My mother worked behind the same sewing machine for 33 years

Today's headline stories about jobs and the economy focus on remote workers facing a return to offices and thousands of professional hired by tech companies to deepen their capacities for artificial intelligence and machine learning. More commonplace injustices are being challenged by a growing movement for livable wages and paid family leave, against racial discrimination and immigrant exploitation and for the right to form a union. These and even worse abuses, including the pervasive use of child labor, were born in 20th century factories and mills. A profound desire to honor the contributions of millworkers is deeply rooted within Jim Warlick whose mother, the late Mary Hamilton Warlick, worked behind the same sewing machine for 33 years at the Garrou-Morgantan Full-Fashioned Hosiery Mill in Burke County, North Carolina. The newly unveiled Dignity of Work Monument recognizes those who toiled in the furniture, textile, and hosiery industries in conditions that would be entirely unacceptable today. Jim's interviews with surviving millworkers reflect both the difficulty of the work and pride in what they accomplished. Lessons about their experience will become middle school curriculum, a triumph of truth in education that should inspire all of us.