Massachusetts
The Bread and Roses Strike Was an Epic Labor Action for Workers’ Dignity
“Short pay, short pay,” shouted the Polish women weavers on January 11, 1912, as they left their looms and walked out of the factory in Lawrence, Massachusetts. The state had recently passed a modest labor reform cutting the maximum number of hours women and children could toil from fifty-six to fifty-four, and employers had promptly docked their pay. The day after the walkout, thousands of mill workers in the area joined them. A week later, the Lawrence mill workers’ strike was twenty-five thousand workers strong.
This storied labor action, widely known as the “Bread and Roses” strike, succeeded despite phenomenal ruling-class unity and the workers’ extreme deprivation. It deserves to be remembered every year, for its namesake slogan (“The worker must have bread, but she must have roses, too”) and for its stirring example of collective action.
The strike was powered by an extraordinarily diverse group of workers, including teenage girls. About half the workers were young women aged fourteen to eighteen. About two-thirds were recent immigrants, including from France, Italy, Russia, Syria, Armenia, Ireland, Belgium, and Lithuania. Meetings were translated into more than three dozen languages.
The mill workers’ conditions were horrific. Pneumonia and tuberculosis ran rampant in the damp factories, and one-third of workers died before they turned twenty-five. Child workers often perished within the first couple years of employment. Workers lived in extremely cramped conditions, often on the brink of starvation. When the pay cut hit in January 1912, many workers were unable to feed themselves or their children.
The stakes of the conflict were high for the capitalist class, too. Lawrence wool mills were vital to the national and local economy, producing one quarter of all the wool in the United States, and comprising two-thirds of the local manufacturing economy and more than two-thirds of all capital invested in Lawrence.
No wonder, then, that the state and the ruling classes mobilized to suppress the worker pushback. Mill owners turned fire hoses on the picketers. State militias and police were summoned from neighboring towns, even Marines. “A tumult is threatened,” whimpered the mayor, in a letter pleading with a militia captain to send troops “to suppress same.” Police beat up mothers and children as families attempted to put kids on the train to send them out of the dangerous chaos. Harvard allowed students, many of whom were militia members, to pass their classes if they missed exams due to strikebreaking.
Enraged by the police brutality, women strikers fought back. Italian women, confronting a police officer on a bridge, relieved him of his club, gun, badge, and even pants, and terrorized him by dangling him over the icy water. Management and cops alike found they could not control the knife-wielding protesters. One boss called the women “full of cunning and also lots of bad temper,” whining anxiously, “it’s getting worse all the time.”
Like many legendary protests, the Bread and Roses strike has often been misremembered as a spontaneous moment of anger. Much like Rosa Parks’s refusal to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus in 1955, the Lawrence strike was the product of extensive organizing. Socialists were crucial to that work. The Italian Socialist Federation led their own members off the shop floor and into the streets, helped organize the entire workforce, and connected the strikers to overseas socialist networks. About twenty chapters of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) — each organizing in a different language — had been active in Lawrence for about five years; they, too, provided critical organizing and solidarity.
The workers also had support from collective institutions in their community, modeled on those in their home countries. For example, Franco-Belgians ran a cooperative with a bakery, grocery store, and meeting hall. The latter was often used as meeting place for worker organizing in the years leading up to the strike. Franco-Belgians also ran a soup kitchen that fed strikers and their families.
The “Bread and Roses” slogan for which the strike is most well known did not originate with the 1912 walkout. Coined earlier by suffragettes — though a similar mantra also existed in radical working-class Italian movements — it became a pithy expression of workers’ desire to have both life’s necessities and pleasures. But it was a speech to the Lawrence strikers by Rose Schneiderman, a formidable organizer and the first American woman elected to a national position in a labor union, that popularized the mantra. As Schneiderman put it,
What the woman who labors wants is the right to live, not simply exist — the right to life as the rich woman has the right to life, and the sun and music and art. You have nothing that the humblest worker has not a right to have also. The worker must have bread, but she must have roses, too.
The strikers won big. Though a pay cut had sparked the action, they accomplished far more than simply reversing it. They came away with a 15 percent increase in wages, double pay for overtime, and a pledge of no retaliation against workers who participated in the strike. The big pay hike rippled across the regional labor market as well, boosting wages for many other workers.
Working-class leaders far beyond Lawrence recognized the significance of the mill workers’ victory. Eugene V. Debs called it “one of the most decisive and far-reaching ever won by organized workers.” The IWW’s Big Bill Haywood addressed workers on the town common at the conclusion of the strike, saying,
Single handed you are helpless but united you can win everything. You have won over the opposed power of the city, state, and national administrations, against the opposition of the combined forces of capitalism, in face of the armed forces. You have won by your solidarity and your brains and your muscle.
