“I am in this fight all the way”

Elizabeth’s announcement speech at Everett Mills

*As prepared for delivery**

I want to tell you a story.

A little over 100 years ago, textile mills in Lawrence like the ones behind us today employed tens of thousands of people, and immigrants flocked here from more than 50 countries for a chance to work at the looms.

Lawrence was one of the centers of American industry.

Business was booming. The guys at the top were doing great, but workers made so little money that families were forced to crowd together in dangerous tenements and live on beans and scraps of bread.

Inside the mills, working conditions were horrible.

Children were forced to operate dangerous equipment.

Workers lost hands, arms and legs in the gears of machines.

One out of every three adult mill workers died by the time they were 25.

Then, on January 11, 1912, a group of women who worked right here at the Everett Mill discovered that the bosses had cut their pay.

And that was it — the women said “enough is enough.” They shut down their looms and walked out.

Soon workers walked out at another mill in town.

Then another. Then another — until 20,000 textile workers across Lawrence were on strike. These workers — led by women– didn’t have much. Not even a common language.

Nevertheless… they persisted!

They organized. They embraced common goals. They translated the minutes of their meetings into 25 different languages, so that the English and Irish workers who had been here for years and the Slavic and Syrian workers new to America could stand together.

They hammered out their demands:

Fair wages

Overtime pay

and the right to join a union.

Big business at the time called those demands a threat to the very survival of America — and the bosses tried to shut it down.

They spread rumors and fear about the strikers.

One factory owner even paid a guy to plant sticks of dynamite around town so he could frame the workers as a violent mob.

The mill owners also owned city government, which declared martial law and called in the militia. Some strikers died in violent clashes with the police.

It was a hard fight. Families that were already going to bed hungry had to make do with even less.

They were cold.

They were under attack. But they stuck together — and they won!

Higher wages. Overtime. Everybody back at work.

And those workers did more than improve their own lives. They changed America.

Within weeks, more than a quarter of a million textile workers throughout New England got raises.

Within months, Massachusetts became the first state in the nation to pass a minimum wage law.

And today, there are no children working in factories. We have a national minimum wage. And worker safety laws.

Workers get paid overtime and we have a forty-hour work week. That’s right, because of workers here in Lawrence — and all across the country — we have weekends!

The story of Lawrence is a story about how real change happens in America.

It’s a story about power — our power — when we fight together.

Today, millions and millions and millions of American families are also struggling to survive in a system that has been rigged by the wealthy and the well-connected.

Hard working people are up against a small group that holds far too much power, not just in our economy, but also in our democracy.

Like the women of Lawrence, we are here to say enough is enough!

We are here to take on a fight that will shape our lives, our children’s lives and our grandchildren’s lives, just as surely as the fight that began in these streets more than a century ago.

Because the man in the White House is not the cause of what’s broken, he’s just the latest — and most extreme — symptom of what’s gone wrong in America.

A product of a rigged system that props up the rich and the powerful and kicks dirt on everyone else.

And so, once he’s gone, we can’t pretend that all of this never happened.

It won’t be enough to just undo the terrible acts of this administration.

We can’t afford to just tinker around the edges — a tax credit here, a regulation there.

Our fight is for big, structural change.

This is the fight of our lives. The fight to build an America where dreams are possible, an America that works for everyone.

I am in that fight all the way.

And that is why I stand here today: to declare that I am a candidate for President of the United States of America.