Strikes, lockouts, walkouts and boycotts were frequent from 1900 to 1919 as organized building tradesmen of the Boston Building Trades leapfrogged trade wages and honored picket lines of striking trades.

At the same time, employers were pulling all stops to squash unionization of their companies. Those workers who were organized were coming together politically during this period, fighting against deplorable conditions in the workplace. Following are three cases of conditions the national political figure, Eugene V. Debs, was attracting workers to his socialist platform with, "My supreme joy is the union meeting, where the faithful assemble at fountain proletaire."

1. Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire New York, N.Y., March 25, 1911. 154 workers were killed in a sweatshop where emergency doors were bolted "to safeguard employers from the loss of goods by the departure of workers through fire doors and fire escapes instead of elevators."
2. The Ludlow Massacre in Colorado's wretched mines on April 20, 1914. President Woodrow Wilson offered to mediate a strike by 12,000 union miners against the John D. Rockefeller owned company. Scabs were recruited to starve out the strikers. Company guards and Colorado national guardsmen attempting to "preserve peace" opened fire with machine guns into the strikers' tent city and then burned down and drove the union miners and the families from the area. The strike leader, Louis Tikas, was beaten to death with a rifle butt by a lieutenant in the state militia. A year later, in 1915, a Presidential Commission on Industrial Relations confirmed almost every charge of wrong-doing by the mine operators, private guards, and the state militia, but the strike was long lost by then.
3. After the Massachusetts House of Representatives enacted a law on March 7, 1912, limiting the work week of women and children to 54 hours. The textile workers of Lawrence, Mass., walked off the job. The factory owners refused to consider workers' grievances, "There is no strike in Lawrence, just mob rule."

"To pay for 54 hours work, the wages of 56 hours would by tantamount to raising wages and that the mills cannot afford." As pickets approached the Atlantic mills, in below-freezing weather, streams of cold water were sprayed on them from fire hoses on adjoining roofs. When the strikers retaliated by hurling back pieces of ice, 36 of them were arrested and summarily sentenced to a year in prison. Three leaders of the strike were subsequently thrown in jail on trumped up charges of plotting to dynamite company property and the murder of one of their own picketers. They were brought to trial in Salem, Mass., in cages and chains to protect the public. Testimony in the trial proved that company employers tried to involve the strikers in the phony bomb plot. Long after the strike was won, the jury brought in a verdict of "Not Guilty" against the Lawrence union leaders, Ettor, Giovanitti, and Caruso.