The International Ladies Garment Worker’s Union and
the Great Revolt of 1909
The 1909 ILGWU
strike established a precedent for serious collective action in other branches
of the garment economy.
By Howard M. Sachar
The following article
serves as an introduction to the roles that Jewish women played in the American
labor movement. It is reprinted with permission from A
History of the Jews in America,
published by Knopf.
It was a devouring inferno. Employees labored sixty‑five
hours a week. At the height of the season they worked seventy‑five hours,
andsometimes until dawn. Not
infrequently they were obliged to provide their own needles, thread, knives,
irons, occasionally their own sewing machines. Within the factory's premises,
too, a sinister "internal" sub‑contracting system functioned,
obliging employees in effect to work for their foremen on a piecework basis.
The ordeal was even more intense for women, for they were
paid less than men for equivalent work. They too were charged for their
equipment, their clothes lockers, their very chairs, and were fined for even
the briefest tardiness, for damage to a garment. At the Triangle Shirtwaist
Company, women were obliged to leave the plant to reach outside toilets. As a
precaution against "interruption of work," the steel door leading
outside to the facilities was locked. Employees required the foreman's
permission to have it opened.
By the early 1900s, as it happened, many of these women were
recent Bundists [the Bund was the General Jewish Worker’s Union in Russia and
Poland]. Indeed, in Russia they had made up a third of the Bund's membership.
Like their male counterparts, they did not abandon their militance in the
United States. Nor was their activism limited to the workplace. It encompassed
also the women's‑suffrage movement. In New York, Jewish women garment
workers represented the very core of the National American Woman Suffrage
Association.
One of those workers, Rose Schneiderman, was a leader of the
city's Women's Suffrage Party. The Polish‑born Schneiderman had been
brought to the United States as a youngster. After four years of schooling she
had gone to work in a cap factory, to support her widowed mother and younger
brothers and sisters. Eventually she doubled as an ILGWU organizer and as an
officer of the New York branch of the Women's Trade Union League. A fiery
redhead, Schneiderman proved so captivating a speaker in behalf of workers' and
women's rights that, many years later, in the 1930s, she became secretary of
the New York State Department of Labor.
Meanwhile, within the trade‑union
movement, other women played decisive roles: Fannie Cohn, a veteran of the
Bund, and the ILGWU's only woman vice‑president; Bessie Abramowitz , a
spunky twenty‑year‑old in 1910 when she helped organize the Chicago
strike of thirty‑three thousand men's‑clothing workers; Pauline
Newman, the first women’s organizer of the historic shirtwaist industry strike.
They were a remarkable breed. They were also the pioneers of the garment
industry's "Great Revolt" of 1909‑1914.
In the shirtwaist factories,
Jewish women comprised 70 percent of thelabor force. Characteristically, they focused their hopes less on improved
working conditions than on marriage and escape from the factory altogether. Yet
it was precisely these "docile" females who became a disciplined army
in the labor uprising.
The largest of the shirtwaist
factories belonged to the Triangle and Leiserson companies, both German‑Jewish.
Earlier attempts to unionize the two firms had failed. Then, in September
1909, workers at the Triangle plant voted to bypass the company‑sponsored
"benevolent association" in favor of the United Hebrew Trades, the
consciousness-raising organizers of Jewish‑staffed industry. Hereupon,
Triangle's management fired the "troublemakers" and advertised for
replacements. In turn, Local 25 of the ILGWU called for a strike.
The
factory employed nearly a thousand workers. All responded to the strike appeal.
They soon paid a bitter price. As the young women marched on the picket line,
they were taunted, threatened, jostled by company goons. Others were arrested,
ostensibly for malingering, vagrancy, incitement. Five weeks of this pressure,
of hunger and physical weakness, took their toll. The women's morale flagged.
In
November, the ILGWU leadership convened an emergency meeting of shirtwaist
workers. Three thousand women crowded into the Cooper Union auditorium. There
they were addressed by the Lower East Side's working‑class heroes-‑Meyer
London, Morris Hillquit, Joseph Barondess, Samuel Gompers. All appealed for
labor unity, for financial and "moral" support. Yet the mood
remained uncertain, for the leaders stopped short of demanding a sympathy
strike of employees from other factories. Here it was that a nineteen‑year‑old
worker, Clara Lemlich, rose to speak. In impassioned Yiddish, the young woman
described the pain and humiliation of factory labor:
[The
bosses] yell at the girls and "call them down" even worse than I
imagine the Negro slaves were in the South. There are no dressing rooms for the
girls in the shops, no place to hang a hat where it will not be spoiled by the
end of the day. We're human, all of us girls, and we're young. We like new hats
as well as any other young women. Why shouldn't we? And if one of us gets a new
one, even if it hasn't cost more than 50 cents, that means that we have gone
for weeks on two‑cent lunches‑-dry cake and nothing else.
Continuing
in this vein, working herself into a fury of denunciation, Clara Lemlich then
appealed for united action against not only the Triangle Company but all
shirtwaist manufacturers. Her speech brought the crowd to its feet. In an
industry with some thirty‑two thousand workers and six hundred shops,
over twenty thousand shirt‑waist workers--all women--joined the Triangle
strikers in a citywide walkout.
The
outpouring stunned the employers. In consternation, they mobilized every weapon
in their arsenal. As always, the police could be depended upon. In the first
month of the enlarged strike, 723 girls were arrested, 19 sent to the
workhouse. One magistrate, sentencing a picket for "incitement,"
shouted, "You are striking against God and Nature, whose law is that man
shall earn his bread by the sweat of his brow. You are on strike against
God!"
Not
all the city's "respectable" elements saw matters that way. Many
upper‑class New Yorkers were moved by the spectacle of impoverished
immigrant girls defying police and hired thugs. The press was generally
favorable. Protestant and Catholic clergymen, as well as the totality of the Reform
rabbinate, sermonized on behalf of the strikers.
Progressives,
women's‑suffrage leaders, and other social reformers organized rallies
for them. Wealthy New York women provided bail money, then marched with the
strikers on the picket lines, occasionally even were arrested with them.
Indeed, the poignancy of a women's uprising, the first in American history,
inspired three novels, each of them using Clara Lemlich as its pseudonymous
heroine.
By
early 1910, management understood that it had lost the war of public opinion.
Evidently the strikers were prepared to continue through the entire fashion
season. It was time to negotiate. After
two weeks of intense discussions, an agreement was reached. Under its terms,
the manufacturers consented to reduce the workweek to fifty‑two hours
and to provide four legal holidays with pay. Employees no longer were obliged
to supply their own tools. A joint grievance committee would negotiate issues
as they arose
The
strike established a precedent for serious collective action in other branches
of the garment economy, and eventually in the American economy at large.
Howard M. Sachar is a
Professor of History and International Affairs at George Washington University
in Washington DC.
c. 1992 by Howard
Sachar
