A New Haven sweatshop of yore.
The son of a garment worker found a tale of a long-forgotten strike buried in a corner of the public library, and decided more people should have access to the stories of working men and women who built New Haven.
Frank Annunziato made that discovery while working on his graduate school thesis back in the late 1970s. He discovered an extensive write-up archived in the main library branch’s New Haven history room about an 1886 strike by the city’s horseless-carriage builders.
A decade later, Annunziato and the late Nicholas Aiello launched the Greater New Haven Labor History Association. The association is still going strong, and has amassed reams of documents, write-ups, photos, and oral histories.
Some of that work will be on display at the organization’s 28th anniversary annual conference and celebration, to be held Sunday, June 5, from 1:30 – 4:30 p.m. at 267 Chapel St. The event will feature an award to Aiello and his sister, retired garment worker Louise Fortin (read about her life in this Randall Beach column in the New Haven Register), an address on “Sisters and Sweatshops” by author Anthony Riccio (this story describes his research on New Haven Italian-American immigrant stories), and a discussion on “Labor History: Looking Back, Moving Forward.” (You can find out more about the event and the organization at this website.)
The 1886 carriage strike failed; the city’s then-busy carriage builders hired new workers. The strikers, according to one legend, drifted to Detroit, where they found work in the industry that would replace the carriages, automobiles. New Haven’s Central Labor Council wrote up a history of the carriage workers’ strike in 1899, in hopes that someone might discover it later — as Frank Annunziato did.
Annunziato argued that it’s important for people to know about that story, as well as subsequent organizing drives and strikes that succeeded in shortening the working week at garment sweatshops, that raised wages for skilled rifle-builders at the old Olin-Winchester plant, that boosted the standard of living for Yale’s office workers. (This story details an exhibit the association created about Winchester’s.)
This New Haven labor mural, produced by the association, is displayed at Troup School.
Annunziato wants New Haveners to know that August Lewis Troup School is named after a woman who made labor history: She was the first female office of the typographical workers union, then crusaded for union rights in New Haven (and wrote about the crusade in a labor daily newspaper).
“It’s important to know that struggle is a part of life,” he said during an interview on WNHH radio’s “Dateline New Haven,” during which he was joined by the labor history association’s executive director, Joan Cavanagh. “People have to band together to fight for what’s right. Every generation’s got to do it again.”
Cavanagh spoke of how there’s still a lot of labor history waiting to be made — and preserved — in New Haven. Most of the old factories are long gone, along with tens of thousands of jobs. Now we have an “eds and meds” economy dominated by Yale and Yale-New Haven Hospital as well as new biotech companies. Yes, Yale’s unions are politically powerful. Government workers have union protection. But new employers, like Alexion Pharmaceuticals, don’t have unions. And, Cavanagh noted, “the haves and have-nots are becoming more separated” than ever.
She noted that transformation of some of the former Winchester rifle factory into $3,000-a-month apartments.
“The people who used to work at Winchester can’t afford to live there,” she noted.
Click on or download the above sound file to hear the full interview with Cavanagh and Annunziato on WNHH radio’s “Dateline New Haven.”
This episode of “Dateline New Haven” was possible in part thanks to financial support from Gateway Community College.
