The Case of the Ilgwu

...The largest part of Horton's scorn is directed at black defenders of the ILGWU whom he describes as "shameless stooges...

...In the worst days of the sweatshop, a jobber might farm out work to several contractors, all of whom had a steady supply of workers—women, children, new immigrants, landsmen—to do the work...

...In New York City the black and Puerto Rican membership is said now to be something over half...

...To be sure, the Protocol did not last...

...The Shirtwaistmakers wore their best clothes on the picket line, and when molested by the whores and pimps employed by management, they defended themselves with hatpins...

...The ban on caucuses dates from the 1920s, when the Communist dual union faction was at the height of its effort to divide and conquer the International...

...And there is the ILGWU itself, and the pride of accomplishment which is its psychic trade mark, as clear a symbol in its way as the union label on the garment...

...He has charged that the custom of keeping undated resignations for dismissing officers of the union is also an instrument of racial discrimination, whereby one-man control is assured and "Negroes and Puerto Ricans are . . . relegated to second-class membership...

...He was one of a remnant that escaped death at the hands of the Nazis...

...that Jewish and Italian organizations received far more in ILGWU support than black, Puerto Rican, or Mexican groups...

...Antonini is an old-time leader and now vice-president of the ILGWU...

...By the end of the wars, the leadership THE CASE OF THE ILGWU had attained to that scarred sense of reality which persists to this day in its weary distrust of ideology, that abstract virtue behind which the totalitarian impulse so often cruises...

...Rice is not the first to believe that if David Dubinsky had cause to turn his wrathful attention on a man, he could destroy him...

...I take care of myself and I take care of my enemies...

...Home work was abolished...

...that in most shops Spanish is more often spoken than English, and that it is time the union made it a second language...

...the idea of preserving a limited labor force had taken hold with a vengeance...

...The skills, most of them, were easy to learn and immigrants who learned them could do so without leaving the ghetto...

...its calamities defined and isolated those necessities of leadership to which the union would cleave for good...

...They knew the Party ideologue and the zealot, and the henchman always close by in the back pocket, and they knew them in the way given only to those who have tried to meet them in the spirit of open-handedness...

...That article was written in 1962...

...It is not in his book of rules to dismiss these things...

...But first, they must be trained...

...The Socialists were in control, and some of the left-wing functionaries who had once supported the CP began to comprehend the Communist design on trade unionism...

...Heston characterized these charges as "racist slander...

...Awful as it was, the ghetto was decidedly less threatening to the immigrant jobseeker than the uptown of tall buildings: for the new arrival who was sparsely, if at all, acquainted with English, it took guts to leave home...

...They understood that the real power of a strike lay in withholding skills...

...Herbert Hill claims that one day at the hearings, two black men followed him into the Men's Room to confess that they were testifying at the hearings because they were told to...

...Precisely in this period of exclusivity, the ILGWU could say that it was the open door union...

...To the charge of work discrimination, the union asserts that to be a cutter, a man must first learn how—to which minority spokesmen might retort that it is easier for some to learn than others, when the spoils of nepotism rule...

...The production of the wrong dress lengths can kill a manufacturer in a season...

...One hears in this answer the special kind of reality of the trade unionist...

...that the ILGWU gave $25,000 to Albert Shanker and the UFT during the New York City Teachers' Strike...

...They found a great ally in the rich women who took up their cause...

...Those that do, say the union leaders, Iack no opportunity for leadership training...

...that Local 89 was exclusively an Italian-language local and had been so since the era of mass immigration, when the Italians were organized...

...The ILGWU was located in the heart of the ghetto and thus, from the beginning, a unique sense of protection, of intimacy and mutual ownership, characterized the relations of the garment workers and their union...

...the garment industry had become, by 1900, one of the largest in the country...

...There are also a sizable number of Chinese workers...

...No doubt it was some of both...

...Competition was so fierce among the contractors that the manufacturer could easily name his own price...

...Its spokesman, Jim Horton, repeats the charges made by Hill, by Mrs...

...When, as she said, she came to the realization that blacks and Puerto Ricans were systematically discriminated against in terms of work opportunity, she decided to testify at a hearing chaired by Adam Clayton Powell...

...As unions went, it was a time of great need and little choice...

