Joseph Ettor

Joseph James "Smiling Joe" Ettor (1885–1948) was an Italian-American trade union organizer who, in the middle-1910s, was one of the leading public faces of the Industrial Workers of the World. Ettor is best remembered as a defendant in a controversial trial related to a killing in the seminal Lawrence Textile Strike of 1912, in which he was acquitted of charges of having been an accessory.

Joseph James Ettor, known to his friends as "Joe" or "Smiling Joe," was born on October 6, 1885 in New York City, the son of a laborer who had emigrated to America from Italy. Ettor went to work at the age of 12 selling newspapers. He later worked as a waterboy on a railroad, as a saw-filer in a lumber mill, as a barrel-maker, as a shipyard worker, and in a cigar factory.

Joe Ettor went to work for the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in 1906 as an organizer, continuing in that capacity for the next decade. An outstanding and inspirational public speaker who was fluent in Italian and English, Ettor's earliest organizing work on behalf of the IWW took place in the Western United States, where he had worked unionizing miners and migrant laborers. He also had cut his teeth organizing foreign-born workers in the steel mills and shoe factories of the East. Ettor was active in the 1907 lumber strike in Portland, Oregon, the 1909 McKees Rocks Strike and another lesser-known steel strike later that year in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, a strike of Pennsylvania coal miners in 1909-10, and a Brooklyn shoe factory strike in 1910-11.

In 1908, Ettor was named to the governing General Executive Board of the IWW, remaining in that capacity until 1914.

On January 1, 1912, in accordance with a new state law, the textile mills of Lawrence, Massachusetts posted new rules limiting the hours of workers to 54 a week, down from a standard of 56 previously in effect. It soon became clear that the employers had no intention of adjusting wage rates upwards to compensate for the lost work time, and a strike ensued.

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