The
Lawrence textile strike was a strike of immigrant workers in
Lawrence,
Massachusetts in 1912 led by the
Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Prompted by a two-hour pay cut corresponding to a new law shortening the workweek, the strike spread rapidly through the town, growing to more than twenty thousand workers and involving nearly every mill in Lawrence. The strike united workers from more than 40 different
nationalities. Carried on throughout a brutally cold winter, the strike lasted more than two months, defying the assumptions of conservative
trade unions within the
American Federation of Labor (AFL) that immigrant, largely female and ethnically divided workers could not be organized. In late January, when a bystander was killed during a protest, IWW organizers
Joseph Ettor and
Arturo Giovannitti were arrested on charges of being accessories to the murder.