Labor Day and the Italian-American Story: The Workers Who Helped Build America
By Chris M. Forte
The Italian Californian
For many Americans, Labor Day is the unofficial end of summer—a three-day weekend marked by barbecues, beach trips, family gatherings, and one last celebration before fall begins.
But Labor Day was never intended to be merely a farewell to summer.
It is a national tribute to the American worker: to the men and women whose labor built cities, railroads, factories, farms, mines, ports, businesses, neighborhoods, and ultimately much of the country itself. The first Labor Day celebration took place in New York City on September 5, 1882. By 1894, Congress had established the first Monday in September as a national holiday honoring workers and their contributions to American life.
For Italian Americans, that history should have particular meaning.
The story of Italian immigration to the United States is, in large part, a story of work.
Millions of Italians came to America hoping for lavoro—work, opportunity, and the possibility of giving their families a better future. They became miners, fishermen, stonemasons, factory workers, garment workers, railroad laborers, farmers, longshoremen, builders, tradesmen, shopkeepers, and entrepreneurs.
And when they encountered low wages, dangerous workplaces, discrimination, and exploitation, many Italians did something else:
They organized.
Italian immigrants and Italian Americans played an important—and sometimes overlooked—role in the American labor movement.
Italian Immigrants and the Working-Class American Dream
The enormous wave of Italian immigration that began in the late nineteenth century brought millions of people from Italy to the United States.
Many immigrants came from southern Italy and Sicily, where poverty, unemployment, land inequality, and limited opportunities encouraged families to look overseas for a better future.
America offered opportunity, but rarely easy work.
Italian immigrants found jobs across the country. In San Francisco, they worked as fishermen and stevedores. In Appalachia and the Mountain West, they entered coal and mineral mines. Skilled Italian stonemasons worked in quarries throughout New England and elsewhere. Others labored on farms from the Northeast to California.
They helped build roads, railroads, tunnels, buildings, factories, and entire neighborhoods.
Yet these workers frequently occupied the lowest levels of the economy.
They worked long hours.
They performed dangerous jobs.
They were sometimes paid less than other workers.
And they faced intense ethnic prejudice.
Even some established American labor unions initially excluded foreign-born workers. As a result, Italian immigrants sometimes formed their own organizations or joined unions willing to organize workers regardless of nationality.
Labor organizing therefore became part of the Italian-American experience.
Pane e Lavoro: Bread, Work and Dignity
An Italian expression captures much of the immigrant experience:
Pane e lavoro — bread and work.
For immigrant families, work meant survival.
But workers gradually demanded something more than survival.
They wanted wages that could support their families.
They wanted reasonable working hours.
They wanted safer mines and factories.
They wanted protection from abusive employers.
And they wanted their children to have opportunities greater than their own.
The labor struggles involving Italian immigrants were therefore about more than politics or ideology.
For many families, they were about dignity.
Arturo Giovannitti, Joseph Ettor and the 1912 Lawrence Textile Strike
Two of the most important Italian figures in early American labor history were Arturo Giovannitti and Joseph James Ettor.
Both became organizers associated with the Industrial Workers of the World, or IWW.
Their names became particularly connected with the great Lawrence textile strike of 1912 in Massachusetts.
Lawrence's textile mills employed an extraordinarily diverse immigrant workforce. Rather than organizing workers according to nationality, organizers sought to unite Italians and other immigrant groups around their shared working conditions.
Giovannitti and Ettor became prominent organizers during the struggle.
During the strike, Italian immigrant worker Anna LoPizzo was shot and killed during a confrontation. Although Giovannitti and Ettor were not accused of firing the fatal shot, authorities prosecuted them, along with striker Joseph Caruso, in connection with the killing.
The Library of Congress notes that the three men were imprisoned for nearly a year before the case against them failed.
Their imprisonment turned the men into symbols of the broader labor struggle.
But the Lawrence strike demonstrated something even more important.
Employers could benefit when immigrant groups remained divided—Italian against Polish, one language against another, one ethnic neighborhood against another.
