International Ladies Garment Workers Union

INTERNATIONAL LADIES GARMENT WORKERS UNION

INTERNATIONAL LADIES GARMENT WORKERS UNION (ILGWU), founded in 1900, a major factor in American labor, radical, socialist, and Jewish history. The first leaders of the ILGWU, moderate Jewish socialists and labor veterans, were the victorious survivors of many years of labor struggles and internecine political warfare in the New York garment industry, which had been inundated by immigrant Jewish "greenhorns." These "Columbus tailors" found their advocate in Abraham Cahan's Jewish Daily Forward, which was struggling to assimilate them into socialist-flavored Americanism.

As a small, moribund, craft-minded organization, the early ILGWU narrowly beat off an Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) challenge in 1905–1907.But an immigrant flood revitalized the Jewish labor movement in the aftermath of the 1905 Russian Revolution. Radicalized by the revolution and trained in trade unionism by the Jewish Labor Bund, this huge wave of immigrants waged a series of mass garment strikes. The 1909–1910 "rising of the twenty thousand" in the New York shirt-waist industry was the first mass strike of women workers in American history. The weak ILGWU left much of the day-to-day administration of the strike in the hands of rank-and-file workers, laborite-feminist activists from the Women's Trade Union League, and woman volunteers from the Socialist Party (SP).The success of the strike paved the way for the unionizing "great revolt" of fifty thousand New York cloak makers, mostly males, in 1910, which established the ILGWU as the third-largest member of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) by 1914.

The "great revolt" was resolved through a "protocol of peace," brokered by Louis Brandeis, that was widely hailed as the Progressive Era model for permanent cooperation between capital and labor. This Progressive pipe dream broke down rapidly. The ILGWU was shaken

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by a massive cloak makers' rebellion against the protocol that prefigured later internal conflicts. The combatants reached a settlement through SP mediation, solidifying the union's Socialist ties, and the ILGWU became a powerful American institution. The union initially opposed World War I, and hailed the Russian Revolution, but its officers continued to face rank-and-file leftist dissent. They hinted that youthful female dissidents radicalized by the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire and revolution abroad were victims of sexual frustration.

During the great labor upsurge of 1919, dissidents formed workers councils, inspired by workers' councils in Seattle and Petrograd. The ILGWU formed the strongest trade union base of the early American Communist Party (CP).The political, generational, ethnic, and gender contradictions within the ILGWU led to a decade of internecine warfare between pro-CP insurgents and pro-SP union leaders. The hardnosed anticommunist Morris Sigman, a former Wobbly (IWW member), kept a tenuous grasp on the ILGWU's national machinery but had to concede control of the New York ILGWU to the rebels. The peak of the insurgency was the left-led 1926 New York cloak makers' strike. The strike achieved ambiguous results, which Sigman seized on as his golden opportunity to purge the left New York officers, touching off a bloody civil war in the whole garment industry. Several lives were lost, and scores of workers were hospitalized. ILGWU leaders managed to regain control with assistance from business, government, and organized crime. The ILGWU's street general was SP spokesperson Abe Beckerman, who was involved in the Jewish gangster "Lepke" Buchalter's infamous "Murder Incorporated." When the dust cleared, little was left of the ILGWU. Wages plunged, hours lengthened, and sweatshop conditions were restored.

The left attempted to replace the ILGWU with a "red union," but the effort was stillborn due to bureaucratic dithering by the "Lovestonites," a CP faction led by Jay Lovestone, and ultraleftist policies imposed by the increasingly Stalinized CP. The ensuing purge of the Lovestonites from the party enabled the ILGWU to regain control of the trade.

The ILGWU experienced a resurgence during the New Deal. The Jewish needle trades unions had a friend in the White House in Franklin D. Roosevelt. The massive ILGWU strikes in 1933 and 1934 benefited from a rare combination of government sympathy, weak resistance from manufacturers, and a tremendous release of pent-up militancy. Soon the ILGWU totally dominated

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the industry. The ILGWU leader David Dubinsky, a veteran of the Jewish Labor Bund, became one of America's most important union leaders. A Tammany politician quipped that "the Jews have drei veltn—di velt, yene velt, un Roosevelt" (three worlds—this world, the other world, and Roosevelt).Consequently, during the Holocaust the ILGWU did not militantly challenge Roosevelt's refusal to admit Jewish refugees. As late as 1947 hourly wages for ILGWU members were higher than wages for autoworkers. The New Deal alliance between the Roosevelt administration and the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), which shaped later American trade unionism, was molded on the template of the special relationship between Roosevelt and Jewish Socialist needle trades officials like Dubinsky.

During the Roosevelt and Truman administrations the ILGWU pioneered many hallmarks of American unionism. But while most American workers experienced dramatically increased prosperity in the Eisenhower era, ILGWU leaders, fearful of nonunion competition, orchestrated a decline in garment wage levels that made the ILGWU notorious for "fighting for lower wages." The ILGWU experienced a major demographic transformation. Jews exited the shop floor, replaced by blacks, Puerto Ricans, and eventually Asians. By 2002, Jews in the garment industry were predominantly union officers or employers.

After World War II the ILGWU, in close collaboration with the U.S. government, threw its considerable resources into the struggle against communism. Love-stone became the ILGWU director of international affairs and the key personal link between the AFL-CIO, led by George Meany, a Dubinsky protégé, and the Central Intelligence Agency. After Dubinsky retired in 1966, the ILGWU became one of the foremost labor opponents of foreign imports.

In the late twentieth century the rapidly declining ILGWU attempted to organize new immigrant sweat-shop labor and defended the rights of undocumented workers. But the old pattern of collaboration with employers to protect the industry persisted. Indeed, some Hong Kong sweatshops moved to New York in the 1980s and set up as union shops. Former ILGWU officials dominated The Union of Needletrades, Industrial, and Textile Employees, which was formed in 1995 through a merger of the ILGWU with the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union, an old rival based in the men's clothing industry.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Dubinsky, David, and A.H. Raskin. David Dubinsky: A Life with Labor. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1977.

Epstein, Melech. Jewish Labor in U.S.A: An Industrial, Political, and Cultural History of the Jewish Labor Movement. 2 vols. New York: 1950–1953.Reprint, New York: Ktav Publishing House, 1969.

Foner, Philip S. "Revolt of the Garment Workers (I and II)." In History of the Labor Movement in the United States. Vol.5. New York: International Publishers, 1988.

Gurowsky, David. "Factional Disputes within the ILGWU, 1919–1928." Ph.D. diss., State University of New York at Binghamton, 1978.

Kwong, Peter, and JoAnn Lum. "Hard Labor in Chinatown: How the Other Half Lives Now." Nation, 18 June 1988.

Liebman, Arthur. Jews and the Left. New York: Wiley, 1979.

Myerson, Michael. "ILGWU: Fighting for Lower Wages." Ramparts, October 1969.

Tyler, Gus. Look for the Union Label: A History of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union. Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1995.

John Dewey Holmes

See also Clothing Industry ; Labor ; Trade Unions .