Appalachian History Series – Wage Cuts and Walkouts at Hanes Hosiery in 1932
In September 1932, workers at the Hanes Hosiery Mill in Winston-Salem walked out after wage cuts touched off one of the most significant labor protests in the city’s textile history. The strike began on September 10 with about 200 employees in the knitting and boarding rooms. By the next day, more than 1,200 of the mill’s roughly 1,800 workers had joined them. For a brief moment, one of the South’s most important hosiery plants stopped cold. Within little more than a week, however, the walkout had largely collapsed, and most employees returned without winning the wage restoration they wanted.
That short, losing strike still matters. It shows how fragile working life had become in Depression-era North Carolina, even inside a company that had recently reported record hosiery sales. It also reveals the hard limits of worker power in the South before federal labor protections had fully changed the balance between mill owners and mill hands. At Hanes, the issue was not whether the plant was busy. The issue was who would bear the cost of a tightening economy.
A Hosiery Giant in Winston-Salem
To understand why the strike mattered, it helps to know what Hanes represented in Winston-Salem by 1932. The Hanes family had already helped reshape the city’s economy after the sale of its tobacco interests. John Wesley Hanes opened Shamrock Hosiery Mills in 1901, and the business grew into Hanes Hosiery Mills, one of the signature textile firms in the city. By the 1920s, the company had moved aggressively into women’s hosiery and expanded into a massive new plant at Northwest Boulevard and Ivy Avenue.
The Ivy Avenue plant was not some struggling backwater mill. It was a major industrial complex. By 1928 the factory employed around 1,200 workers, housed 1,300 knitting machines, and had reached a capacity of 100,000 pairs of hose a day. In December 1929, the Charlotte Observer called Hanes the world’s largest circular-knit plant. That scale helps explain why a strike there drew notice. When Hanes workers walked out, they were challenging one of Winston-Salem’s industrial pillars.
Depression Conditions and the Breaking Point
The Depression battered North Carolina unevenly. Hosiery manufacturing held up better than some other lines of business, but that did not mean mill workers were secure. The state relief administration later noted that the textile industry’s dull season came in mid-summer, when mills often went to part-time schedules or closed altogether, and families in mill communities had little chance to find other income because they depended so heavily on a single occupation. In the Piedmont, where textile and tobacco factories shaped daily life, relief officials said urban case loads could swing violently when mills closed.
That context makes the Hanes dispute easier to read. According to the National Register nomination for the Ivy Avenue plant, Hanes reported in April 1932 that its first-quarter sales were larger in dozens than in any previous quarter in company history. Yet only months later, a wage reduction touched off the strike. To workers, that combination must have felt especially bitter. Strong sales did not protect them from cuts. Instead, the burden fell downward, onto the people tending the knitting and boarding rooms.
September 10, 1932
The strike began on Saturday, September 10. Contemporary reporting cited later in the National Register study says about 200 employees in the knitting and boarding rooms walked out after wages were reduced. Those were not marginal departments. In a hosiery mill, those rooms sat close to the heart of production. Once the protest started there, it had the potential to spread quickly through a tightly connected factory system.
It did. By the next day, more than 1,200 employees had joined the walkout, and the company shut the mill down. Workers claimed their pay had been cut by more than 50 percent. Their demand was not for some dramatic new scale but for a return to 80 percent of the previous year’s wage. Even that demand tells a story. These workers were not describing prosperity. They were asking to recover only part of what had been lost.
Part of a Wider North Carolina Labor Crisis
The Hanes strike did not happen in isolation. North Carolina saw more than a dozen textile strikes between 1931 and 1933, many tied directly to wage reductions. In 1932 alone, workers in High Point, Rowan County, Rockingham, and Spindale also struck over pay cuts and intensified work demands. Statewide, textile workers were pushing back against a labor system that expected them to accept less money, less security, and often more work in the middle of the Depression. The Hanes walkout belongs in that same pattern, even if Winston-Salem’s hosiery story has not always been remembered alongside better-known textile strikes elsewhere in the state.
That wider context also helps explain the speed of the Hanes action. Workers were living in a moment when wage cutting had become a recurring fact of life across the industry. News of one strike in one town traveled quickly to another. By September 1932, many North Carolina mill hands knew they were not alone, and they knew exactly what was at stake when management reached again for the wage scale.
A Defeat in Little More Than a Week
The strike rose quickly, but it did not last. The best reconstruction says that by September 19, all but about 300 dissatisfied workers had returned to the job, and they did so without any change in the wage schedule. In practical terms, that meant the company outlasted the walkout. The protest had shown how much anger the cuts produced, but it had not forced Hanes to yield.
That outcome fit a larger pattern in North Carolina textile history. Mill workers could and did resist, sometimes in impressive numbers, but unions had struggled to gain durable footing in the state, and employers usually held the stronger hand. The Hanes strike stands as a clear local example of that imbalance. It was large enough to shut the factory, but not strong enough to break management’s position.
