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- Title
Corporate Structure, Technology, and Unionism in the Full-Fashioned Hosiery Industry: The Berkshire Knitting Mills Strike of 1936--1937.
- Authors
Kennedy, Donald
- Abstract
The article focuses on The Berkshire Knitting Mills Strike of 1936--1937. In late September 1931, approximately 5000 hosiery workers from New York, New Jersey, and New England organized a seemingly endless automobile caravan which motored to Reading, Pennsylvania, where they picketed for one week at the gates of Berkshire Knitting Mills, the largest full-fashioned hosiery mill in the world. What explains this unusual march, which one author labeled "one of the most dramatic incidents in the history of the American labor movement"?' The immediate stimulus for the march on reading was a wage cut negotiated by the American Federation of Full-Fashioned Hosiery Workers and the Hosiery Manufacturers Association, designed to protect the competitive position of union mills against nonunion firms like Berkshire. For centuries stockings were made by a hand-knitter using two needles, but in the sixteenth century a framework knitting machine was invented which replaced the art of hand-knitting.
- Subjects
PENNSYLVANIA; READING (Pa.); UNITED States; STRIKES &; lockouts -- Textile industry; STRIKES &; lockouts; HOSIERY industry; SOCIAL movements; AUTOMOBILE industry; HOSIERY workers; PUBLIC demonstrations; BERKSHIRE Knitting Mills (Company); LABOR unions; LABOR disputes; ACTIVISM; CORPORATE history
- Publication
Labor Studies Journal, 1979, Vol 3, Issue 3, p257
- ISSN
0160-449X
- Publication type
Article