INSIDE AND OUTSIDE THE UNIONS: 1920–1980
ONCE women had entered unions in large numbers, their battles had to be fought on two fronts: inside and outside the unions. The unionization movement continued, with organizers fanning out across the United States to follow runaway shops as they fled organizing in the Northeast. Here organizers, mostly from old industrial centers, encountered new workers with different cultural traditions and languages. Hispanic, Asian, and native-born southern white women all provided new challenges to organizers in their attempts to expand union influence. At the same time, women within the two remaining major clothing unions encountered male opposition to their leadership. Male officials continued to maintain that women were difficult to organize at the same time that they denied union women a major voice in determining policies on the recruitment of the predominantly female clothing workers and their assimilation into the union.
Organizers devoted long careers to recruiting and supporting women within the unions and yet never achieved a major voice in those unions. These unions promised working women support for controlling their working conditions. Yet once inside the promised land of unionization, women had to face having no control over their organizational hierarchy. The tensions of these two contradictory conditions dominated the history of clothing workers after 1910.
The careers of women leaders in unions clearly indicated the difficulty of organizing and the lack of union support for rank-and-file leadership that might have been drawn from the masses of the new women workers in the runaway shops of the West. Some female union activists did become a species of honorary officials as vice presidents upon marriage to ACWA leaders: Bessie Abramovitz, for example, who married Sidney Hillman, and Dorothy Jacobs, who married Albert Bellanca. While the work of these women was important, as Nina Asher explains in her article on Dorothy Jacobs Bellanca, they did not challenge the male leadership, but supported it. In neither the ILGWU nor the ACWA were women able to go beyond a well-defined place to reflect the predominantly female constituency of their unions. They could encourage women to organize, but they could not expand the role of these women in the unions. It must have seemed to the rank and file that only marriage with union leaders, even if that marriage was a partnership, could bring leadership roles for women. Women had to subordinate their interests as women to class issues—class issues as defined by the eastern male union leadership.
While Dorothy Jacobs Bellanca worked within the ACWA, other women organizers continued the battle within the ILGWU. The ILGWU emerged from World War I shorn of its cross-class allies in the Women’s Trade Union League and torn by domestic political conflict.
In the aftermath of the Red scare of 1919 most militant left organizations disintegrated or went underground. But many militant individuals remained in mainstream labor organizations and the Communists emerged in the early 1920s as the main organizers of the left. In the years between 1924 and 1926 clothing unions bristled with conflict over control. Centrists attempted to keep the more radical leftists from being elected by rank-and-file members. In New York, the centrists failed in their attempt, and in July 1926, Communist members led the ILWGU into a massive and costly six-month strike involving 35,000 clothing workers. During this strike, the employers found public opinion and the police on their side; seventy-five hundred strikers were arrested. Conflict over the strike split locals clear across the country to Los Angeles, where factions battled over whether or not to send strike funds to New York.1 Following the strike, centrists again gained control; and in 1928 the internal conflict was finally settled through reorganization. The ILGWU expelled its Communist members (actually it dissolved all dissident locals and required members to reregister), and the Communists began a policy of dual unionism, that is, organizing independent rival unions rather than working for influence within AFL unions. Thus, yet another union emerged, the Industrial Union of Needle Trade Workers (IUNTW) to contend for the leadership of the women sewers.2
The period of dual unionism ushered in a bitterness among contending union factions which has lasted to the present. All accounts of union politics are colored by these factional disputes, making it difficult to reconstruct an unbiased account of events. The struggle over control of the rank and file gave employers the opportunity to play one group off against the other. ILGWU accounts accuse the IUNTW of offering “scab” labor to employers and allowing the trade to be overrun with “scab shoplets.” Defensiveness led the ILGWU away from its progressive politics into a highly structured, centralized organization unable to allow freedom to locals in organizing the militant Hispanic women who had become the new reserve army of labor, the women whose labor had to be organized if the runaway shops were to be halted in their march to the Southwest. To the more militant rank and file, ILGWU leadership seemed committed to avoiding conflict that could endanger its leadership. Only in the context of this domestic quarrel among the male leadership of the clothing workers can the failure of women organizers of the 1930s, such as Rose Pesotta, be understood.3
Rose Pesotta’s career in some ways is the most significant for understanding the ultimate failure of the Jewish women who organized for the women’s clothing unions after World War I. Such earlier organizers as Pauline Newman and Fannia Cohen, who organized primarily among Jewish and Italian women, have been judged passive but successful by Alice Kessler-Harris in both their personal and professional lives. While always battling intolerance of male unionists, both Newman and Cohen established warm supportive relations with both working-class and middle-class women.4
Rose Pesotta began full-time organizing in 1933, at a time when women were being accepted as part of the permanent work force, but she was not recruited to organize among women of her own culture. Instead she went west to Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, and then to Puerto Rico. In these places she had to work with Asian and Hispanic women and yet be responsible to an increasingly conservative male union hierarchy. The difficulties of such a task finally caused her to abandon organizing and return to the shop. Her account of organizing in Bread upon the Waters carefully defends the ILGWU leadership, but even her own account indicates that the ILGWU could not provide the leadership needed by Hispanic and Asian women.5
Pesotta’s experience in Los Angeles is an excellent example of this conflict. When the Los Angeles clothing industry expanded during the 1920s, unions followed the eastern pattern, with Jewish and Italian workers forming the core of the locals. Beginning in 1920, the ILGWU sent out organizers to work with the Spanish-speaking women workers, but throughout the 1920s these attempts were sporadic and unsuccessful. Part of the difficulty was due to the employers not being interested in stabilizing the industry in a geographic area that could not specialize in the high-fashion skilled operations common to New York. Communist influence in Los Angeles was also stronger than in New York, and the centrists were not able to regain control as quickly. By the time Pesotta arrived in 1933, Communists had formed their own union, but they remained a formidable threat. The ILGWU was never able to provide a united front against the employers. Pesotta was conscious that the Communists presented a serious threat to the ILGWU because they challenged its tactics and its leadership.6
