Word: cottons
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...were in office now," said ex-Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin last week with Cheshire-cat complacence, "everyone would be blaming me for this cotton strike...
Half a million sturdy Lancashire cotton folk had ceased to spin and weave. Their grievance was specific, precisely stated. The mill owners had announced a 12½% wage cut. That would pare the average wage of each male Lancashire breadwinner from a pitiful 47 shillings ($11.08) weekly to a scandalous 41 shillings ($9.84). Sisters, wives and mothers, long since driven by necessity to eke out the family income by working in the mills, would get not 30 shillings ($7.20) but 27 shillings ($6.48), for a week's skilled labor with trained and nimble fingers...
...self-control more intimidating to employers than any show of violence?500,000 steady and skilled workers stopped work on the day the wage cut became effective last week. They are craftsfolk. Out of the question to replace them with scab labor not skilled to spin and weave! The cotton strike, colossal in magnitude, damaging to a dozen allied British trades, world-wide in repercussions, was, at its focus in Lancashire, almost terrifyingly simple: a stark, stubborn battle of wills between a Labor Monopoly and a Capital Monopoly...
...Cotton Weather." Why is British cotton fabricating confined almost exclusively to Lancashire, thus creating even a regional monopoly, putting all Britannia's cotton eggs dangerously in one basket...
...answer is that in early cotton spinning days, a peculiarly damp climate with chronic "bad weather" was necessary to make the cotton fibres cling properly together as they were spun into thread. All England is damp, but the atrocious weather typical of Lancashire, is positively ideal?for cotton spinning. Nurtured on this gift of Providence the mills of Lancashire have grown until they now number close to 2,000?for the most part, small, ugly mills employing a few hundred craftsfolk in each...