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Impact · Chapter 14, 1934

The Stretch-Out

The speed-up that detonated the 1934 strike.

A Paterson silk weaver tending four looms at once-the work assignment that triggered the 1913 strike.
A Paterson silk weaver tending four looms at once-the work assignment that triggered the 1913 strike.Lewis Wickes Hine, "Paterson, New Jersey-Textiles. Weaver operating four-loom system," 1936-1937. Works Progress Administration National Research Project, U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NAID 518541). Public domain.

Beginning in the late 1920s and intensifying in the Depression, mill owners responded to falling prices by hiring efficiency engineers and assigning each worker more machines, often at faster speeds, for the same or lower pay. Weavers, spinners, and loom fixers saw their workloads multiply, with exhaustion, injuries, and the erosion of the family wage that had been the implicit bargain of the mill village. The stretch-out was a central grievance at Gastonia and Marion in 1929. When the 1933 cotton textile code under the National Industrial Recovery Act promised shorter hours and a federal hearing for workload complaints, workers believed federal law was on their side. When owners evaded the code and the government's enforcement board proved toothless, the region's pent-up grievance exploded in the strike of 1934.

Sources

  1. ScholarshipJacquelyn Dowd Hall, James Leloudis, Robert Korstad, et al. Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World. University of North Carolina Press, 1987.
  2. ScholarshipGeneral Textile Strike (1934). South Carolina Encyclopedia.
  3. ScholarshipLoray Mill (Firestone Mill). Clio.

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