A VIsit To The Boott Cotton Mill & Museum In Lowell

      There are times when you are reminded that you have it much better, in terms of health and quality of life, than others in the world and especially people who lived in the past. That reminder can come in many different forms; it can be a television special on the working conditions of Foxconn buildings, where many products from companies like Apple and Nintendo, or it can be as simple as Eddie Vedder covering a James Taylor song about a young girl working in the mills. In my opinion, however, the best way to place yourself in the shoes of someone less fortunate is to visit the places that are so often talked about. A local example of this is the old Boott Cotton mill, which has now become a museum about the mill. My visit to the Boott Cotton Museum (as well as the Foxconn documentary and Eddie Vedder cover) has educated me on the conditions of those who work in these mills and factories when they are only useful for what they can produce.

The front of the Boott Cotton Museum

    

      The very first thing I noticed about the Boott Cotton Mill was the courtyard area within the mill. While there was not a cloud in the sky on the day I and some friends went and the people who take care of the mill had done a great job of preserving the building, I could only imagine how the workers years ago must have felt. The courtyard was essentially a box, and considering that the sky would be hard to see with the smoke emanating from the buildings and the somewhat bland-looking buildings themselves, it must have been a very bleak place to relax in between work sessions. If this was what the outside was like, I thought, the inside must have been even worse.

The courtyard of the mill

    

      For the most part, I was right; the inside of the mill only confirmed my concerns on the working conditions of the workers. The first room of the museum (after an information desk) was the weave room, a relatively large room consisting of dozens of weaving machines. The machines were in straight lines running vertically across the room, in a manner similar to an assembly line. A sign outside stated that the room was not an exact replication; the noise wasn’t as loud, not every machine was running, and the air was (thankfully) not filled with cotton particles. Even with these considerations, it still looked like a terrible place to work; the sign even read, “Try to imagine working all day, day after day for years, in the mills.”

The Weave Room

    

      The weave room actually reminded me of the working rooms in Foxconn today. They both have the same assembly line style of production, and both places seem to be absolutely terrible places to work, where each worker is thought of not as a human being, but as a machine that is swiftly replaced as soon as it is rendered useless. Both places also seem to be known for the abuse that their workers endure, whether it be physical (a video interview of the millworkers in the museum was full of stories of injuries and deaths) or mental (the stress put on Foxconn workers has been so great that the company had to implement nets to catch suicidal workers).

    

      If there is anything that the mill museum does incredibly well, it’s that it gives a great view into the lives of the workers. Aside from the aforementioned video and weave room, there are exhibits on the various different kinds of workers and their positions and purpose in the mill, physical examples of the fabric that the workers would produce, various testimonies and quotes from millworkers, and scale models of the mill itself. Each of these things, like Eddie Vedder’s cover of “Millworker,” convey the trials that the workers went through every day, thus humanizing the people who were considered means to an end by the people who ran the mills.

    
      My visit to the Boott Cotton Mill/Museum has helped me understand the working conditions and overall quality of life of millworkers in ways that people like Eddie Vedder and James Taylor have communicated before. It has also made me sympathize with workers who are facing these issues today in companies like Foxconn. While I may never truly understand what it was/is like to work in places like these, I believe that this experience has taught me to not take the good things in my life for granted.