Working-Class Employment Opportunities – 20th Century

In an effort to better understand the attitudes and sentiments of the adults in my corner of Lowell as I was growing up in the late 1930s to the 1960s, I decided to delve into the labor market that my relatives and their friends faced before World War I through the Great Depression and then through World War II with the travails of the Spanish flu around 1918 to 1919 thrown in for good measure.

Lowell’s economic boom had begun to slowly fizzle in the 1910s time frame, even as many French Canadians from Quebec eagerly sought relief from the economic doldrums that they had been facing in that north country since the 1880s. Their natural skill set for the local marketplace was one that hardscrabble dirt farmers also encountered in the Vermont and Maine woods before the arrival of factory jobs in the leather and timber industries.

These individuals usually came with an old fashion farming background, including experience with archaic tools and instruments going back to the days of Jacques Cartier and the discovery of these territories. All such machinery was operated by human muscle power or farm animal strength. Power tools, pneumatic drills, and electrical pieces of machinery such as lathes, metal drills, circular saws, and electric motors were not part and parcel of a typical worker’s ready skill set.

Immigrants of all ethnic types generally shared similar workplace disadvantages, which meant that competing in a busy, dangerous technological marketplace such as Lowell’s textile mills tested the resolve of these brave new world pioneers. The work itself was exhausting, repetitious, boring, and quite hazardous with angry machinery and flying shuttles clanking out an unending chorus of mechanical clamor.

Often, a worker could not converse with another operative working on the adjacent machine without yelling. Ten to fourteen-hour-long days, Monday through Saturday, were common. Although these labor conditions were far from ideal, many a hapless, and unskilled immigrant laborer chose this lot in life since it was the best deal available, far better than starving in a hovel.

Working Class Opportunities

To appreciate, even barely, the work-a-day world experienced by my grandparents and, later, my mother and father plus their brothers and sisters, I decided to review the available “help wanted” columns and related references to job categories that the Lowell Sun newspaper offered its readers over the many decades from 1920 to 2000.

This research centered on the use of the online data available to anyone, whose has access to the website called, “Newspaper Archive”. See: www,newspaperarchive.com.

An example might make this process clearer to the reader. Imagine that you are interested in knowing the job openings for a “welder” in Lowell, Massachusetts during the Depression years of 1932 through 1939. After entering the website given above and entering the keyword, “welder”, you would first select the “United States” as the main, geographic search area and then filter down to “Massachusetts” followed by subsequent filtering down to the city of “Lowell”.

Finally, you would do the last bit of filtering by choosing the years, 1932 to 1939 as the time period of interest. As a result, you would be given the number of times the word “welder” was mentioned in each year of your choice in your newspaper of choice, which would be the Lowell Sun in this case.

Similar results for other “working class” individuals are presented in the following sections.

Job Opportunities: Welder, Laborer, Machinist & Electrician Openings – 1932 to 1940

The turbulent years after the Wall Street disaster of October 1929 had left an ominous social and financial specter over Lowell’s countenance, which had once been a bustling center of intense manual activity coupled to the pneumatic, piston-like motion of thousands of individual looms each producing fabric for the clothing and linen industries located elsewhere.

All job openings in that textile-based economy trembled in the aftermath of that industrial collapse. XXXX