Massachusetts
At Massachusetts stores, the demise of the penny is adding up to one big headache – The Boston Globe
With little government guidance on how to lawfully undertake the transition, and loath to give up even a few cents by rounding transactions down to the nearest nickel, Maloney is instead trying to kick the coin jar down the road.
“We’re sort of hoarding,” said Maloney, who has run Julio’s since 2000, “so that we don’t have to deal with this problem.”
It’s a problem playing out in cash registers across Massachusetts and the country as the realities of a penniless future begin to present themselves.
When Canada phased out its one-cent coin a little more than a decade ago, it offered retailers and consumers a clear path forward, suggesting that cash transactions be rounded up or down to the nearest nickel — $1.61 and $1.62 become $1.60, while $1.63 and $1.64 become $1.65 — with sales tax applied before rounding. In Massachusetts, retailers say they have been given little such direction from the federal or state government, bringing about a patchwork of solutions as stores try to navigate the changing tides of change on their own.
“I didn’t really think it was going to cause much of an issue, but then it started causing an issue,” said Sara-Ann Turner, a cashier at Warren Hardware in the South End. The shop has begun rounding transactions to the nearest five-cent increment when customers don’t have exact change, which has left some shoppers feeling nickel-and-dimed when the sum comes down in the store’s favor.
The penny remains legal tender, with billions of the coin still in circulation — many likely sitting in jacket pockets, under couch cushions, and between sidewalk cracks. But the lack of fresh ones shipping out of the US Mint means that cash transactions will soon have to sidestep the one-cent coin. And even in an increasingly cashless economy, that’s no simple endeavor.
In a recent survey conducted by the Retailers Association of Massachusetts, 65 percent of members said they planned to take Canada’s recommended approach and round cash transactions up or down to the nearest nickel. The other 35 percent said they would always round down in the customer’s favor, a policy Dunkin’ has recommended for its franchisees. (The survey did not give respondents the option to say they would always round up.)
But any rounding policy stores choose risks running afoul of a tangle of bureaucratic regulations, said Jon Hurst, president of the Retailers Association of Massachusetts. Consider, for instance, a Massachusetts law that prohibits surcharges on customers who use credit cards over cash, or the federal statute that mandates food stamp customers be charged the same as those using cash.
“The sellers just need some guidance, number one, and number two, some protection,” Hurst said.
In a letter in early December, Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren and California Representative Maxine Waters sought answers from the heads of the Treasury Department, the Federal Reserve, and the US Mint, writing that the absence of guidance could “risk worsening inconsistencies in customer transactions, uncertainty in pricing approaches, legal compliance, tax calculations, and more.”
Late last month, the Treasury Department published a frequently-asked-questions webpage that pointed to the technique of rounding to the nearest nickel but ultimately passed the buck to states, which it said “will approach this issue differently based on unique considerations.”
Both chambers of Congress have introduced bipartisan federal legislation, called the Common Cents Act, that would codify for US businesses the same rounding practices as Canada recommended, but progress for the bills appears to have stalled.
And while states including Georgia and Utah have come out with basic guidelines for retailers — leaving rounding decisions up to individual merchants but clarifying that sales tax should be applied before rounding — Massachusetts has yet to do the same.
In a statement, a Massachusetts Department of Revenue spokesperson said the office is “considering what if any guidance is needed.”
The Massachusetts attorney general’s office said any legal changes to retailers’ practices would have to come from lawmakers.
“It’s more involved than any of us thought it would be on the first glance,” said state Representative Tackey Chan, who is looking into the penny issue.
Merchants may soon get some temporary relief, thanks to the Federal Reserve, which distributes coins to banks. This week, all seven of the Federal Reserve bank distribution sites in the Boston district will once again accept deposits of pennies from banks, a move the Fed said it made “to better support the circulation of pennies for commercial activity.” This may eventually allow banks to order the coins again, which could then allow supply to trickle down to retailers.
Amid all the unknowns, Julio’s isn’t the only one trying to put off the inevitable. In November, the supermarkets Price Chopper and Market 32 held a promotion in which customers could bring in pennies and receive double their value in a gift card to the grocers. The event amassed roughly 20 million pennies, or $200,000, according to director of customer service Michele McKeever — about $11,900 of which came from the chains’ 14 Massachusetts stores.
“We were hoping that we could buy some time and get legislation passed to give us clear direction,” McKeever said.
For stores that have already begun their own rounding policies, there can be growing pains as they explain the new system to clientele. Turner, the Warren Hardware cashier, said she dealt with one customer who grew particularly upset at being shortchanged.