Workers became much more powerful when they crossed those divisions.
That lesson remains one of the most important legacies of early immigrant labor organizing.
Joseph Ettor: Organizing Across Ethnic and Language Barriers
Joseph Ettor was born in New York to Italian immigrant parents.
He became particularly effective at organizing immigrant workers in industrial communities where numerous languages and nationalities existed side by side.
That was no small accomplishment.
A textile workforce might include Italians, Poles, Syrians, Portuguese, Jews, French Canadians, Lithuanians, and many others.
Their cultures differed.
Their languages differed.
Their religions sometimes differed.
But their paychecks and working conditions gave them common interests.
Ettor's career illustrates one of the most significant contributions immigrant labor organizers made to American unionism: teaching workers that ethnic identity and worker solidarity did not necessarily have to compete with one another.
An Italian could remain proudly Italian while standing alongside workers from entirely different backgrounds.
Carlo Tresca: Italian Immigrant, Labor Organizer and Anti-Fascist
Another major Italian labor activist was Carlo Tresca, an immigrant from Abruzzo who arrived in the United States in the early twentieth century.
Tresca became a newspaper editor, labor activist, anarchist, civil-liberties advocate, and later a vigorous opponent of Fascism.
He participated in labor struggles involving miners, textile workers, hotel employees, and other workers.
One of his best-known activities occurred during the 1913 Paterson Silk Strike in New Jersey.
Thousands of silk workers walked out during a long and bitter industrial dispute.
And an Italian immigrant family's home became one of the most important gathering places of the strike.
Pietro and Maria Botto: When an Italian-American Home Became a Labor Headquarters
Pietro and Maria Botto were immigrants from northern Italy who settled in Haledon, New Jersey.
Pietro worked as a silk weaver.
Maria performed textile work at home while also caring for their household and preparing meals for boarders.
The Botto home represented the kind of immigrant achievement familiar to countless Italian-American families: work, saving, homeownership, family, hospitality, and community.
But in 1913, their house became something more.
During the Paterson Silk Strike, Pietro Botto offered the family's property as a meeting place for striking workers.
Labor organizers including Carlo Tresca, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, and "Big Bill" Haywood addressed crowds from the home's second-story balcony.
The National Park Service records the important role the house played in keeping striking workers organized and maintaining morale during the months-long dispute.
The property later became the American Labor Museum/Botto House National Landmark.
There is something wonderfully Italian-American about that history.
A family home—with meals being prepared, relatives gathering, boarders staying upstairs, and bocce being played outside—became part of America's labor history.
The family table and the workers' movement existed in the same world.
Italian-American Women in the Labor Movement
Italian-American labor history was never exclusively male.
Women were essential participants.
Italian immigrant women worked in factories, textile shops, garment shops, family businesses, and inside their homes performing paid piecework.
Many carried the enormous burden of earning money while simultaneously raising children and maintaining households.
The garment industry in particular became an important arena for female labor organization.
Young immigrant women often worked long hours in crowded factories for low wages. These workplaces brought Italians together with Jewish, Polish, Russian, and other immigrant women.
Some became strikers.
Others became union organizers.
And a few became nationally important labor leaders.
Angela Bambace: From Garment Worker to Union Leader
One of the most important Italian-American women in organized labor was Angela Bambace.
Bambace became active in the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union, one of the most influential unions representing workers in the clothing industry.
She worked extensively as a labor organizer and eventually became a vice president of the union.
Cornell University's labor archives preserve Bambace's papers and identify her as a prominent labor organizer and ILGWU vice president.
Her career challenges a stereotype sometimes attached to early Italian-American women—the idea that they existed exclusively within the domestic sphere.
Many did devote enormous energy to their homes and families.
But they were also wage earners.
They walked picket lines.
They organized other workers.
They attended meetings.
And sometimes they rose into leadership positions within major American institutions.
Luigi Antonini and the Italian-American Labor Council
As Italian Americans became more established in American society, they also began moving into leadership positions within organized labor.
One important figure was Luigi Antonini.
