Passaic Strike (1926)

The economic recession after World War I, the loss of massive postwar strikes, and the Red Scare took a severe toll on the labor movement. In the following decade, labor unions suffered steep declines in membership, particularly in the ailing textile and mining industries. By the mid-1920s, however, these industries began to recover from the postwar crisis and witness the stirrings of worker protest that included the Passaic strike of 1926. As cotton and woolen textile manufacturing increased, so too did the willingness of workers to demand their due. The wage cuts, mandatory overtime, bad working conditions, and increasing workloads that had followed the war set the stage for strikes in textile factories in the Northeast and the South.

During these years, craft unions continued to dominate the labor movement. They had little incentive to organize industrial workers. New initiatives from within the Communist Party gave priority to organizing mass industry. Its work in the textile industry played a crucial role in organizing drives in the woolen industry in Passaic, New Jersey. Workers in the woolen mills in Passaic and surrounding towns were first and second generation ethnics, many of them women. Like the workers in the Lawrence Strike of 1912, they spoke a wide array of languages, including Polish, German, Hungarian, Russian, and Italian. These differences kept them divided. Their employers had sharply cut wages and frequently laid off workers during the early 1920s. Recovery brought the hope that workers would no longer be asked to accept deteriorating conditions.

On January 25, 1926, 6,000 workers struck the Botany Woolen Mill in Passaic. The strike quickly spread to mills in Garfield, Clifton, and Lodi. Within a few weeks, over 20,000 woolen workers were on strike. The strikers demanded that their employers rescind a 10 percent wage cut, limit hours to 44 per week, and improve working conditions. They also asked that the union be recognized. The Passaic City Council passed an ordinance to prohibit workers from picketing, but strikers continued to protest outside the plants. There were many arrests. The strike attracted national publicity and the support of liberal and left-wing organizations, and the relief committee raised over $500,000 to aid strikers.

By summer, however, the long strike was beginning to take its toll. The Communist Party decided to turn control of the strike over to the United Textile Workers (UTW), an AFL union. The UTW took over the direction of the strike on the condition that Communist labor organizer Albert Weisbord leave his leadership position. Once he withdrew, the strike began to fall apart. Relief funds slowed, and the UTW began to negotiate with employers. In late 1926 and early 1927, some of the mills came to terms with the strikers. The wage cut was stopped, but workers failed to gain union recognition. That failure left them, and the organized labor movement, without recourse to collective bargaining in the textile industry.

The Passaic Strike foreshadowed organizing drives in the textile industry between 1928 and 1932, especially the Gastonia Strike. The conservatism of the labor movement and the resistance of craft unions to industrial unionism meant that workers in mass production industry failed to establish stable unions during this crucial decade.

See also labor and labor movement.

Further reading: David J. Goldberg, A Tale of Three Cities: Labor Organization and Protest in Paterson, Passaic, Lawrence, 1916-1921 (New Brunswick, N. J.: Rutgers University Press, 1989).