...She testified that discrimination was rampant in the union...

...To the critics of the ILGWU those tools appear as weapons of racial oppression, and the comparative optimism of the trade unionist seems a cruel disregard of the harsh realities of life now, for minority workers...

...In the summer of 1900 the newly formed International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union could call its own a treasury of $30 and a few desks in the office of the Cloakmakers' Union...

...with having no proper representation of ethnic minorities...

...Samuel Gompers and the AFL understood, as the Knights never did, the power of the craft union...

...It ordered a six-day week of fiftyfour hours, with piece rates to be established by a committee of union and employers...

...It was the period in which Legs Diamond and Little Augie sent their mobsters out to do battle on opposing sides of the strike, with both under the control of that genial tactician, Arnold Rothstein...

...In addition to the caucus in Local 155, an organization called "Fight Back" directs its attentions to labor discrimination such as that alleged of the ILGWU...

...To such a working body, he added, the union is not about to add a figurehead in order to keep the peace...

...As to discrimination in wages, the union responds that the worker is paid by the standard piece rate, which sets the rate upon the work and not upon the worker...

...It established a preferential union shop...

...The very history of the sweatshop was grounded in the contracting system, as indeed were the major union battles...

...Her salary, she says, dropped to $60, she was labeled a Communist, and she could get no job where she was not feared as a trouble-maker...

...Only the trade unionist knows that the progress which came after the revolutionary ardor of the old days was no less progress for coming after...

...His grave eyes reflect the wonder—yet by now it is no surprise—that he is to be counted among the "racists" and the "reactionaries" of the world...

...While the industry kept the work force in the ghetto, it was largely by way of the industry that many of them got out of the ghetto...

...Perhaps most important is the fact that the union is hard put to keep wages up in an erratic industry whose survival depends from season to season on such unpredictable factors as weather and women...

...It has run qualification courses for union officer, for example, in which any member could enroll before running for election...

...The period in which the ILGWU began was also the time in which the withholding-skill theory became entrenched...

...It is not true, of course...

...The present-day leadership of the International is marked by a reverence for reality and a loathing for abstract virtue which are more than an inheritance of ideological wars: they also provide the fuel with which critics have fired their attacks...

...Indeed, there is the sense that most of the charges brought against the ILGWU have to do with matters larger and more irreconcilable than those which are described: matters which are, in fact, not questions of union policy but trends of history...

...that the union gets away with its low wages because of its ability to divide workers "along racial, ethnic, craft and shop lines...

...A far deeper cultural empathy and common tradition exist today between the Jewish ILGWU leaders and the Jewish employers...

...When, in 1961, Herbert Hill had Ernest Holmes, a black cutter, file a complaint against Local 10 (the Cutters' Local) with the New York State Commission Against Discrimination, saying that the local had refused to permit him entry, the union representatives of the local at first refused to make their records available...

...Among the latter was Charles "Sasha" Zimmerman, now a typical member of the reconstructed old guard that forms the top ILGWU leadership...

...They are aware of that which touches their present: that a good many of them are poorly skilled and low-paid and that, often, they do not understand the language of the men who represent them...

...It was an era of disastrous, Party-directed strikes...

...It is a predominantly Jewish leadership, of which the bulk are in the tradition of the Social Democrats...

...It is charged that the top-heavy leadership has nothing in common with the black and Puerto Rican members in New York City and elsewhere (80 percent of whom are women...

...Among those who make opinion, it is a time of fearful mistrust of unions generally...

...There is, then, only Local 155, about 75 percent black and Puerto THE CASE OF THE ILGWU Rican in which an insurgent group puts out a mimeographed newspaper with the headline, "The Rank and File Organizes...

...Out of the ruins of the 1926 Cloakmakers' Strike, which collapsed under the weight of the fanaticism with which the Party leadership blocked every attempt at settlement, the ILGWU emerged, poorer but tougher...

...But the greatest advantage, undoubtedly, was that contracting enabled the jobber to avoid responsibility in the matter of pay or working conditions...

...Contracting, which would be one of the great evils of the industry (and remains so today), had its origins precisely in the ease with which the system permitted every man to become a boss, of a kind...

...There were all sorts of advantages in the contracting system...