Antonini joined the ILGWU in 1913 and rose rapidly through its leadership. Cornell's labor archives record that he became an ILGWU vice president in 1925 and later served as first vice president for more than three decades. He was also a founding member of the Anti-Fascist Alliance and president of the Italian-American Labor Council.
In 1941, the Italian-American Labor Council was established.
Its mission connected labor activism with another important question facing Italian Americans during World War II: how to maintain pride in Italian heritage while firmly opposing Mussolini's Fascist regime.
The ILGWU had a substantial Italian membership and even maintained Italian-language locals. The Italian-American Labor Council supported the American war effort while advocating for Italians in the United States.
That history deserves greater attention.
Italian-American opposition to Fascism did not exist only among politicians, intellectuals, or newspaper editors.
Labor activists participated as well.
Italian Workers and the Ludlow Massacre
Not every labor struggle ended at the negotiating table.
Some ended in tragedy.
One of the darkest episodes occurred during the Colorado Coalfield War.
Striking miners and their families had been forced into a tent colony near Ludlow, Colorado.
On April 20, 1914, violence erupted between the Colorado National Guard and the striking miners.
The tent colony burned.
Women and children died.
The incident became known as the Ludlow Massacre.
For Italian-American history, there is a particularly painful detail.
According to the Library of Congress, the two women and eleven children who died in the fire were Italian immigrants.
Their deaths are a reminder that the history behind Labor Day was not simply one of parades and union banners.
Workers and their families sometimes paid an enormous price during America's industrial conflicts.
The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire and the Immigrant Worker
The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911 is another tragedy inseparable from America's immigrant labor history.
The New York garment factory employed large numbers of immigrant women, particularly Jewish and Italian workers.
When fire swept through the factory, 146 people were killed.
The disaster became one of America's most infamous workplace tragedies.
It strengthened public demands for improved factory regulation, fire safety, inspections, and protections for workers.
For immigrant families, workplace reform was therefore not an abstract political idea.
It could literally mean whether a daughter or son came home from work.
Italians Were Never Politically All the Same
There is an important qualification to this history.
Italian workers did not all share one political philosophy.
Some were socialists.
Some were anarchists.
Some joined mainstream trade unions.
Some were deeply Catholic and suspicious of radical politics.
Some became Democrats.
Some became Republicans.
Some disliked unions altogether.
Others crossed picket lines.
Many immigrants cared little about political ideology and simply wanted a steady paycheck with which to support their families.
As Italian Americans moved upward economically, many also became business owners, managers, contractors, employers, and professionals.
That diversity is important.
Remembering Italian participation in the labor movement does not require modern Italian Americans to adopt the politics of every historical labor organizer.
Carlo Tresca's anarchism, for example, does not have to become one's own political philosophy in order to recognize his historical importance.
The story is larger than ideology.
It is about working people attempting to improve their lives and participate in American society.
Labor and the Rise of the Italian-American Middle Class
Eventually, the relationship between immigrant workers and organized labor changed dramatically.
Italian workers who had sometimes been excluded from established unions became members of those unions.
Their children and grandchildren became skilled tradesmen, union officials, civil servants, teachers, firefighters, police officers, construction workers, longshoremen, transit workers, manufacturing employees, and public-sector workers.
For many families, union wages and benefits helped make possible something their immigrant grandparents could barely imagine:
a stable American middle-class life.
A home.
A car.
Education for their children.
Health benefits.
Retirement.
Paid vacations.
And enough disposable income to enjoy the country their ancestors had helped build.
Labor Day in America and Festa dei Lavoratori in Italy
Italian Americans also occupy an interesting position between two labor traditions.
In the United States, Labor Day is celebrated on the first Monday of September.
In Italy, workers are honored on May 1, known as Festa del Lavoro or Festa dei Lavoratori.
The dates differ, but the basic idea is similar:
work deserves recognition because workers contribute enormously to the life, prosperity, and stability of society.
For Italian Americans, that gives us two opportunities each year to remember the dignity of labor.
May 1 connects us with Italy.
Labor Day connects us with the American experience.
