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In
some mill villages, the company would not rent a house to a family if they
could not provide at least two hands for the mill. All of this led to a
kind of indentured servitude from which mill hands could rarely escape.
By owing the mills rent, food bills, and the like, the workers essentially
owed them work. The "Stretch-Out" system of labor was instituted in Southern
Mills around the mid-1920ís. In the Manville-Jenckes-owned Loray
Mill in Gastonia, "Stretch-Out" began in 1927 under the auspices of one
Mr. Johnstone, the general superintendent of Loray. Approximately a year
before the 1929 strike, in August of 1928, Mr. Johnstone had left Loray.
On the day he resigned, a group of young mill workers left work early and
drove over to Johnstoneís home in a parade, which ended with loud
festivities on his lawn. The supervisors were not well-loved by the workers
at Loray. With the "Stretch-Out" system in place, though, workers could
look forward to pay cuts, fewer jobs, more work and longer hours. Where
one worker would have to work six drawing frames in 1920, by 1929, the
same worker would be required to tend ten machines in the same amount of
time.
These "efficiency systems" meant that workers lost what short break times they did have, and production was of key interest to the supervisors. Many of the Southern Mills were in a state of disrepair, and though the workers worked more hours, were paid less, and worked on less advanced equipment, Southern Mill owners still expected them to keep production up to the same levels as their better paid, shorter working New England counterparts. A pamphlet ìGastonia: Citadel of the Class Struggle in the New Southî written by William J. Dunne for the NTWU in September or 1929 stated that Gastonia had one-sixth of all the active spindles in North Carolina. Dunne also argued that the Loray Mill, being Gastoniaís largest, owned Gastonia politics. The mill had 22,000 workers hired at $12.00 a week working 10-12 hour days six days a week. He cited Joseph S. Wray, the secretary of the Gastonia Chamber of Commerce, at a Senate committee on manufacturing, who said children between fourteen and eighteen only worked eleven hours a day, that women under sixteen were not allowed to work at night, and that skilled workers earned eighteen to thirty cents an hour. Between 1920 and 1927, spindles in Gaston Country increased by 2.4%, whereas the number of active spindles decreased by 3.1%. The Depression was especially hard on the cotton industry, and in Gaston county the Depression his early and it hit hard. Mills in the South were often owned by Northern interests. The Manville-Jenckes company that owned Loray was based in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. The Loray was part of a chain of mills across North Carolina; because the smaller mills were owned by a larger chain, any bond that had existed between employee and employer was lost.