The ten-cent wage cut imposed by the mill owners broke the camel’s back — workers were real angry, and even though most of the workers were unorganized: not belonging to a labor unionunorganized they poured out of the mills fighting mad. They were fed up with the wage cuts and the speedups, and it was almost as if everything was organized beforehand, but it wasn’t. When the Textile Council rejected the ten percent cut and announced that they were gonna strike, all the unskilled people that they paid no attention to got out there. And they became the [main] force of the strike.

Oral history interview with Joe Figudiredo

Quoted in The Strike of '28, by Daniel Georgianna with Roberta Hazen Aaronson (Spinner Publications, 1993).