What the Strike Reveals About Hanes and Winston-Salem
The 1932 strike is also a reminder that industrial success stories often look different from the factory floor. Public histories of Hanes rightly emphasize growth, innovation, and scale. Winston-Salem’s textile story includes expansion, new buildings, new product lines, and national prominence. But inside that same story were wage disputes, work discipline, and moments when workers concluded that walking out was the only answer left to them.
Later events suggest that the underlying tensions did not disappear. The same National Register history notes another series of labor disputes at Hanes in 1936, including strikes over mandatory fifty-hour workweeks with no increase in pay. In other words, the 1932 walkout was not a strange one-off episode. It was one flare in a longer struggle over wages, hours, and control inside one of Winston-Salem’s leading mills.
Remembering the Hanes Hosiery Strike
Today, the strike survives mostly in scattered newspaper references, preservation work, and the physical memory of the mill itself. The National Register nomination for the Ivy Avenue plant preserves the clearest modern summary of what happened in September 1932 and ties it back to the local press coverage from the time. Digital Forsyth’s photographs, including a 1939 interior image of the mill, help modern readers picture the enormous industrial world in which Hanes workers labored. Those surviving records do not give us every voice from the shop floor, but they give us enough to recover the outline of a real confrontation between labor and capital in Depression-era Winston-Salem.
The Hanes Hosiery strike did not end in victory. It did not produce a famous martyr or a sweeping settlement. But it deserves to be remembered because it shows ordinary textile workers trying, however briefly, to draw a line. In a city where Hanes stood for industrial power, more than a thousand workers answered wage cuts with collective action. Even in defeat, that remains an important part of Winston-Salem’s history.
Sources & Further Reading
Fearnbach, Heather. Hanes Hosiery Mill, Ivy Avenue Plant. National Register of Historic Places Registration Form. Raleigh: North Carolina Historic Preservation Office, 2016. https://files.nc.gov/ncdcr/nr/FY8833.pdf.
“Strike Begun in Twin City.” Charlotte Observer, September 10, 1932. Quoted and cited in Heather Fearnbach, Hanes Hosiery Mill, Ivy Avenue Plant. https://files.nc.gov/ncdcr/nr/FY8833.pdf.
“Mill to Close to Avert Trouble.” Charlotte Observer, September 12, 1932. Quoted and cited in Heather Fearnbach, Hanes Hosiery Mill, Ivy Avenue Plant. https://files.nc.gov/ncdcr/nr/FY8833.pdf.
“Strike Ended at Winston-Salem.” Statesville Record and Landmark, September 20, 1932. Quoted and cited in Heather Fearnbach, Hanes Hosiery Mill, Ivy Avenue Plant. https://files.nc.gov/ncdcr/nr/FY8833.pdf.
“Report New Record in Hosiery Sales.” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, April 23, 1932. Quoted and cited in Heather Fearnbach, Hanes Hosiery Mill, Ivy Avenue Plant. https://files.nc.gov/ncdcr/nr/FY8833.pdf.
North Carolina Emergency Relief Administration. Emergency Relief in North Carolina: A Record of the Development and the Activities of the North Carolina Emergency Relief Administration, 1932-1935. Raleigh: Edwards & Broughton, 1936. https://docsouth.unc.edu/nc/emergencyrelief/emergencyrelief.html.
Monachino, Rose F. Hosiery Production in the United States with Special Reference to the Use of Cotton. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Bureau of Home Economics, 1939. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/da/Hosiery_production_in_the_United_States_with_special_reference_to_the_use_of_cotton%2C_by_Rose_F._Monachino_%28IA_CAT31039686%29.pdf.
Fries, Adelaide L. “One Hundred Years of Textiles in Salem.” North Carolina Historical Review 27, no. 1 (January 1950). https://digital.ncdcr.gov/Documents/Detail/north-carolina-historical-review-1950-january/3705620.
Digital Forsyth. “The Textile Industry.” Forsyth County Public Library. https://www.digitalforsyth.org/photos/stories/the-textile-industry.
Digital Forsyth. “Interior of Hanes Hosiery Mill, 1939.” Forsyth County Public Library. https://www.digitalforsyth.org/photos/12038.
NC State University Libraries. “Hanes Hosiery.” Textiles History. https://history.textiles.ncsu.edu/textile-companies/hanes-hosiery/.
NCPedia. “The Textile Industry and Winston-Salem.” https://www.ncpedia.org/anchor/textile-industry-and-winston.
NCPedia. “Hanes Brands.” https://www.ncpedia.org/hanes-brands.
Bevis, Spencer. “Textile Strikes in North Carolina.” NC Miscellany, December 28, 2020. https://blogs.lib.unc.edu/ncm/2020/12/28/textile-strikes-in-north-carolina/.
“Tobacco to Textiles, Hanes Corporation: How It All Began.” Hanes Hosiery News, Fall 1972. Quoted and cited in Heather Fearnbach, Hanes Hosiery Mill, Ivy Avenue Plant. https://files.nc.gov/ncdcr/nr/FY8833.pdf.
Author Note: This is one of those stories that shows how labor history often turns on ordinary pay envelopes and factory floors. I wanted to trace this strike through the strongest surviving sources and place it in the wider history of Appalachian industry.