“‘I work hard for these two pennies,’” Turner recalled the customer saying.
Andrea Pendergast, co-owner of the Cape Cod Package Store Fine Wine & Spirits in Centerville, is also worried about inadvertently driving away business.
“We end all of our pricing with nine,” she said, a common consumer psychology trick known as charm pricing. Rounding up to the next dollar, she knows, would “look, psychologically, from a customer standpoint, like maybe the prices are going up.”
While some retailers are concerned about the effects of rounding policies on their profits, research from the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond last year estimated that rounding to the nearest nickel would end up costing shoppers, not retailers, about $6 million annually. This was because, the researchers found, prices tended to end on digits that would round up.
Nevertheless, Maloney, the Julio’s Liquors owner, worries about the potential hit to his bottom line once his penny-pinching days run out. Choosing to always round down could cost him the equivalent of a part-time employee’s pay.
“I know everybody’s going to say, ‘It’s just pennies,’” he said. “I go, ‘Yes, but pennies add up.’”
Dana Gerber can be reached at dana.gerber@globe.com. Follow her @danagerber6.
Massachusetts
Massachusetts native earns Patriots collaboration through social media design campaign
FOXBOROUGH, Mass. (WJAR) — Building a brand, sharing her funky graphic designs and garnering the attention of major brands and professional sports teams, Kate Weinberg has proven the power of social media, amassing more than 500,000 followers across TikTok and Instagram.
Her latest campaign, designing fresh merchandise for the NFL, has now resulted in a massive collaboration with the Patriots.
“The whole team has been amazing,” Weinberg told NBC 10 News. “They’ve trusted in my creative vision the whole way through.”
The collaboration is the result of months of planning, designing, and editing.
“It was hard to pull together so quickly,” she continued. “From coming up with the design and getting the production to happen and making sure they were approved by the league, there’s so much I’ve been learning.”
Weinberg says as a Massachusetts native and generational Pats fan, inspiration came naturally — the designs feature lobsters, sailboats, and everything uniquely New England.
“I try to make every design unique and tell a story with it … the story of the team,” Weinberg said.
They were placed on display just in time for the Patriots’ 2026 playoff debut.
“They went on display, Friday, right before the big game. Sunday was the big sales day, I think they sold out at 2 p.m.,” Weinberg said.
She said come this Sunday, she’ll be proudly repping her merch, while rooting for the Pats as they take on the Texans at 3 p.m.
Can I hear just a few positive things in 2026? Amanda Gutierres of the new women’s soccer team, Boston Legacy FC, at Gillette Stadium. Boston Legacy
For one year — just one year! — What if we all tried to be Mass. boosters, rather than Mass. criticizers, Mass. fault-finders or plain old Massholes?
What if we made that a New Year’s Resolution that we actually stick with until December?
If you’re a resident of Massachusetts, you can undoubtedly add to this list of problems that our state has: high taxes, pricey housing, unreliable public transit, bad traffic, cold weather, elected officials emitting hot air and residents voting with their feet by moving.
But if there was ever a year to look at the Dunkin’ cup as half full, I’d argue that 2026 is it.
A partial list of good stuff we could be bragging about would include:
• An NFL team that won its first playoff game with a quarterback who could be the season’s MVP, and an NBA team that surprisingly has a solid chance of making it to the playoffs.
• Boston is continuing to get better at enjoying winter, with Frostival and Winteractive. A Ferris wheel on the Greenway? A “street snowboarding” contest on City Hall Plaza? I’ll be there!
• The inaugural season of Boston Legacy FC, our new National Women’s Soccer League team, opens in March.
• Seven FIFA World Cup games will be held in Foxborough in June.
• Marking the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence on the Fourth of July and other Revolutionary happenings throughout the year.
• Later in July, a fleet of tall ships from around the world arrives in Boston Harbor for Sail Boston.
• Worcester and Auburn are getting ready to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the birth of modern rocketry, with Robert Goddard’s early tests in 1926. In other nerdy news, the MIT Museum has plans to mark the 50th birthday of the biotech industry in Cambridge. Just two of many major industries born in Massachusetts.
Most residents of other states would view two or three of those things as opportunities to boast or back-pat.
They’d invite friends and relatives from all over to come for a visit, and see it as an opportunity to show off their state’s positives — or at least to appreciate the work it took to bring these things together in a single year.
Maybe we should, too.
Traffic will be bad at times. Hotel and Airbnb prices will skyrocket.
And you could live up to the stereotype by bemoaning that. Or you could see 2026 as a pretty great year to live in Massachusetts.
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