Sixty Years of the ILGWU

...The monthly financial report shows a deficit of $92 that means I draw no wages...

...David Dubinsky, the union's effervescent president, went into action as soon as he learned of the trans-Atlantic plant...

...Our union is what it is primarily because of FDR and the New Deal," the ILGWU president says...

...Now 10 years old, the institute is being studied as a model by the AFL-CIO...

...The devil knows what the end of it will be...

...The union is the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU), now celebrating its 60th anniversary...

...The union responded with all the militancy that marked the uprising of 20,000 New York shirt-waist makers a half-century earlier...

...Impressive as these accomplishments are, none of them is the key to the uniqueness of the ILGWU...

...For the ILGWU, "out of town" is the enemy...

...That is why Dubinsky and the ILGWU will be up to their union labels in politics this fall...

...In this article celebrating the 60th anniversary of the birth of International Ladies Garment Workers Union, Raskin examines its record of economic and political successes and its reputation at home and in the international field...

...They are counting on the election to open up new vistas of union service and union strength in a growing America and a prospering world...

...The ethnic character of its membership has undergone radical shifts— from Jews to Italians to Negroes and Puerto Ricans...

...The same is true of John L. Lewis and all the others...

...its influence in the AFL-CIO far outweighs its size...

...Instead of joining the grumblers who muttered a "curse on Columbus" to reflect their disenchantment, they fought for their dreams and made them come true in an industry so predatory that it would have turned cannibals into vegetarians...

...The union's able general counsel, Morris P. Glushien, outwitted the company's legal staff in efforts to force the strikers back under an injunction...

...The target is still the same...

...Their heritage is the conception of the union as a cause, not a business...

...He dropped it and is starving again...

...What future does Dubinsky see for the labor movement to which he and his organization have contributed so much...

...It makes strange reading in a period when so much of public thinking about labor is focused on huge treasuries, palatial headquarters and chauffeur-driven Cadillacs...

...Nothing better epitomizes the complexities involved in the ILGWU's ceaseless effort to make "out of town" part of an industrial One World with headquarters on Seventh Avenue than the successful campaign it completed on its 60th birthday to protect 1,200 union members in Virginia against losing wages or jobs because their employer opened an affiliate in Cork City, 3,000 miles away...

...Dubinsky negotiated with the employer in New York on a round-the-clock basis...

...This is how things are here...

...In The early years of this century the secretary-treasurer of a fledgling union sent a report on its progress to the head of its Boston local...

...both in dependability and in resourcefulness it has a more impressive record than the State Department in combatting Communist imperialism on a world-wide basis...

...provided its members with a vacation center as luxurious as any country club and extended millions of dollars in aid to labor and liberal causes all over the globe...

...Dubinsky has no illusions that labor will be able to reverse the pendulum on its own...

...The result has been that in an eight-year period the wages of garment workers in New York, where more than half the total membership is employed, have gone up only 18 per cent...

...But the garment industry is not a place in which it is easy to sit still and revel in the consciousness of one's own virtue without finding that the empire is sliding out from under the throne...

...It is a senior partner in a political party that is often able to swing the balance of power in New York State...

...In an industry where employers go through as many as four bankruptcies and reorganizations in a single year, there are no General Motors or United States Steels to provide an anchor for union stability...

...I just received a letter from Phila, that Local 15 Waist Makers are organizing or reorganizing and people are coming to the union but they have no one to take care of them...

...Locals 9 and 23 had no meeting for the last few weeks, Local 17 is auf tzores...

...Perhaps it is the fact that Seventh Avenue was a jungle and that its veneer of civilization remains paper-thin that keeps the ILGWU from being swallowed up in a morass of complacency...

...And how are innovations to be achieved in a period when most of labor seems to have run out of ideas, when union membership is static, when automation threatens large-scale reductions in the areas of union strength and when white-collar workers shun organization...

...He was arrested with the bunch...

...The police are active on Fifth Avenue arresting cloakmakers looking for work...

...In other manufacturing industries the increase has been 50 per cent...

...It may be a gangster-protected non-union contracting shop in Brooklyn or the Bronx...

...And even with this restraint on the upward thrust of labor costs the union has seen more and more work move away from the metropolitan area to "out of town...

...To assure vitality in leadership, it has opened its own West Point—a training institute for business agents and staff technicians as a reservoir of future talent...

...It has built cooperative housing developments on the site of the old "lung blocks" of the tuberculosis-ridden East Side...

...Wages there average 25 to 40 cents an hour, as against $1.50 in the company's four Virginia factories...

...it may be a hostile community in the anti-union South...

...They want that we should send an organizer from N. Y. and here we have no money to pay the rent...

...Policoff has just returned from the Police Court...

...established 13 health centers and a half-dozen "healthmobiles...

