Hillman, Sidney

Hillman, Sidney (1887–1946), labor leader.Born in Zagare, Lithuania, and reared in an orthodox Jewish family, Sidney Hillman rebelled as a teenager by joining Jewish social‐democratic trade unionists and revolutionaries fighting tsarist rule. Arrested twice in 1905, he joined the emigration of Lithuanian Jews to the United States. In 1909 in Chicago he began his American career as a labor leader among fellow immigrants. In 1914, at age twenty‐eight, he became the first president of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (ACWA), a position he held until his death.

Hillman's idealism, influenced by the practices of American trade unionists and Progressive Era reformers, led him to promote industrial unionism as a social democratic reform of American capitalism. His union's collective bargaining agreements with employers in the men's clothing industry brought a forty‐four‐hour work week, workshop efficiency, discipline, social welfare benefits, and arbitration arrangements for stabilizing a conflict‐ridden industry. Without severing his links to Jewish labor movements at home and abroad, he steered the multiethnic union—it had 177,000 members by 1920—through the turmoil of the post–World War I decade: Red scares; trade union decline; and, in the needle trades, competing passions of socialism and nationalism. During the Great Depression and the New Deal Era, Hillman became a leader in the campaign to organize industrial workers throughout the economy. As vice president of the Committee of Industrial Organizations (1935) and in 1936 in coalition with the Labor Nonpartisan League and American Labor Party, he allied with President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the New Deal. In 1940 Roosevelt appointed him codirector of the Office of Production Management. Hillman fought for Roosevelt's reelection in 1944 and played a key role in the political solidification of organized workers as a liberal force in the Democratic party. After Roosevelt's death, Hillman worked for a World Federation of Labor, which he envisioned as part of a new world order under U.S.–Soviet leadership.
See also Congress of Industrial Organizations; Immigration; Labor Movements.

Bibliography

Steven Fraser , Labor Will Rule: Sidney Hillman and the Rise of American Labor, 1991.
Gerd Korman , New Jewish Politics for an American Labor Leader, 1942–1946, American Jewish History 82 (1994): 195–213.

Gerd Korman