The first factory strike in U.S. history began on May 26th, 1824. The New England factory system itself was still finding its footing, and its legions of poorly paid young workers were at constant risk of illness, injury, or worse during the long hours they spent wrangling its roaring machinery. When the mill owners of Pawtucket, RI collectively announced that they’d be reducing weavers’ wages and tacking on an extra hour to everyone’s 14-hour workday, the workers revolted. That day, 102 workers walked out of the mills and into the streets. The tactic was so new, so novel, and so revolutionary that those leading the charge hadn’t even settled on a name for it yet. At that point, they called it a “turn-out.” The strikers weren’t the only ones who had suffered at the mill owners’ greedy hands, either, and they were joined by supporters from across the community. It was no mere protest; workers barricaded the mill entrances and marched directly to the bosses’ homes, where they pelted the grand houses with rocks. After an “incendiary device” was thrown into Walcott’s Mill on June 1st, the flames sent the rest of the mill bosses scrambling to negotiate. By June 3rd, a “compromise” had been reached.

The mill workers of Pawtucket had planted the seeds for the next two hundred years of working class rebellion. It just so happened that all of them were women—and many of them were teenage girls, some as young as 15 years old. Teenagers and young adult workers have played an outsized role in American labor since such a thing even existed. In the U.S. child labor has been a constant economic feature since the very first European invaders set foot on North American soil, and became even more visible with the rise of the industrial economy. Children whose labor would have generally contributed to the home, the family farm, or been loaned out via an apprenticeship in the skilled trades were now being herded into belching factories, suffocating cotton mills, and tenebrous coal mines to earn their daily bread.

Some of them resisted. In Pennsylvania coal country, preteen and teenage “breaker boys” joined in a number of militant miners’ strikes and led protests of their own over long hours, harsh treatment, and at least one cancelled Christmas party. The “newsies” of New York City went on strike in 1899, inspiring both changes to the cutthroat newspaper business and a beloved Disney musical. A few decades later, in 1933,18-year-old Carrie Smith led two thousand Black women workers out of the Funsten nut processing factory in St. Louis and out onto the picket line. “Girls, we can’t lose!” she’d cried, waving a Bible in one hand and a brick in the other. Eight days later, the bosses proved her right by acquiescing to the workers’ demands. In 1938, 21-year-old Emma Tenayuca helped lead 12,000 Mexican and Chicana pecan shellers in San Antonio, TX on the largest strike the city had ever seen; in 1970, her fellow San Antonian 18-year-old Rosa Flores, became the face of a contentious strike at the Farah Manufacturing Company. Jessica Govea Thorbourne, the daughter of Mexican-American migrant workers, started working in the fields when she was two years old, and became an organizer for the United Farm Workers union when she was 19; Rev. Addie L. Wyatt would become the first Black woman to hold a senior office in an American labor union, but started out as a rank and file member of the United Packinghouse Workers of America when she was 17.

Radical youth was a particularly potent element during the early days of the Industrial Revolution, when children, teenage girls, and young women made up a huge chunk of the workforce in cotton mills and garment factories. The young women of Pawtucket had been the first, but they were far from the last of the “mill girls” to stage strikes, slow-downs, and protests of their own. Throughout the mid-1800s and well into the early 1900s, teenage girls and young women were at the forefront of labor militancy in the garment industry. In Chicago, 21-year-old garment worker Agnes Nestor led a strike for union recognition at the Eisendrath Glove Company in 1902—and won. Some connected their work in labor to broader social struggles, too, like 16-year-old Lithuanian immigrant Pauline Newman, a young garment worker who helped lead a rent strike in the Lower East Side in 1907. Starting with her teenage coworkers, Newman convinced ten thousand families to take part in the protest.

Two years later, another factory girl, Clara Lemlich, helped lead her fellow garment workers in New York City on a strike so massive it was known as The Uprising of the 20,000. In 1909, the 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee stood up at a meeting of thousands and demanded they join the struggle. "I am a working girl, one of those who are on strike against intolerable conditions,” she cried out in her native Yiddish. “I am tired of listening to speakers who talk in general terms. What we are here for is to decide whether we shall strike or shall not strike. I offer a resolution that a general strike be declared–now!" The next morning, thousands of garment factory workers—most of them young Jewish and Italian immigrant women—took to the streets in a mass strike that lasted two months and resulted in union contracts at nearly every shop they targeted. One of the holdouts, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, became the site of unspeakable tragedy just two years later when a fire broke out and 146 workers (123 of them young women and teenage girls) lost their lives due to the owner’s negligence. It’s no coincidence that one of the 1909 strike’s major demands had been for factory owners to adopt better safety conditions—improvements that could have saved those young workers from the flames.

Young workers certainly weren’t afraid to organize strikes or to call out injustice when they saw it. Some, like Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, would find themselves in hot water for the latter. The bookish daughter of politically active Irish immigrants, Flynn formed her liberatory worldview early; her first public speech was entitled “What Socialism Will Do for Women,” and was delivered when she was only 15 years old. By her 17th birthday, she had become a full-time organizer with the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) an anti-capitalist labor union that welcomed workers of all races and genders and sought to bring all laborers together in “one big union.” She threw herself into the work, capitalizing on her youthful energy to organize copper miners and timber workers in Montana, iron miners in Minnesota, and hotel cooks and waiters in New York City. She played an important role in the historic 1912 Bread and Roses strike in Lawrence, MA which saw thousands of other young women workers take on the still-booming textile industry (and win), as well as the rough and tumble 1913 Paterson silk strike, which lasted for five grueling months.

Flynn would go on to become one of the most storied radical activists in U.S. history, fighting for workers as well as women’s rights, co-founding the American Civil Liberties Union, and organizing against fascism; she was arrested ten times for her trouble, and spent three years in prison during the 1950s. That pattern holds: Clara Lemlich, Pauline Newman, Agnes Nestor, Jessica Govea Thorbourne, Addie L. Wyatt, and many other worker-organizers who got their start as teenagers ended up dedicating their lives to labor, and to lifting up the next generation of rebel girls and gender nonconforming teens.

A century after that first “turn-out,” youth-led unions like Starbucks Workers United, the Union of Southern Service Workers, the Amazon Labor Union, and graduate workers unions are continuing down the path towards freedom that so many other young people just like them have helped carve out, bit by bit, strike by strike, and moment by moment, in an effort to tear down an exploitative wage labor system and build a better world. “I want workers to realize, it's a system that was made by people,” 23-year-old USSW member-organizer DeArmon told Teen Vogue in 2023. “We can unmake it. It’s possible to make huge changes, but we have to come together. It's never going to change unless workers organize and demand it.”

“A lot of people never learn this history,” 25-year-old USSW member-organizer Jamila Allen had added, emphasizing the importance of Southern labor organizing and the contributions of Black workers. “Our union is going to be like those workers before us who weren’t afraid to fight.”