...By the middle '30s Jews had already begun to leave the industry in great numbers and by the end of World War II, the Jewish and Italian membership, so long the bulk of the rank and file, dwindled to insignificance...

...though they could not have been very surprised that the manufacturers should come to them on such a matter...

...They are not as many as they are loud...

...Thereafter, the union reversed itself and made the records available...

...that they do not reflect the racial and ethnic composition of the union...

...The end of Dubinsky's leadership brought no surcease from complaints that the union was a dictatorship...

...The union in turn can point to a very substantial number of black and Puerto Rican cutters, even as there are, among the 58,000 retirees from the union, a good number of blacks and Puerto Ricans...

...This modest enterprise was called into being at the behest of the New York Cloakmakers, who were spurred by necessity to appeal for a union of all crafts...

...The undated resignations actually issued from the early years of David Dubinsky's leadership...

...who published their English, Italian, and Yiddish New Post to rally workers for the strike which brought 60,000 Cloakmakers off the job on a single afternoon, and kept them off for weeks...

...For some time thereafter, Hill recited the details of this alleged bathroom encounter in a number of public forums...

...If an employer moves there, he be comes a "multinational corporation"—with a showroom on Seventh Avenue...

...Heston notes, particularly bitter inasmuch as his union pioneered in taking in Indians, blacks, Chinese, and Mexicans...

...It is a sense of reality which has grown increasingly alienated from the mainstream of received social opinion in America...

...Rice, now a private consultant on consumer matters, says that the union is now just what it always was: "that same old oligarchy at the top...

...But by the early 1930s, the ILGWU leadership had emerged with that loathing for the totalitarian which marks men who have done business at close range with Party-directed functionaries...

...One black, former union chairlady, Florence Rice, recalls that in the fifties she was making very good money herself...

...One ILGWU manager asserts that these will make up the significant numbers of black and Puerto Rican union leaders who will appear on the scene in a few years...

...By 1921, the Comintern had launched its campaign to seize the trade unions, and thereon began the battle for control between Socialists and the Communists which almost wrecked the ILGWU...

...Increased trucking costs and higher rents are also said to have contributed to the exodus from New York...

...They came to the shops with stars in their eyes...

...He is, Mr...

...He knows that by now, he is accused of understanding the problems of management too well: yet he cannot understand how he should not know what he does know...

...Given its long history, such spectacles are no doubt more painful for the ILGWU than for any other union in the labor movement...

...The collapse of the Knights and the commitment of workers to the AFL signaled the end of the quixotic dream of a union of a single, undifferentiated army of labor which would array against its adversaries a legion of all crafts and all degrees of skill...

...Many of the charges are ludicrous, as, indeed, are some of the answers the union makes, and that ludicrous aspect is part and parcel of the wild, mutual incomprehension which characterizes both sides...

...As for the surprising lack of any more insurgency, or any more vocal expression from black or Puerto Rican workers, given all the charges, ILGWU critics explain that the workers are afraid of ietaliation...

...Workers might labor from sun-up to ten at night for $10 or $8 a week, at work for which there was no standardization either of price or wage...

...What remained was the solidly Jewish (and some Italian) leadership, the reason for the most bitter criticism now directed at the union...

...They had read Ibsen and Whitman...

...The man was the personification of the ILGWU, and what might be said of him might be—and certainly is—said of the union...

...days when Mrs...

...The flight from organized territory has made an exceedingly mobile industry out of an always fiercely competitive one, and, from the logic of survival, it has always been a labor-squeezing industry...

...There is a smattering, too, of ex-Bundists and exCommunists...

...The men were in this work to stay: the women might marry...

...The union's concern with "mere" wages and benefits, in the face of those rumblings of a higher nature which afflict the rest of American society, is the locus of no small blame from ILGWU critics...

...The General Executive Board is a THE CASE OF THE ILGWU 23-member group that sets operational policy...

...Health care, a living wage, and education strike them as values considerably more respectable than any of what they suspect to be liberal abstractions...

...A Joint Board of Sanitary Control would oversee working conditions...

...The Shirtwaistmakers themselves were women, many of them Russian Jewish emigrees who had tasted the wine of revolutionism...

...The Shirtwaistmakers began, and the Cloakmakers concluded, a strike against this system which resulted in one of the great labor victories of modern times...

