Your Handmade Textiles And Labor Day

or, Let Me Sing You A Song You Already Know By Heart

Today is Labor Day in the USA. The US Department of Labor says of today’s history:

So what does “in honor of workers” mean? I thought I’d take a moment to discuss that question in the context of making textiles by hand — the topic I’ve been teaching and writing about for the past decade plus.

Textile work is inextricably linked with labor, because textile production always involves someone doing a whole lot of work. From start to finish, these processes tend to include the following steps:

1. Producing the fiber. This can be foraging, raising animals, planting crops, or more recently, making it in something more like a laboratory setting. Somebody has to do these things, even if it isn’t you personally. At home, this can mean flocks and plantings of various sizes, typically worked by the individual or the family. Industry means ramping up past that point, to having workers who do the tasks associated with growing fiber. (A note: industry scale ranges from cottage industry (in which small-scale family farmers produce fibers, selling directly or to pools, or doing some processing before selling, all the way up to distributed mega-industry. )
2. Processing the fiber. The fiber will typically need to be made into yarn to make a textile (although there are textiles made directly from fiber, such as felt, weaving, knitting, and crochet are the dominant means of making textiles by hand). At home, this typically means using small hand tools or household equipment to get the fiber ready to spin. In industry, it means mills filled with carding and combing equipment.
3. Spin the fiber into yarn. Prepared fiber is typically turned into yarn by a process called spinning. At home, this typically means a single-user tool or machine (like a spindle or spinning wheel) being used. In industry, it typically means mills filled with spinning frames (sometimes in the same place as the carding and combing equipment, but not always).
4. Dye the fiber, yarn, fabric, or object. This can happen at varying stages, so I’m putting it here in the middle. At home, this is typically a seasonal or occasional thing, sometimes involving a temporary kitchen, and usually on a small scale and in ways that are (or should be) limited by considerations of safety with respect to chemical processes. In industry, this is typically a year-round operation on a much larger scale, and is often a major resource consumer and polluter.
5. Turn the yarn into cloth. This can be done in many ways, but weaving, knitting, and crochet are probably the most common methods. At home, this can mean weaving on a variety of small, personal loom solutions, thus producing cloth, producing cloth with individual-sized knitting machines, or using small hand tools like knitting needles or crochet hooks to make fabric or finished objects. In industry, this means mills and factories where workers perform these tasks or tend machines which perform these tasks.
6. Turn fabrics into objects such as garments, upholstered items, or utility textiles. A note: utility textiles such as ropes may be produced prior to the “fabric” stage of the game. At home, this commonly means sewing or assembling fabric pieces (like piecing together a sweater). In industry, this commonly means garment factories (like making t-shirts) or work done on assembly and production lines (like upholstering automotive seats).
7. Get textiles to their destination. This is really moot in many (perhaps most) cases at home, because you’ll have made the textile for you or someone you know in most cases. But in industry, there’s a lot involved in getting textiles to the point of sale — and in selling them. Shipping, logistics, having stores to sell them in, it’s huge.

Whether you’re growing your own flax, harvesting it, retting it, scutching it, hackling it, combing it, dressing it, spinning it, dyeing it, weaving it, and then sewing it, or whether you’re running a group of factories that does all these things and distributes product to market, there’s a ton of labor involved. And in the history of textile production, those who wish to make money from the industry of doing it have long set the standards for how things should work — and frequently, in ways that are not to the benefit of the human beings doing the hands-on work.

This means textile work and labor movements are deeply interconnected. Intertwined and interwoven, even. They have always been so. And they have often, in recorded history, been connected by exploitation, suffering, struggle, and blood — whenever people doing textile work have found themselves in untenable positions, and have stood up for their human rights in and around the workplace.

Some selected textile/labor events in USA history:

• The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire in 1911. This event gets plenty of discussion as an industrial disaster, but we don’t always put it into the context of women and children locked in a burning building with no way to escape.
• The Lawrence strike in 1912. This is the one most commonly associated with the slogan (and later song) “Bread and Roses.”
• The 1934 Textile Workers Strike. 22 days and 400,000 workers from New England, the Mid-Atlantic region, and the Southeastern USA: the biggest strike in US history at the time (and I’m not sure what strike since then has been larger, actually, and I’d be interested in hearing if you happen to know).

Glossed over in many accounts of these three selected stories — and I assure you there are plenty of other stories too — are the questions of who these workers were. At Triangle Shirtwaist, they were mostly women, mostly recent immigrants, mostly Italian and Jewish. In Lawrence, half the workers were girls between the ages of 14 and 18, and there were workers under the age of 14 as well. The 1934 strike included these demographics as well as those calling for the racial integration of textile mills and factories in the South.

But that was then, right? What about now?

• Egypt, 2015 (and 2014…)
• Bangladesh, 2016
• India, 2017

And there are more. Plenty more. What do they all have in common? They’re all about the question of whether or not the people doing the textile work are reaping the profits of that work, or whether the people who are reaping the profits of textile work are treating the workers reasonably.

But, okay, let’s remember it’s Labor Day in the USA, and other countries observe a similar holiday on different days of the year (frequently May 1st). So, what about the textile industry in the USA?

The short answer is: it’s been hit pretty hard over the past few decades. Per the US Department of Agriculture, 900,000 jobs were lost between 1994 and 2005. Those production facilities have moved elsewhere — amidst vast political rhetoric. But few would dispute that moving textile production hasn’t made the textile industry a better or kinder or more egalitarian industry; it has simply moved where one set of problems occur, and left others in its wake.

There’s a lot more to be said around all of these topics, but I wanted to touch on them in the briefest of ways, as a backdrop for the statements I’m about to make.

Ready? Here we go.

Are you a knitter? Crocheter? Do you sew? Do you spin, or weave, or both? Are you a person who makes textiles by hand for yourself and your family and friends?

Have you ever had the experience of being belittled or derided for your textile interests?

Today, on Labor Day, don’t forget that every handspun, handknit sweater you made and will wear for decades is a blow straight to the heart of a textile-industrial complex that has centuries of history, in the USA alone, of exploiting, disenfranchising, abusing, and even murdering its workers. And when we expand that to the global scope in which your sweater (or afghan, or socks, or tablecloth, or dress you sewed, or flax garden, or small flock) exists, that impact is even bigger, and includes the environmental benefit of, say, not turning all the dogs blue.

You can take pride in knowing that the labor you put into your handmade textiles is a major stand for workers everywhere – a rejection of the cultural values that create disposable textiles made by disposable workers.

della mae boston town - Google Search

If you have never given much thought to the larger scope impact of your handmade textile pursuits, I hope this has been thought provoking! There is a wealth of amazing textile history out there, and lots of stories that really are timeless – alas.

I hope you stand with me in applauding the hard and vital work of labor movements made up of our textile working peers around the world.

Oh, and I’ll leave you with an old song.