Knowing things change, and being smart enough not to put the proverbial eggs all in one erstwhile basket, besides owning ships for commerce and whaling, the tycoons of New Bedford also invested in manufacturing cloth, and many of the companies they started are still around

In the early days, the Quaker belief in the equality of man kept them treating employees with relative fairness, but as the money poured in, some of that spirit began to evaporate.

In 1867 the manager of the Wamsutta mill, Robert Bennet fired four workers because they protested a cut in pay, and when 900 workers out of a full complement of 1050 walked out, the mill had to be closed.

The workers wanted a ten hour day at the same rate they had received for the 11 hour day and the return of the fired workers.

Rachel Collins Smith had married into the Howland family of New Bedford of which one member had been the first mayor when the town became the city. She knew and worked with Harriet Beecher Stowe, founded the still existing Fund for Aged Women, helped found the Myrtilla Minor School for Free Black Children in Washington DC, and while in that city was a great friend of Lincoln’s. All this is to say, she was rich, prominent, and a very charitable person.

As rich and privileged as she might have been, Rachel supported the underdog, and so it was when she sided with the workers and attempted to end the workers’ walk out in their favor, she acted as arbitrator.

Although she got most of what the workers wanted, the original four workers who had been fired were not rehired.

The price she paid, in spite of her standing as one of the richest wives in the city was a precipitous drop in invites to social events and the cold shoulder of her peers.

Undaunted, a few years later when there was tension between school teachers and administrators, she had a meeting at her home with both sides at which she established that one teacher would represent the others when presenting their concerns to those in charge.

Rachel did for the workers what unions would eventually do because the less money the workers made and the less attention paid to their working conditions, the more profit for the company, and workers needed to speak with one voice.

In 1928, approximately 30,000 machinery operatives in several of the large cotton mills located in New Bedford walked out again over the same issue, a cut in wages. This time it was a 10% cut proposed by the New Bedford Cotton Manufacturers’ Association.
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Prior to the strike, textile workers saw their wages triple, and small businesses and local banks thrived as workers spent and saved their earnings.

Workers demanded not only the abolition of the cut in wages, but a 20% wage increase and implementation of the 40-hour work week, equal pay for equal work, an end to child labor, and no retribution against union members.

New Bedford police were tolerant of picketers at the beginning of the strike, but when the number of picketers grew, arrests became more common.

Although there was more than one labor committee representing the various trade and immigrant workers, who had not been allowed to join the worker unions initially, they were all eventually represented by the American Federation of Labor.

Most of the mill workers of New Bedford, loom fixers, weavers, warp twisters etc., had unionized ahead of the 1928 strike .

The strike ended when negotiators representing the strikers accepted the offer of mill owners for a 5 percent wage cut and promises of 30 days’ notice before implementation of any further wage reductions.

What the workers got in terms of hours, wages, and conditions of employment, things like  realistic work hours, safe working conditions, sick time , and weekends, did not come from the largess of generous  heads of corporations, but because of the unified workers speaking with one voice.

And, because they have to treat the workers with dignity and share their profits with the workers who created them, the corporations want desperately to have the unions go away so that the workers would have to accept whatever crumbs would be spared for them.