The United States textile workers' strike of 1934 (2 set 1934 ano – 24 set 1934 ano)

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The United States textile workers' strike of 1934, was the largest textile strike in the labor history of the United States, it started on the second of September 1934 and ended on the 24 of September 1934. It all started when in 1933 Southern mills produced more than seventy percent of cotton and woolen textiles in more modern mills, drawing on the pool of dispossessed farmers and laborers willing to work for roughly forty percent less than their Northern counterparts. As was the rest of economic life, the textile industry was strictly segregated and drew only from white workers in the Piedmont. Until 1965, when passage of the Civil Rights Act broke the color line in hiring, less than 2% of textile workers were African American.Throughout the 1920s, however, the mills faced an intractable problem of overproduction, as the wartime boom for cotton goods ended. Their favored solution to this was to squeeze more work out of their employees through what workers called the "stretch-out": speeding up production by increasing the number of looms assigned to each factory hand, limiting break times, paying workers by piece rates, and increasing the number of supervisors to keep workers from slowing down, talking or leaving work.The stretch-out sparked hundreds of strikes throughout the Southeast: by one count, there were more than 80 strikes in South Carolina in 1929 alone. While most of them were short-lived, these strikes were almost all spontaneous walkouts, without any union – or other – leadership. When the mill owners made the cotton mill employees' hours larger still further – with the blessing of the NRA – without raising their hourly wage rates in May, 1934, the UTW threatened a national strike. Union organizers estimated that 20,000 out of the 25,000 textile workers in the county were out on strike. These strikes resulted in the defeat of the union, the blacklisting of many workers, and finally, long-term formation of many union locals.

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