International Ladies Garment Workers Union

INTERNATIONAL LADIES GARMENT WORKERS UNION. A major center of Jewish immigrant radicalism and socialistic sentiments, the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) has also been marked historically by bitter divisions among the Left and by particular labor problems of the trade. It has, alongside its dynamism, also manifested a deeply antiradical sentiment and an abiding rule of male officials over a predominantly female work force. As a labor organization, it has nevertheless had many inspiring moments, and made great contributions to its members’ welfare. As a factional battleground, it offered sobering lessons in the losses, moral and strategic, self-inflicted by American radicalism.

The early socialism of ILGWU leaders was shaped by their experiences in the Jewish Bund, along with a scattering of other Eastern European revolutionary organizations. The sweatshop, together with popular traditions of Jewish messianism, created the context for garment workers’ response to socialistic ideals. Irish, American-born, and (with important exceptions) Italian workers in the industry remained largely immune to such appeals, even while often willing to follow radical leaders in practical activities.

Early struggles roiled the Jewish Lower East Side ghetto. During the early 1890s, Jewish anarchists and socialists struggled among themselves while they attempted to create garment locals and to promote the much-anticipated revolutionary transformation. In 1896 the Progressive Cloak Makers joined the Socialist Trades and Labor Alliance, sponsored by the Socialist Labor Party, only to be denounced by the rival United Brotherhood of Cloak Makers, led by anarchists and moderate socialists. The founding of the ILGWU in 1901 left behind the Socialist Labor Party’s failed union affiliate and placed the ILGWU in an ambiguous relation with the emerging Socialist Party. New York garment local leaders, many of them socialists, intermittently sought a modus vivendi with nonsocialist national leaders of the ILGWU, compromising for practical reasons the vision of a socialist union. Related to political issues stood the problem of organizational structure, acute for an ILGWU divided in locals along craft, sex, or ethnic lines.

The syndicalism of many Italian garment workers, and the radicalism of Jewish veterans of the 1905 Revolution in Russia, posed both a serious possibility of defections to the more extreme Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and contradictorily provided shock troops for militant ILGWU advance. With the help of the American Federation of Labor (AFL), and given the IWW’s own weakness, the threat of dual unionism receded. ILGWU leaders continued, into the early 1910s, to join in the appeals of employers and religious leaders to IWW strikers to return to work in garment-related trades. Meanwhile, the growing popularity of Socialist electoral campaigns, and the ardent support of ILGWU unionization by the Jewish Daily Forward, cemented Jewish loyalties to a political socialism.

The 1909–1910 “rising of the twenty thousand” women shirtwaist makers forced the reorganization of the crucial and very radical Local 25, itself rising to a membership of ten thousand. Socialist agitation for the strike also marked a high point of women socialists’ propaganda efforts on behalf of women workers. This strike paved the way for the cloak makers’ strike of 1910, involving 50,000 workers that resulted in the “Protocol of Peace,” with improved wages, sweatshop supervision, and a fifty-hour week. The protocol, soon viewed by much of the membership and leaders of dissident locals as suspending class conflict by removing the strike weapon from workers’ hands, was nevertheless sustained under the new socialist president, Benjamin Schlesinger. The ILGWU, by now the third-largest union of the AFL, was also increasingly outright in endorsing socialist policies.
Indeed, in this “golden era” of the Socialist Party, the ILGWU facilitated through its membership an array of support for radical institutions and movements. Not only socialist candidates and the Jewish Daily Forward, but radical cultural societies, woman suffrage campaigns, Yiddish schools, and an array of publications from Italian anarcho-syndicalist to Jewish anarchist to Labor Zionist, all found a day-to-day convergence of supporters at ILGWU-organized jobs and union meetings. Meyer London’s 1914 election to Congress owed much to ILGWU members, as did near-misses and strong campaigns by various socialist candidates. Juliet Stuart Poyntz’s emergence from prominent research positions to become educational director of the ILGWU, 1915–1919, facilitated the formation of Unity House, a summer retreat whose comradely atmosphere (especially for young women of varying ethnic backgrounds) typified the “leisure” side of union work at its contemporary best.

On the other hand, the ILGWU drew increasingly close to AFL leaders on a more than practical basis. While proposing socialist resolutions at AFL conventions, the union leadership ardently defended the AFL against radicals’ criticism. This approach alienated many labor activists, not only in the fading IWW but also in independent unions (such as the Amalgamated Clothing Workers) formed where AFL bodies had failed. During World War I, the robust ILGWU courageously defended official socialist policies and even initially endorsed the Bolshevik Revolution. Yet the challenges rising up from the ferment, mainly the call for more labor militancy, centered in the Current Affairs Club of mostly young women enamored of Russian events. These women inspired leadership ridicule, leaders openly suggesting that the women must be sexually frustrated. Bureaucratic repression of activist challenges followed, setting a pattern for decades to come. In the recession of the early 1920s, with working conditions deteriorating and wages swiftly declining, political and generational conflicts bought much internecine warfare.

