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Examiner

Fascinating facts on Massachusetts labor movement, just in time for the holiday

Activists, leaders, and a groundbreaking strike give Labor Day extra meaning in this state.

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Frances Perkins was FDR’s secretary of labor. London Express/Getty Images/Getty

> 1836 — Massachusetts passes first state law requiring at least three months’ schooling per year for workers under 15, following Connecticut’s 1813 lead requiring employers to provide some schooling to child employees

> 1863 — Boston machinist Ira Steward forms the Grand Eight-Hour League to champion the eight-hour workday

> 1887 — Year Massachusetts made Labor Day a holiday, seven years before the nation did

> 1933 — Year Boston-born Frances Perkins becomes the first woman in a presidential Cabinet, as FDR’s secretary of labor; she helped create maximum hour laws, a national minimum wage, the Social Security Act, and child labor laws

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> 23,000 — Number of millworkers, many of them immigrant women, who participated in Lawrence’s Bread and Roses strike from January 11 to March 12, 1912

> 56 — Maximum work hours per week for women and children before the Massachusetts Legislature reduced number to 54, effective January 1, 1912

> 32 cents — Amount employers docked each worker in Lawrence in 1912, to reflect those two fewer hours of work per week, prompting the Bread and Roses strike

> $10 — Current hourly minimum wage in Massachusetts; increases to $11 in January 2017

> $29.84 — Average hourly wage in the Boston area

> 12.9 — Percentage of Massachusetts workers who are members of unions

> 500,460 — Number of workers employed in office and administrative support in Massachusetts, making it the largest occupational group in the Commonwealth in 2015

> 16 — Minimum age at which you can have a job in Massachusetts

QUOTABLE:

Chris Haston/NBC

“Now, you may look around and see two groups here: White collar, blue collar. But I don’t see it that way. And you know why not? Because I am collarblind.” — Michael Scott (Steve Carell), The Office

SOURCES: mass.gov; bls.gov; imdb.com; dp.la; dol.gov; smallbusiness.chron.com; massaflcio.org; massmoments.org

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