Just before the firing started.

After long accepting low pay, long hours, and dangerous working conditions, Polish oil refinery workers in Bayonne, New Jersey, walked off the job in 1915. Virtually the entire Polish immigrant community supported them, and only police violence and hired thugs succeeded in breaking the strike. In this photograph, striking workers confront company guards outside the Standard Oil Works moments before the private police opened fire. Five strikers were killed by gunfire, but workers elected to strike again the next year.

Source: Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.