Fur and Leather Workers

FUR AND LEATHER WORKERS. The International Fur and Leather Workers Union (IFLWU) is a prime example of a successful Communist-led American trade union. Its success was largely due to the efforts of Ben Gold and close associates such as Irving Potash, Jack Schneider, and Joseph Winogradsky. Gold joined the Communist movement from its inception and remained a member until compelled to resign in 1950.

The fur workers union of the 1910s was controlled by right-wing Socialists and trade union bureaucrats. Gold, who had been born in Bessarabia in 1898, entered the fur industry in 1912 and quickly drifted into the orbit of the left-wing Socialists. In 1917 he served as a leader of militant fur workers in a Montreal strike. Returning to New York, he became head of a progressive faction that sought to take over the leadership of the union. Through considerable courage and the skillful handling of strikes, Red-baiting, and other political challenges, the Gold group won the loyalty of the predominantly Jewish rank and file.

Typical of the leadership’s foresight and determination was the organization of some three hundred shops employing fifteen hundred to two thousand Greek workers. Strikes had previously been lost or weakened when work at struck shops flowed to the nonunion Greek sector. The former leadership considered the Greeks unorganizable, but Gold, using Greek-speaking organizers from the Communist Party, unionized the Greek shops in a brief whirlwind campaign in 1926.

Shortly after the Greek shops were organized, the union called an industrywide strike. A bitter and difficult conflict was capped by a substantial victory that firmly established the Gold leadership. The forty-hour work week was won, wages raised, legal holidays obtained, working conditions improved, and job security protected. In subsequent years the union would build upon this base to establish wages, hours, and conditions that were among the best in the garment industry.

Employers had often used gunmen and “sluggers” to work their will in the garment districts of New York. During the 1930s the fur bosses hired gangs led by Louis “Lepke” Buchalter and Jacob “Gurrah” Shapiro. The union formed defense units and bested the hoodlums in a bloody series of confrontations that resulted in serious injuries and deaths on both sides. Almost alone among the garment unions, the fur workers could boast that they had defended their interests against gangsters without having to hire gangsters of their own to do the job. The battle with hoodlums is a central theme in Leonard Kriegel’s Quitting Time (1982), a novel loosely based on the union’s leaders and history. Lepke would become notorious in later years as the main figure in Murder, Inc.

By the end of the 1930s the fur workers had organized one hundred percent of their industry and had become pioneer members of the Congress of Industrial Organizations. Their succuss in fur led to a request by leather workers for affiliation. Wages, conditons, and hours for leather workers were despicable, and the existing union was collapsing rather than growing. Under the Gold administration, the new IFLWU was able to win benefits for leather workers that were comparable to those of the fur workers. Membership in the IFLWU swelled to 100,000.

While the union focused most of its energies on trade union issues, it was part of the Left culture of its time. The union sent an ambulance to the Spanish Republic, and some of its leaders and members fought in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. The union later sent funds for a hospital in China set up by Dr. Norman Bethune for use by Mao Tse-tung’s guerrilla army. In later years the union would question the Korean War and offer guards for Paul Robeson’s threatened concerts in Peekskill, New York. While only a few members were African American, the union was a strong advocate of full civil rights for all races and elected African Americans to union posts. The Greek section of the union was the focus of Left cultural life of New York City’s Greek community and the leader in Greek war-relief work directed through the trade union movement. More broadly, the fur workers had close working relations with the American Labor Party and its various initiatives.

In the postwar era, the IFLWU came under heavy pressure resulting from the Taft-Hartley Act. Gold had always avowed his Communist views and had held visible posts in the Communist Party, but his leadership group was a true alliance of Communists, Socialists, and liberals. The union was a model of internal democracy and was free of economic scandals. Gold voluntarily resigned his Party membership to comply with provisions of Taft-Hartley, but he did so in a letter that praised Communist objectives and practice. His resignation was termed “fraudulent” and “insincere” and led to long court battles in which radical East Harlem politician Vito Marcantonio served as Gold’s counsel. Although Gold ultimately won in the courts, the survival of the IFLWU required additional concessions to the reunited American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO).

Other IFLWU leaders with past or present Communist affiliations had to resign their posts. Some of the Greek Communists would, in fact, be deported under the McCarran-Walter Act. Thus purged of card-carrying Reds, the IFLWU made an accommodation in 1955 by which it became the Fur and Leather Department of the Amalgamated Meat Cutters. Patrick Gorman, the secretary-treasurer of the Amalgamated, was a longtime socialist and a militant trade unionist. He integrated the IFLWU staff into important posts in the Amalgamated, which grew rapidly and took progressive stances on civil rights and was an early opponent of the war in Vietnam. In 1979 the Amalgamated merged with the Retail Clerks to form the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, the largest in the AFL-CIO. The remaining fur and leather locals, greatly reduced in size owing to contraction of their industry, retained some sense of their special history and a commitment to a socially oriented labor movement.

Foner, Philip S. The Fur and Leather Workers Union. Newark, N.J.: Nordan Press, 1950.

Ginger, Ann Fagan, and David Christiano, eds. The Cold War against Labor, 2 vols. Berkeley, Calif.: Meiklejohn Civil Liberties Institute, 1987.

Gold, Ben. Memoirs. New York: William Howard, 1988.