...Then, there are the charges which have their roots in a fine muddle of crossed traditions...

...Thus is it possible to sigh over—and occasionally to dismiss—the achievements of organized labor as part of the malfunctioning system and, with it, all the outdated tools by which the labor union has known its progress: patience, experience, and work...

...Indeed, the union looks to the achievement, long ago, of the standard piece rate as the strongest instrument of the workers' civil rights...

...The contractor was only somewhat better off than his workers, and when he was unable to pay them, as was sometimes the case, they could not look for redress from the jobber...

...Noting that he was aware when he wrote it of the article's emphasis on Dubinsky's Yiddishness and of his emphasis on the Jewish aspect of the union, Jacobs reports, nonetheless, that he was shocked to receive approving mail from anti-Semites, "horrible mail, congratulating me on having exposed the role of Jews in running unions and even inviting me to speak at meetings of one antiSemitic group in South Carolina...

...The union leaders did not think they should offer such help...

...But there is no bitterness in him as he assesses the charge: only a slight, disputatious glint at the fate that could cast him and his tradition in the role of oppressor, in any man's eyes...

...Rice says that, immediately after her testimony, "they started giving me bad work...

...Answer for answer, whether in the matter of discrimination in wages, nepotism, or lack of black or Puerto Rican leadership opportunity, the ILGWU can explain and explain...

...There are the ironies: some of the items offered in proof of corruption, of dictatorial rule and racial discrimination are themselves emblems of the union's historical fight to stay free and clean...

...And then the contractor would pass his price cuts down to his workers...

...But its spirit did, beyond 84 the wildest expectations of those who fought for it...

...He has won much: much that once appeared to be impossible has come round to fulfillment by the route of patience, experience, plain work...

...Perhaps the closest thing to an ideologue among them is the kind of union intellectual—there are several—who looks upon unionism as the last humanistic enterprise left to men...

...In a fit of intransigence and anger, no doubt deeply felt, that a union with its long tradition of egalitarianism could be called to make such an account, the local refused to cooperate, and thereby gave the Commission reason enough to issue a finding of "probable cause...

...they were literate, they had perspective, they could . organize...

...that the Italians in Local 89 can bring their cousins in to learn, while blacks and Puerto Ricans have no such entrenched relations...

...To save themselves from dying at the hands of caprice, the manufacturers got together on skirt lengths during a recent season and came to the union for help in selling that length...

...Ninety percent of the applicants to the Training Institute, the union reports, were black and Puerto Rican, of whom one-third graduated...

...Dubinsky's Yiddish accent, Jacobs observed, was a factor in the empathy between the Jewish union leader and the Jewish employers...

...These, presumably, will make up the ranks of top black and Puerto Rican leadership, after the necessary period of field experience...

...The "everybody in" school of unionism yielded, finally, to a realpolitik whose intelligence and shrewdness is incontestable, three quarters of a century later...

...Determined that no breath of scandal should disrupt the International, in what was already an age of union corruption, Dubinsky used the resignations to get rid of business agents whose conduct was irregular...

...But of that, more later...

...Counted among those abstractions is the idea of proportional union representation on racial and ethnic lines, and the notion that there lies slumbering in every man a capacity for leadership that needs only rousing...

...A subsequent check of the union books, however, indicated that the black cutters had in 88 deed been members of the local for many months prior to the investigation...

...Later there were different heroes, other struggles—perhaps none more decisive than the war for control of the ILGWU that raged between the Communists and the Socialists in the 1920s...

...The fact that so many are women makes them even less likely to provide a large pool of leadership material: women want to go home and take care of their families, not to sit around for union meetings...

...The old Knights of Labor were dead and took with them, it seemed, the problem of dual unionism...

...Gus Tyler, education director of the ILGWU, responded that the union believed that "$130,000 is not too large a contribution over three years to help the children of the six million Jews exterminated by Hitler...

...A number of black cutters appeared on behalf of the union, in proof that the International did not discriminate...

...The manner in which the charges are made and the manner in which they are refuted are not insignificant...

...One of the more vocal critics of the ILGWU is Herbert Hill, National Labor Director of the NAACP, who has charged that the union ban on caucuses (except for a three-month period before conventions) is an instrument of racial discrimination...

