Friend,

Saturday January 11, marked the 114th anniversary of the Bread and Roses strike, and it deserves to be remembered as more than just a history lesson.

In Lawrence, Massachusetts, working people walked out of textile mills because they were tired of choosing between starvation wages and broken bodies. 

They faced clubs, jail cells, hunger, and the murder of 3 workers, yet they stayed out on the bitter cold picket line for over 3 months. 

What they demanded was simple and radical at the same time: enough to live AND enough to live well.

That moment matters because it tells the truth about how labor rights were won in this country. 

Those rights were forced into law because people shut down production and refused to be ground into dust. Because workers understood their power and used it.

But the fight didn’t end there.

In the 1968 “I AM A MAN” strike, 1,300 Black sanitation workers in Memphis walked off demanding pay raises, safety and above all, dignity. Their strike inspired a visit by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. who spoke to a crowd of 25,000 workers.

Our campaign stands in that tradition.

Chip in to fuel a campaign that understands rights on the job are won through solidarity and worker power when the bosses tell you to know your place.

Working people cannot win by trusting the same sold out institutions that profit from our exhaustion.

We win by uniting to own the whole system.

Together, we can build a 21st-century vision for labor with public works programs that put people to work at living wages, rebuilding roads, schools, water systems, and communities that have been neglected for decades. 

We will raise the minimum wage to $25 an hour and tie it to the real cost of living so paychecks stop falling behind. 

We will fight to make union organizing easier and end corporate union busting.

We will back worker-owned cooperatives because people deserve a real say where they spend their lives working.

Bread and Roses was about a fight for dignity. 

And that fight has not ended yet. 

If you believe working people built this state and should have power over its future, stand with us and help build a campaign rooted in the hard-earned lessons of labor history.

In solidarity,

The Butch Ware Team

DON’T FORGET!

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Paid for by Butch Ware for Governor 2026