Paterson Silk Strike of 1913

Silk workers, largely Italian and Jewish immigrants, went on strike to protect their jobs and wages from increasing mechanization and to win an eight-hour work day. They drew support from the Industrial Workers of the World, and feminists such as Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, a leader of IWW, and Margaret Sanger, a founder of Planned Parenthood. Artists and radicals from Greenwich Village also took up the silk workers’ cause. The Paterson Strike Pageant at Madison Square Garden raised money for the striking workers. The Botto House in nearby Haledon became a gathering place for supporters to meet with strikers, and is the site of the American Labor Museum today.
But the strike failed and the IWW never recovered its momentum. Six years later, the workers got their eight-hour day.
The national significance of the Paterson strike was not about bare survival or terrible working conditions, said Steve Golin, professor emeritus of history at Bloomfield College, who wrote about the strike in “The Fragile Bridge: Paterson Silk Strike 1913.”
“It was about protecting a way of life that was pretty good, and passing it on to their children,” he said. “The strike foreshadowed the effort by labor and the Democratic Party to create a middle-class lifestyle for working people.”