What Remains

Labor Day has always felt like a little pause button.

Summer is winding down, vacations are behind us, and it’s back-to-school time.

For me, Labor Day also brings back memories.

I remember spending the holiday with my parents and maternal grandparents. We’d talk about family, past vacations and what was ahead — including the dreaded return to school, which my parents and grandparents somehow viewed as wonderful news.

But one thing was never debated in my family: support for unions.

My father and his brother were union asbestos workers. The middle-class life my family enjoyed was tied directly to my father’s work — and to the wages, benefits and protections that came with union membership.

I understood that. What I didn’t fully understand was the labor history that came before him

A Family Footnote
Recently, I came across a social media post about the New England Textile Strike of 1922 — and went down a rabbit hole.

I was told that my maternal grandparents worked in textile mills in Rhode Island and Massachusetts before moving to Michigan. But that was about all I knew. It was a forgotten chapter of our family story — acknowledged in passing but never really told.

What Came Before
Census and other records confirmed that both had worked in textile mills. My grandmother, orphaned at a young age, was living in a boarding house and working in a mill in her early teens. My grandfather was working in a mill by age 15.

Suddenly, that family footnote became a giant question mark.

What did they do in the mills? What were those mills like? What was it like to be 15 or 16 years old and spend your days working in a textile mill?

And perhaps the biggest question: Did they belong to a textile workers’ union?

The Struggle Before Us
My grandparents worked in the mills at a time when workers were discovering the power of standing together. Textile workers had been organizing since the late 19th century, striking for better wages and working conditions.

Then came the New England textile strike of 1922.

On January 16, Rhode Island mill owners cut wages by roughly 20% and restored a 54-hour workweek. The United Textile Workers of America and other unions led a strike that spread across Rhode Island, Massachusetts and New Hampshire, involving an estimated 50,000 workers. Mills closed, violence erupted and workers lost their lives.

The strike wasn’t a complete victory, but most mill owners reversed the wage cuts and reduced the workweek to 48 hours.

More importantly, workers demonstrated the power of standing together — helping pave the way for the stronger labor movement and workplace protections that followed.

The Inheritance
I may never discover whether my grandparents belonged to a union or participated in those labor struggles.

But perhaps that is not the most important part of the story.

Every generation leaves something behind.

My grandparents left me a question.

The textile workers alongside whom they worked left a legacy of standing together.

My father’s generation left an example of how union membership could help create a middle-class life for a family.

And today’s workers are deciding what comes next.

We often think of Labor Day as a day off — one last summer weekend, one last barbecue, one last chance to avoid thinking about Monday.

But maybe it is also a day to remember the union members whose work, courage and persistence made our Mondays different from theirs.

We inherit more than memories.

We inherit progress.

And perhaps our job is to make sure we leave some behind, too.

Happy reading,
Suzanne Daniels, Ph.D.