This is a story based on an actual 1912 worker's strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts. The story is told from two viewpoints. One of them is Rosa, a girl in sixth grade and from an Italian family. Her father is dead, and her mother works at the mill. They have extremely little money and are basically on the edge of starvation.
The other character is Jake, a young boy whose mother is dead and whose father is a drunkard. Jake works at the mill also, but his father takes his paycheck to buy booze.
The conditions at the mill are horrible, and the management of the mill has cut the worker's pay and speeded up the machines. The workers go out on strike.
The story then describes how the strike starts and how the vast majority of workers become strikers themselves. The corrupt city government, however, and the governor, also utterly favoring big-business, call out police and militia to take on the strikers. People are killed, but the deaths are blamed on the strikers and not on the men that actually do the killing.
Outside people arrive to help in the strike but some of them end up jailed and charged with murder. One really good quote from the book is '...the law in Lawrence was twisted to suit the mill owners.'
The situation gets worse and many of the children are sent to stay with other people in other states, much like children were sent away from London in WWII to avoid being killed by the German bombing of the city.
Rosa is sent out of the city, and Jake ends up going with her, with some of the story revolving around Jake's tendency to steal things (just to survive, though), and how the people that house them react to him.
The people striking are determined to remain in solidarity, however. Eventually everything works out all right for the workers, Rosa and even Jake.
When you read this story and compare it to working conditions today, one can see that much progress has been made in worker rights, but not as much as could be, and some of the progress that had been made has been lost to today's equally-greedy factory owners and business owners who often have little if any concern at all about those who do the actual work.
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