...and their charges of racism and corruption are particularly galling to the heirs and veterans of a tradition in which heroic battles were fought in the name of fraternity and a hint of corruption was enough to consign a union leader to oblivion forever...

...Heston's union, like the ILGWU, is charged with having more in common with the industry than with the actors...

...It was a battle that hardened the strong and routed the weak...

...Nationally, however, the union is still primarily white...

...In New York, which is still the heart of the business, the average earnings for the least skilled workers are sometimes barely above the minimum wage...

...The weariness with which ILGWU leaders view such a charge, the ingenuousness that characterizes both sides, is symptomatic of a dual between antagonists who tarry over nonsense, lest they be brought too soon to that abyss where conflict must rage without hope of resolution because it has no aim but the expression of mutual enmity...

...Mrs...

...This was undoubtedly as much the result of the peculiar nature of the work —and of the workers—as of any ideological commitment on the part of the new union...

...One of these, a former Bundist, reflects the enormities the times have visited upon him and men like him...

...To this reply, union critics of Hill's persuasion counter-charged that, in any event, such a local is against State law...

...To the complaint that there were no blacks or Puerto Ricans in Local 89, the ILGWU could answer that there were no Irish, Chinese, or Jews, either...

...It is by now a commonplace of that opinion to describe the ILGWU as an oligarchy, a dictatorship, and even as an enemy of the working class...

...One donation was for a Luigi Antonini Stadium in Haifa...

...It set a maximum of two and a half hours overtime...

...And this opinion has it that much which appears to be impossible for any sector of our life is so because of the general impossibility of the American condition and the innate malfunction of the system...

...Paul Jacobs, a journalist of New Left cast, wrote in Harper's Magazine: DOROTHY RABINOWITZ The tragedy of the ILGWU is that its leaders do not understand the membership...

...She is also convinced that Adam Clayton Powell's downfall commenced the first day he held those hearings: when he incurred the enmity of David Dubinsky...

...Those who organized and endured the two great strikes were characteristic of the high heroic tradition, the fiery moral stature with which the ILGWU was informed at its inception...

...To make the leap from worker to boss, all an industrious man had to do was earn enough money to rent four sewing machines...

...Now, as in the early days in Poland, he can look back upon a life consecrated to a faith: that unionism is a humanistic endeavor...

...Whenever the union has managed to raise the wage level, the manufacturer has sought escape by moving to depressed areas...

...To civilize the relationship between the jobber, contractor, and worker was the central aim of the early ILGWU...

...There is one Puerto Rican on the GEB...

...The ILGWU maintains, in turn, that part of the answer is that many blacks and Puerto Ricans are not union-conscious and feel that they have little in common, so far, with union interests...

...Mr...

...By 1900 the garment industry had absorbed great numbers of women and girls—a population in which organized labor had hitherto shown slight interest—all of whom, clearly, needed to be organized...

...Indeed, their bravura was of a kind the grimmer men of the Cloakmakers could ill afford, much less feel...

...still less is despair in the rules...

...That there exists in America a large body of people in whose lives economic necessity is no longer the determining factor is of little direct interest to a union whose rank and file will never see a day without economic necessity...

...that "most of the `girls' in the local—and all women are called `girl' no matter what their age—work as floor girls, operators, button hole markers, etc...

...There is no evidence that the shock he received when anti-Semites congratulated him has muted his sense of mission...

...One contractor might produce well on one kind of material, another on just a certain aspect of the garment, and thus the choice among contractors yielded the jobber some advantages of specialization...

...Rice, and by the group in Local 155...

...The union categorically denies these charges, as it has for as long as they have been made...

...The Protocol of Peace that emerged from the strike settlement provided for conciliation and arbitration...

...These were also the days when Judge Olmstead could sentence a picket, shouting, "You are on strike against God...

...Its two historic strikes—the revolt of the Shirtwaistmakers in 1909, the Cloakmakers' general strike of 1910—were a direct attack on the system of subcontracting...

...Indeed, the now retired Dubinsky once answered in response to a query about how he stayed young, "I do two things...

...By and large, though, the legatees of the Socialist-union tradition are today confirmed pragmatists in the matter of human necessities...

