On March 2, 1912, 5 adults and 13 children—including Camella—testified before Congress in Washington, D.C. The next day, the House of Representatives Committee on Rules opened its hearings. As one Lawrence worker after another told their stories, the congressmen couldn’t believe what they were hearing. Were there really people in America who worked under such alarming conditions?
When Camella, by then 14, spoke, she was so shy that the people in the room had to strain to hear her. Yet her testimony was riveting. Why did she join the strike? she was asked. “Because I didn’t get enough to eat at home,” she replied.
Camella related the terrifying story of how her hair had been sucked into the loom. “The machine pulled the scalp off,” she said, stunning the congressmen.
The hearings won additional public support for the workers, and President William Howard Taft met with the young people in the White House. Finally, on March 12, the mill owners agreed to raise their workers’ pay. Not only that, but across New England, other textile mills improved wages as well—hoping to avoid a strike like the one in Lawrence.
The Lawrence mill workers’ strike was a milestone in American labor history. Their victory shone a light on the poor conditions in many factories and made the U.S. government ask what it should do to protect workers.
But it didn’t change American factories overnight. Life there continued to be miserable—and dangerous—for many people. Eventually, the strike and other incidents before and after, such as the deadly 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire in New York City (see timeline slideshow below), convinced Americans how desperate the situation was.
Real progress finally was made in 1938, when Congress passed the Fair Labor Standards Act. That landmark law capped the workweek at 40 hours—and limited how children could be employed (see “Child Labor Laws You Should Know”).
Camella didn’t benefit from those advances. Even after the Lawrence mill owners raised wages and Camella’s father was bringing in higher pay, the family still couldn’t afford for her not to work. So she returned to the factory.
Still, say experts, it was Camella’s actions and those of countless people like her that helped win standards of safety, pay, and dignity in the workplace that many Americans take for granted today.
“In a period when workers tended to be overwhelmingly defeated, the workers in Lawrence won their strike,” says Stephen Brier, an expert on the labor movement. “That was extremely unusual.”