge from owners to not retaliate against strikers. A majority of the workers in the mills of Lawrence were women and children, and the protest gained strength from the feminist movement of that time. They were fiercely determined to change the way ownership was operating the mills, showing “lots of cunning and also lots of bad temper,” according to one mill boss. One group of women cornered a police officer, stripped him of his uniform, and tossed him over a bridge into the icy waters below. Such civil disobedience led the district attorney, Harry Atwell, to comment that “one policeman can handle 10 men, while it takes 10 policemen to handle one woman.”

 

The strikers dug in for a long struggle; they formed relief committees that  provided food, medical care, and clothing to families left without an income. The companies hired thugs to intimidate the protesters. The governor of Massachusetts sent state police and militia to fire-hose picketers. This only enflamed tempers more. Their resolve and unity remained intact. One magazine observed, “At first everyone predicted that it would be impossible to mold these divergent people together, but aside from the skilled men, comparatively few [broke the strike and] went back to the mills.”

 

Workers continued picketing and clashed violently with authorities over weeks, destroying machinery at the mills. At protest parades, demonstrators carried banners demanding not only a living wage but also a more dignified workplace. “We want bread, and roses, too,” they chanted, drawing from a populist poem by James Oppenheim called “Bread and Roses.”

 

After weeks of struggle, the American Woolen Company finally agreed to all the strikers’ demands on March 12, 1912. Within a few weeks, most other mills had too. Before long, factories across New England also raised pay and shortened the workweek in fear of similar repercussions. The strike is now remembered as among the first in which workers from multiple ethnicities united to improve their working conditions, in which they demanded dignity in the workplace and won.

 

Against this backdrop of economic challenge and labor strife, a young

man arrived in Lowell. His name was Athanasios Demoulas.