Workers throughout the country had over the previous decade sought to secure shorter working days and higher wages, but many of these efforts and strikes failed.
Inspired by Boston, workers in a number of trades in Philadelphia began a campaign to secure a ten-hour day, and after receiving support from professionals in the city, were almost universally successful.
They also demanded an end to the use of fines to enforce discipline in the mills, wage withholding, and the company store system in the town.
Due to this last fact, debate around the strike quickly became infused with nativist and anti-immigrant rhetoric, especially from the Lowell Intelligencer, a pro-management newspaper.
According to historians David Roediger and Philip Foner, "...the strike, which added a dozen hours to each worker's weekly leisure, must have been counted a success by the children initiating it.