UNIONS ARE ESSENTIALLY working people standing together, in solidarity, to form collective power in the workplace and sometimes beyond. One root of this type of power in the United States stretches back to 1824, when in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, hundreds of girls—teenagers mostly, but some as young as seven—led what they called a “turnout,” which would become the first factory strike in US history.

The girls worked at a dam-powered cotton mill, where their bosses had met the night before and decided to cut their pay by 25 percent while simultaneously extending their thirteen- to fifteen-hour workdays by yet another hour. The day after the bosses announced these new conditions, 102 workers blocked the mill entrances at start time. They held a meeting there, just outside the factory, in front of their bosses and the rest of the town. They resolved not to go inside to work, and by the next day, their turnout had spread to the other cotton mills in town. It lasted a week, until one of the mills mysteriously caught fire, in what was perhaps the first act of industrial sabotage in this country’s long, rich history of industrial sabotage. The day after the fire, mill owners negotiated better hours and pay and safer conditions with the teenage strike leaders.