...His hopes are based quite simply on his expectation that the next President of the United States will prove to be another Franklin D. Roosevelt in creating the kind of social, political and economic climate in which unions can start growing again...

...You can get plenty of work but I do not in the least exaggerate when I tell you that you will be lucky if you can get a job to earn a dollar a day...

...The Dixie workers walked out...

...In the end he came out with the kind of agreement he felt was needed to curb overseas runaways and to put an extra layer of protection around the wages of American garment workers...

...What could any of us do before the New Deal...

...The end of it was a union whose name has become synonymous with advancement for the welfare of its own 445,000 members, the economic health of its industry and the betterment of the national and world community...

...Out of the sacrifices of volunteer organizers like Solomon Policoff and Herman Grossman has come an institution of such vast resources that it has paid out $500 million in health, welfare and retirement benefits, made loans to the Rockefellers and pioneered in more directions than Lewis and Clark...

...The problem of acting as industrial policeman in battling chiseling jobbers and contractors is only one of the headaches that prevents dry rot from developing in the ILGWU...

...produced a highly successful musical comedy and a no less successful movie...

...Otherwise we are all O.K...

...it may be coolie-wage blouse makers in Japan or it may be a U.S.-owned housedress factory in Cork City, Ireland...

...Certainly, it would be an exaggeration to pretend that affluence has not brought flatulence to some members of its high command...

...It was that same conception which led it to welcome public scrutiny of the operation of these funds and to insist that the federation make itself the guarantor of the good faith of all its affiliates in assuring that money set aside to safeguard their members against the financial hazards of illness and of poverty in old age be treated as a sacred trust...

...When it became apparent that the venality of some union leaders and the systematic penetration of labor by underworld elements made the federation's self-policing efforts inadequate, the ILGWU was the first to acknowledge the need for Government help...

...The company balked when the ILGWU came up with another "first" in the form of a demand for a royalty fund to guarantee supplemental unemployment compensation for any Virginia dressmaker who lost earnings because of low-pay competition from the Irish unit...

...But that does not mean he is despondent or that he is dazzled by the euphoric self-hypnotism in which so many of his colleagues find comfort...

...The fluidity of the boundaries of the garment industry has compelled the union to yield leadership in the pushing up of pay scales to other labor organizations in less volatile fields...

...An hour later he was on a plane returning to New York for a new round of conferences with the employer that lasted until 2 AM the next day...

...What gives it special standing in a labor movement grown fat and dis-spirited is the carryover of the spirit that emancipated the original children of the sweatshop—Jewish and Italian immigrants who had come from an Old World of darkness into a New World of darkness...

...it may be a coterie of runaways in Pennsylvania...

...The work nearly killed him...

...It was not Dubinsky—sure, I helped and so did many others, but it was basically FDR who picked us up out of bankruptcy and made us the powerful organization we are...

...At 5:30 AM he got off the train, shaved, showered, conferred with the strike committee and walked the picket line...

...That enrichment is as limitless as our own capacity to dream, to innovate, to pioneer...

...The fact that the final fruit of the McClellan Committee was the passage of the Landrum-Griffin Act, a law likely to do more damage to honest unions than it will to crooked ones, has caused no wavering in the ILGWU's conviction that labor cannot turn its back on Government in eradicating the racketeers who get more, rather than less, powerful in labor's ranks...

...The earnings are small...

...It was that conception which prompted the ILGWU to press beyond the bread-and-butter boundaries of conventional business unionism and win employer-financed welfare funds at a time when most of labor's ruling heirarchy considered such funds not only socialistic but, in the words of one AFL brass hat, a "pain the neck...

...Grossman was a janitor for two months, had to look after a whole block of houses...

...He took a sleeper to Roanoke to address a strike rally, but the strike fever was too contagious to permit any sleep so he spent the night playing gin rummy...

...SIXTY YEARS OF THE ILGWU The union's uniqueness is in retaining the spirit that emancipated the sweatshop By A. H. Raskin A. H. Raskin, labor reporter for the New York Times, is an authority on the American trade-union movement...

...In mid-morning he made his speech—an evocation of the spirit of the union pioneers so moving that the Virginians quickly forgot the accent of the little man from Lodz and hailed him as a 20th-century Patrick Henry...

...auf tzores...

...Here is what the letter said: "You want to know the latest in N. Y. Well, things are as bad as they can be, dead as Queen Ann, as we say in England...

...Rosenger and Grossman are doing nothing...

...The trade is as bad as the union is...

...He told the company that the union was all in favor of its expanding—provided that the expansion was not a device for exporting the jobs of the Virginia workers by transferring production to Ireland...

...In effect," he says, "it is the enrichment of life, in all respects, that is the true and continuing goal of trade unionism...

...In every free country democratic unionism is stronger because there is an ILGWU, in every enslaved country the anti-totalitarian, anti-colonial forces look to it for inspiration and material support...