Weinstock, Louis

WEINSTOCK, LOUIS (1903–1994). Louis Weinstock was a union organizer and leader of the Communist Party USA. Born in 1903 in Satoraljaujhely, Hungary, he immigrated to the United States in April 1924. Settling in New York, he soon found work with Local 499 of the Painters’ Union whose members mainly spoke German and Hungarian. As he learned the trade, Louis discovered the corruption in union leadership and took part in the left-wing rank-and-file movement focused on giving decision-making power to union members and taking it back from organized crime groups that had infiltrated New York unions. He served as Secretary and later President of District Council 9 of the union from 1926 to 1937.

The successful reform in the Painters’ Union strongly influenced other building trade unions to challenge their leadership and help develop better working conditions, pay and benefits. The Painters’ Union was also one of the New York unions which successfully increased membership among Hispanic and Black workers.

Louis Weinstock was a driving force in the rank-and-file movement to support unemployment insurance within the American Federation of Labor, despite the AFL Executive Council rejection of federal unemployment insurance as a Communist plot. He participated in the 1931 National Hunger March and became Secretary of the New York AFL’s Trade Union Committee for Unemployment Insurance and Relief. He partnered with Harry Bridges of the West Coast Longshoreman and Elmer Brown of the Typographers Union to build support among rank-and-file and leadership to change the Council’s position. Their support helped lead to Congressional approval and to President Franklin D. Roosevelt signing the Social Security Act of 1935. Weinstock eventually became known as “Mr. May Day” for his decades of organizing the annual New York parade, which at its height had more than 50,000 participants.

A member of the National Committee of the CPUSA, Weinstock developed plans for implementing the Party’s labor policies through union organizing and education. After World War II, he traveled to Europe and made connections with trade unions in England, France and Eastern Europe, emphasizing his own connections with the Hungarian trade union movement.

Weinstock regularly taught labor studies and the history of labor at the Jefferson School and the Faculty of Social Science in New York. He also gave frequent lectures around the country on labor issues and union organizing in English and in Hungarian.
In 1952, along with 16 other Communist leaders, Weinstock found himself indicted under the Smith Act for the purported crime of “teaching labor history.” Convicted and sentenced to three years in prison and a $6,000 fine, Weinstock he returned to his role on the National Committee of the CPUSA and became business manager of The Daily Worker.
Although ill health caused his retirement in 1963, he and his wife Rose continued their lifelong activism, supporting programs for senior citizens in the United States and internationally until his death from a heart condition.

Louis Weinstock Papers and Photographs. Guide. Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives. New York University. https://dlib.nyu.edu/findingaids/html/tamwag/wag_013/bioghist.html

“Radical agitation helped bring Social Security and much of the New Deal into being.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/20/opinion/biden-fdr-left-new-deal.html