...To be sure, there were bitter encounters yet to come as the Party set up its various dual unions...

...Charlton Heston, of the Screen Actors' Guild, retiring after several years of the presidency, had to defend that union against certain charges of the independent slate (led by Western star Bert Freed...

...The cutters are the most skilled and highest paid men in the industry...

...Still, it is just that: it is a union among other unions in a sad time for old values and for old trade unionists...

...Rose Schneiderman, who led the first Triangle strike, and then, as Leon Stein describes in his excellent book on the Triangle fire, led the funeral procession for the fire victims, leaning hatless and coatless into the rain, informing everyone around her with her rage in the largest procession of working people the city had ever seen...

...The Cloakmakers got a standard rate of pay and fixed responsibility for that pay...

...The paper is a series of allegations: that the manager, Louis Nelson, is a czar and that around him are his cronies who came to the leadership when the union was built in the 1930s...

...Members of the Women's Trade Union League befriended them...

...Now, Louis Stulberg is president of the International and there is but one ILGWU local which has a serious insurgent faction...

...Since 1961 the critics of the ILGWU have grown more militant, and not all of there are professional crusaders...

...There were the men of the Cloakmakers' Joint Board who prepared feverishly for their long siege...

...And it is no small sign of these times that Mr...

...that they then laughed and said their membership in the union was a great joke, and that their union books had just been issued them...

...DOROTHY RABINOWITZ 90...

...that stubbornness which is an allegiance to his own history...

...O. H. P. Belmont, DOROTHY RABINOWITZ society leader, would flounce into the same courtroom in her enormous hat and produce bail for the girls arrested that day...

...that Cubans, Haitians and Puerto Ricans were played off against blacks and each other, to threaten everyone and to keep wages down, and that when employers did this, the union looked the other way...

...From the beginning, the work of the industry revolved about the home...

...that, from the obvious paucity of their numbers in key union roles, there is a deliberate attempt to discourage them from reaching leadership...

...But it will not matter, for it is engaged, finally, in the conflict with the times that all unions face...

...Between 1965 and 1970, employment dropped off almost in direct proportion to the overall wage increase in that period...

...Critics charge that there is not a single black on the General Executive Board of the ILGWU...

...The sadness of the ILGWU battles, charges and counter charges is no doubt greater than that of the Screen Actors' Guild...

...He stated further that the union's financial report "reflects the tight hold of the past...

...He adds that he is neither a Communist nor an anti-Semite for asserting that the ILGWU is dictatorial and, in practice, racist...

...The trade unionist is the forger of a slowly growing, infinitely patient success...

...The outcome of that war irrevocably formed the union as it is today...

...Workers who sought to join most unions generally encountered elaborate conditions of entry...

...The industry has moved to the farm belt, to Los Angeles, to Pennsylvania, anywhere where it can escape organization and labor is cheap...

...In answer to this charge, one top ILGWU leader said with some irony, that General Motors could afford tokenism: the International could not, and would not insult blacks by putting into positions of leadership men who would be plain figureheads, by virtue of their inexperience...

...It points to the extraordinary sums spent on its Training Institute to develop new leadership...

...So far as he was concerned, only the contractor worked for him...

...Indeed, the self-image of the union today is comprehensible only by the illuminating light of that past: little Clara Lemlich of the Shirtwaistmakers, standing up against the pontifications of the union leaders at the Cooper Union hall, to call for the strike...

...Jacobs asserted that he did not intend to stop writing about Jews—"one must write his perceptions of the truth" or not be a writer...

...They have no family memory of sweatshops or union triumphs...

...86 DOROTHY RABINOWITZ The largest part of the new ILGWU constituency has no connection with the tradition of the Shirtwaistmakers or the Cloakmakers' General Strike...

...In Mexico, labor now costs 16 cents an hour...

...James Graham, activist and co-counsel during the 1968 New York Teachers' Strike on behalf of parents of Ocean Hill, cites the ILGWU in his book, The Enemies of the Poor (Random House...

...The General Executive Board, he pointed out, is composed of men of long experience, each one of whom is responsible for a large sector of union management...

...Garment work has always been low-paying and, for the most part, it still is...

...There are resources to bank on: for him, there is still the absolute commitment to the practical, to patience, and to hard work...