Italian-American Heritage Is Also Working-Class Heritage
Italian-American culture is frequently—and rightly—celebrated through:
food,
wine,
music,
religious feasts,
family traditions,
Little Italys,
regional customs,
art,
festivals,
and entrepreneurship.
But our heritage is also the heritage of the worker.
The miner.
The fisherman.
The railroad laborer.
The stonemason.
The seamstress.
The bricklayer.
The dockworker.
The barber.
The baker.
The factory worker.
The construction worker.
The farmer.
The shopkeeper who worked twelve hours and opened the doors again the next morning.
Those people built Italian America.
And many literally helped build America itself.
The Library of Congress documents Italians working in mines, quarries, ports, farms, factories, and other industries throughout the United States while also participating in many of the major labor struggles of the early twentieth century.
This Labor Day, Remember the Italian-American Worker
So when we celebrate Labor Day, perhaps we should remember something beyond the last barbecue of summer.
Remember Arturo Giovannitti and Joseph Ettor, standing beside immigrant textile workers in Lawrence.
Remember Carlo Tresca, organizing workers and later speaking against Fascism.
Remember Pietro and Maria Botto, whose Italian immigrant home became an important gathering place in the Paterson Silk Strike.
Remember Angela Bambace, who rose from garment labor activism into union leadership.
Remember Luigi Antonini and the Italian-American labor leaders who combined pride in their heritage with participation in American civic life.
Remember the Italian women working in garment factories.
Remember the miners.
The quarrymen.
The fishermen.
The railroad crews.
The farmworkers.
The builders.
Remember the Italian mothers and children who died at Ludlow.
And remember the countless Italian immigrants whose names will never appear in history books.
Their labor helped build railroads, factories, homes, churches, businesses, docks, farms, streets, and communities throughout the United States.
For Italian Americans, Labor Day is part of our heritage too.
Our ancestors did not usually arrive in America wealthy or powerful.
For many, the American Dream began with a lunch pail, a sewing machine, a shovel, a hammer, a fishing net, a factory whistle, or a small storefront—and the determination to make sure their children had opportunities they themselves had never known.
That deserves to be remembered.
Buona Festa del Lavoro—and Happy Labor Day from The Italian Californian.
Labor Day Q&A
Q: What is Labor Day?
A: Labor Day is an American holiday honoring the social and economic contributions of workers. The first widely recognized Labor Day celebration took place in New York City on September 5, 1882, and Congress made the first Monday in September a national holiday in 1894.
Q: Were Italian immigrants involved in the American labor movement?
A: Yes. Italian immigrants participated in major labor struggles involving textile mills, mines, quarries, garment factories, cigar factories, and other industries. Some became nationally known organizers and union leaders.
Q: Who were some important Italian-American labor figures?
A: Arturo Giovannitti, Joseph Ettor, Carlo Tresca, Angela Bambace, Luigi Antonini, and immigrant workers Pietro and Maria Botto are among the notable Italians and Italian Americans connected with American labor history.
Q: Were all Italian Americans supporters of unions or radical politics?
A: No. Italian-American workers held many different political, religious, and economic views. Some were union activists or radicals, while others were politically conservative, opposed strikes, became employers themselves, or had little interest in organized labor.
Q: Does Italy celebrate Labor Day?
A: Yes. Italy observes Festa del Lavoro or Festa dei Lavoratori on May 1, while the United States celebrates Labor Day on the first Monday of September.
Q: Why should Italian Americans remember Labor Day?
A: Because the Italian-American story is deeply connected to work. Generations of Italian immigrants and their descendants helped build the country's industries, infrastructure, businesses, and communities—and some also helped shape the American labor movement.
Sources & Further Reading
For readers who want to explore this history in greater depth, these are particularly useful starting points:
History of Labor Day — U.S. Department of Labor
Working Across the Country: Italian Immigration — Library of Congress
Paterson, New Jersey: America's Silk City — National Park Service
ILGWU Historical Timeline — Cornell University
ILGWU International Affairs and Luigi Antonini — Cornell University
.jpg)
