George McNeill Organizes Workers
On this day in 1852, hundreds of mill workers at the Woolen Company in Amesbury walked out on strike. Fourteen-year-old George McNeill, who had worked in the carding room since he was ten, immediately organized the children employed by the mill into a mutual benefit association. This began his lifelong commitment to bettering the lives of working men, women, and children. His decades of advocacy for an eight-hour workday earned him the title "father of the eight-hour movement." In 1869, he was instrumental in persuading the state legislature to create the Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics of Labor. He was co-director of the bureau, which was the first in the nation and the model for the U. S. Department of Labor.
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