The Trade Union Educational League, founded by Communists and led by William Z. Foster, had one of its strongest bases inside the ILGWU, and also some of its most sophisticated opponents. A shop-delegate movement sought to democratize union leadership drastically, returning it to the shop floor and to the hands of talented Communist activists. The high point of “workers’ control” movements in contemporary labor swept up Charles Zimmerman, a young darling of the trade and a most energetic Communist union figure, inspired by the IWW. His enthusiasm for rank-and-file democracy prompted ILGWU leaders to divide Local 25, in order to weaken the Left. Leaders also demanded that all shop leagues cease activities and amended the ILGWU constitution to forbid membership to anyone holding a separate labor affiliation, that is, to the TUEL. In 1925 Communist garment leader Louis Hyman ran a close second to Morris Sigman in the balloting for union president. Disaster for the Left followed. In 1926, Communists led a six-month, unsuccessful general strike of the garment trade in New York, at the end of which many left-wing locals were suspended. ILGWU leaders and institutions had meanwhile shrewdly continued to support Socialist Party candidates and gave special urgency to the 1924 La Follette-Progressive campaign. In the following year, they turned toward major-party politics AFL-style, first of New York governor Alfred Smith, and then Franklin Roosevelt. A vision of socialism remained within the ILGWU, but was increasingly sentimental.

The ILGWU meanwhile played a major role in the 1930s Left politics, both public and internecine. The division of the Communist Party between supporters of Moscow and supporters of “Right” Communism (in the United States, supporters of Jay Lovestone) in 1928 affected the ILGWU more than any other union. Here, Lovestone’s intimates, including Zimmerman, used their union base in Local 22 freely for political ends. When Communists abandoned the ILGWU for the Trade Union Unity League’s Needle Trades Workers Industrial Union, Zimmerman and his supporters remained with the union. The return of relative peace within a much-weakened ILGWU facing the Depression made Zimmerman and Lovestone all the more valuable to the new ILGWU leadership of David Dubinsky, himself a former Bundist. Will Herberg, chief Lovestoneite theoretician and decades later a prestigious conservative theologian, became educational director of Local 22. The Lovestoneite weekly, Workers Age, operated almost as a house organ within the union’s upper ranks.
Yiddish-speaking anarchists had their own special role in these struggles. Dwindling in numbers from a generational lapse, as young radical Jews moved toward Communist sympathies, anarchists found in Local 22 their main base of union members. They had bitterly opposed Communists from the early 1920s for their own reasons and provided support for the union leadership via their own, bitterly anticommunist ILGWU-oriented organ, Der Yunyon Arbeter. As it did with the Lovestoneites, ILGWU leaders materially reciprocated affections, subsidizing the weekly Freie Arbeter Shtimme in a variety of ways until the paper’s demise in 1976.

Their own union alternative a failure, Communists rejoined the ILGWU in 1934, when the beginnings of a massive National Recovery Act-inspired industrywide success made Local 22 for a time the largest union local in the United States. Through the 1930s, Communists in the ILGWU campaigned within the union on various issues, for and against administrations, but they no longer seriously threatened Dubinsky’s or Zimmerman’s authority. As individuals, indeed, many supported the massive expansion of leisure and cultural activities, especially in Local 22, and Zimmerman’s generally keen attention to working conditions. As a group, Communists coalesced with Dubinsky’s important support for the American Labor Party (ALP), bringing them together with Jewish socialist old-timers and a mostly younger Communist cohort in a common cause, with the general support for the New Deal that this orientation contained. Symbolically, the stage production of Pins and Needles, labor’s greatest theatrical extravaganza, heavily supported by and with a union cast disproportionately taken from Local 22. The productions, traveling widely, offered a moment of class unity in a world of political conflicts.

Personal as much as political conflicts within the upper reaches of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), with Dubinsky himself usually at the center of the fractiousness, seriously affecting the influence of American Left at large. In 1937, Dubinsky began to separate his union leadership from that of John L. Lewis and from Sidney Hillman, earlier seen as his mentor. Dubinsky became far more willing than his fellow industrial union leaders to conciliate differences with the rock-ribbed conservative AFL. He was said to conclude privately that the CIO was less a vast industrial union movement than a conspiracy between Franklin Roosevelt and the Communist Party to take over organized labor. Above all, he resented the personal status of Sidney Hillman far exceeding his own in the growing empire of garment trades unions.

