The workers in the spinning mills worked between 11 and 14 hours a day, six days a week, mostly women and girls, many of whom came from nearby Italy. They were employed as young as nine years old because they could earn a minimum wage. Their young age was justified by the argument that it took years for them to learn the trade properly and that their employment would end once they married. Working in the spinning mills was a very important social event because it offered one of the few opportunities for peasant families to find employment and supplement their meager agricultural incomes.
The factory environment was unhealthy due to the humidity, harsh working conditions, and poor nutrition, which had serious consequences, especially for the youngest girls. While working, they were not allowed to speak, but they could recite the rosary and sing since they did not cause distraction, allowing them to find some solace in the hectic pace of the factory.
When the federal law on factory work came into force in 1877, which banned the hiring of workers under 14 and reduced working hours to 11, there was widespread opposition in Ticino and frequent violations, so much so that for almost twenty years an exemption was granted lowering the age to 12. When the exemption expired in 1899, the Lucchini spinning mill in Lugano, which employed more than 400 female workers, more than a hundred of whom were between 12 and 14 years old, deeming it essential to hire low-cost workers to compete with Italian competition, moved production near Como, where the law still permitted the hiring of girls as young as 9.