Word: bedford
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...Bedford, Mass., is a city of some 120,000 inhabitants. Ordinarily, it is a pleasant and prosperous city to live in. Dominating its industrial life, chief support of its storekeepers and its landlords, are, of course, its famed cotton textile mills. And since the War, New Bedford mills have done exceedingly well, declaring cash dividends of over $32,000,000, stock dividends of about half that sum. They employ 35,000 operatives. They produce a high grade of cloth, so high that they are virtually free from the competition of Southern mills...
Only one thing has troubled the serenity of New Bedford. Wages of the textile operatives, averaging $19 a week, were undeniably low. And when the mill owners announced, early last April, that wages were to be cut by 10%, reducing the average wage to $17 a week, the workers were stirred to serious and active protest. Out of 27 mills walked some 27,000 operatives, spinners and weavers, loom fixers, slasher tenders. They left 3,000,000 spindles idle, and 50,000 looms...
Last week, the 16th of the dogged strike, New Bedford industry remained at a standstill, rents remained unpaid, stores were without customers, national guardsmen cleaned their rifles. In the greatest labor protest in the history of the textile city, strikers had lost some $9,600,000 in wages, at the staggering rate of $600,000 a week. Mill securities had fallen to purely nominal values, a few dollars a share. Both owners and strikers had rejected arbitration, had agreed without hope to allow the State Board of Arbitration and Conciliation to '"investigate." So far as New Bedford could...
Back of the strikers are a united press and a supporting clergy. Landlords accept the total loss of rents without grumbling. In spite of hard times, merchants keep on extending credit, postponing payments on instalments. Riots and unemployment are the bugaboos of most fire and police departments, but New Bedford firemen and policemen contribute to the strikers' funds from their own pockets...
Including the new Bedford strikers, some 40,000 textile workers throughout the U. S. were out of work last week, as the result of strikes...