In 1938, a developing quarrel within the ALP found Dubinsky bitterly opposed to the nomination of Sidney Hillman as senatorial candidate in New York state. Old-line socialists, supported by the Jewish Daily Forward, successfully lined up with Dubinsky Meantime, Dubinsky and his lieutenant Jay Lovestone reverted to the conspiratorial behavior practiced within the Communist Party of the 1920s. Under the guidance of Lovestone, the conservative Homer Martin, first president of the United Automobile Workers (UAW), talented Communist unionists were to be purged, a move that largely failed when union members voted Martin out of office. Stung by the failure, Martin sought unsuccessfully to lead a faction of the UAW back into the AFL, using a future intelligence agent of note, Irving Brown, as his operative.

Dubinsky now withdrew the ILGWU from the CIO and returned his union to the AFL. He sought to discredit the rising industrial union federation as a wrongful, Communist-guided split from the AFL. Meanwhile, within the ILGWU, Dubinsky and Charles Zimmerman hired Lewis Corey, a former Communist turned anti-communist, as Educational Director of Local 22. Corey suspended the extensive recreational and cultural activities of the ILGWU, from choruses to mandolin “orchestras,” as a waste of union resources and presumably a source of continuing Communist influence. This closure, whatever its reasons, offered a severe blow to Yiddish cultural activities within the labor world.

Tensions increased still further in the early 1940s, when Franklin Roosevelt coined the phrase, “Clear it with Sidney!” to show how much he depended on Hillman’s advice in matters large and small. The resentful Dubinsky repeatedly scorned Hillman’s offers of conciliation between the AFL and CIO. When the Hillman wing of the American Labor Party won a decisive primary victory in 1944, Dubinsky and his allies seceded, forming the New York Liberal Party. The untimely death of Sidney Hillman and the spread of Cold War sentiment effectively doomed the ALP. The Liberal Party, for its part, evolved into a patronage machine, offering endorsements in return for favors, depriving both socialists and communists of an electoral arm semi- independent of the two-party system.
The ILGWU of the 1940s-1960s experienced a major demographic change. The “Jewish trades” ceased to be Jewish in any respect but leadership, African Americans and Puerto Ricans became the new workforce of a trade increasingly hit by the increase of garment imports. With the passing of the old generation, socialism dwindled into a dimming recollection of the union’s difficult early days. A final, ironic blow to the union’s progressive image came with the vote by its field staff in 1960 for their own unionization. Dubinsky’s refusal to negotiate with the staff union, made up largely of young socialists and liberals who had attended the ILGWU Training School during the 1950s, symbolized the chasm between the ILGWU’s hierarchical “social unionism” and the nascent New Left. Harsh and telling critiques by Herbert Hill and Paul Jacobs, in the journal New Politics and elsewhere, hit the democratic claims of the surviving bureaucracy hard.

The ILGWU moved strategically toward protectionism against the ever-greater quantities of goods from abroad. Between the early 1960s and late 1980s, union membership dropped from an all-time high of 450,000 to 170,000. As the end of the century approached and union influence further weakened, industrial homework reappeared as a menace to union standards. Occasionally, the ILGWU still provided inspiration and defenses to the impoverished and vulnerable new members of the garment-industry work force, especially in defending their rights against immigration authorities. At the same time, the ILGWU remained scarcely less rigid in its ideological anti-radicalism, which had extended from Communist to the New Left and beyond, including internal dissidents of all types. When the ILGWU and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers merged their depleted memberships into a single union, called UNITE, in 1995.

By a turn of fate familiar to the history of the internal shifts and the intrigue within the garment unions, UNITE merged with HERE, the representative of hotel and restaurant workers within the expanding hospitality sector. UNITE HERE withdrew from the AFL-CIO in 2005, joining a new and promising labor body called the Change to Win Federation. Four disappointing years later, erstwhile UNITE leader Bruce Raynor withdrew his followers from UNITE HERE, taking along a remnant of garment workers and others, and forming a new body, Workers United, within the Service Employees International Union. Workers United leaders, by this time mainly acting within American labor’s store of memories, managed the sale of the Amalgamated Bank building in Manhattan. The resulting, heavily-funded Sidney Hillman Foundation, awarding prizes for worthy human rights activists and celebrities, seemed to represent a progressive edge of the larger memory, but surely not one pleasing to the ghost of Hillman’s bete noir, David Dubinsky.

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Josephson, Matthew. Sidney Hillman: Statesman of American Labor. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1952.

Katz, Daniel. All Together Different: Yiddish Socialists, Garment Workers, and the Labor Roots of Multiculturalism. New York: New York University Press, 2011.

Stolberg, Benjamin. Tailor’s Progress. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday and Doran, 1944.

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