Chinatown sweatshops in San Francisco were even more difficult and complex to organize than the Hispanic sweatshops of Los Angeles. Chinese males sewed most of the clothing in the first late-nineteenth-century sweatshops, but women began operating sewing machines in the early twentieth century. By the 1920s Chinese women were a majority; by the 1930s women were organizing. Jenny Matyas helped organize the first ILGWU local in Chinatown. In the thirteen-week strike that followed, however, the National Dollar Store closed rather than agree to unionization. When Pesotta arrived, she found she could give the Chinese women little help. Women desperately needed the work to support their families, the Chinese community was ghettoized without cross-class or cross-ethnic support, the community did not have the resources to sustain extended strike activity, and the companies did not have enough capital investment in their businesses to make paying higher wages worthwhile. The women remained unorganized.7
In the Northeast, meanwhile, the male-dominated unions managed to strike a balance that allowed them to survive a discouraging decade for labor. Unions emerged in a declining but controlled place in the clothing industry. Sex segregation and low wages were the price women paid for unionization. Women continued to dominate the industry numerically as low-paid stitchers, and the movement of employers out of New York City continued to draw women into the garment industry and to leave them there, at the bottom. As this movement has had such a long history and continues to the present day, we need to examine it in some detail, studying the overall conditions of the industry, the ingredients of the compromise, and its effect on women workers.8
In 1981 sewing remained one of the most sex segregated of all United States occupations: 96.7 percent of all stitchers are women, exceeded in percentages only by secretaries and dental assistants (99.3 and 97.9 percent respectively). Median wages were also the third lowest, after waiters and retail sales clerks.9 At the same time, clothing was a highly unionized industry compared to other industries in which women predominated. Thus, its unique position requires explanation.
The clothing industry as a whole experienced a decline in sales in the 1920s, which especially affected New York and the women’s clothing sector. While this period saw a great increase in pattern sales, the primary reason for the decline in ready-made clothing sales, particularly women’s clothing, appears to have been a shift in household spending patterns. With the appearance of new consumer durables—especially cars and appliances—families chose to spend more of their income on these items rather than on clothes. A family’s status now seemed to be linked to these purchases. While the trend first affected upper middle-class families, it had reached the working classes by the 1950s. Clothing continued to be “democratized” during this period, but mainly because new material items were available which could more easily set off one class from another. As one commentator remarked in the 1950s: “Not only do Americans of all classes look much the same when they dress up, they are indistinguishable when they are not dressed up, and that is a larger and larger part of the time.” The new leisure wear began a trend that culminated in blue jeans. Only vestiges of the former function of clothes as a status definer remained.10
As a result, there was an actual increase in home-made women’s clothing in the 1920s and the 1930s, a trend that may have given both the scantier and less-form-fitting clothing an additional attraction. Most women could now make their own clothing if they wished to, and dressmaking gradually disappeared as an occupation for poorer middle-class women. Millinery also disappeared as an occupation in the 1930s, as women ceased to create their own headwear or to order it specially made. A store-bought hat frequently topped a home-made outfit. After World War II, the higher percentage of married women and higher fertility rates also diverted income from clothes. Women over fifty were not yet expected to keep up with styles; thus, as the female population aged, so did their clothing.11
As competition for markets again increased, women’s sewing wages were pushed still lower compared to the wages in male-dominated occupations. The struggle of employers usually took the form of flight west to upstate New York or to the coal mining areas of Pennsylvania, where there was little work available for women, and to the Southwest, where Hispanic women had little available paid labor except agriculture and domestic work. The flight continued overseas in the 1970s, as multinationals reached out to the even lower-paid women of Asia and Latin America.
The great compromise between union leaders and employers in the sewing industry—solidified in legislation, union contracts, racketeering, and union ideology—was to maintain New York as a center for cutting and marketing of high fashion women’s clothing, especially dresses and suits. Meanwhile, the sewing of less changeable clothing, especially blouses and other casual wear, moved West out of New York City. While many New York employers had abandoned the protocols signed in 1914 and 1915, those who decided to move to the new place in the market remained committed to collective bargaining. By the 1920s and 1930s, clothing unions were beginning to resemble more and more the old Knights of Labor in their opposition to strikes. Strikes, according to the new industrial relations experts, were regrettable outbreaks of class warfare, to be avoided at all costs.
In the context of this emerging compromise between employers and union leaders to stabilize the New York segment of the volatile clothing industry, the militant strike of 1926 seemed like madness. Once centrists had regained control, unions opposed strikes in union shops, organized the nonunion markets, made concessions on wage rates, and cooperated with management to cut costs. Total employment and the proportion of workers unionized dropped, but union-dominated shops retained a large share of the market.12
Like the earlier Knights of Labor, the ILGWU had difficulty in avoiding strikes and still attracting women workers, for whom strikes seemed to remain the speediest form of education to the benefits of unionization and politicization. Strikes did continue in the 1930s, and the number of women involved in them reached a new high in 1934. At the same time, the percentage of union workers involved in the clothing strikes of the mid-1930s declined as the totals of workers increased. The mass uprisings of 1933 to 1935 (almost 315,000 workers struck in 1933) brought greater emphasis on collective bargaining and government support for mediation. The largest of these strikes occurred in New York state and Pennsylvania, indicating that the workers employed in runaway shops had taken the initiative in using the strike as a weapon.13
In this context, then, the unions became a more and more conservative force, hoping to organize women, but unwilling to give them a larger place in the unions or to encourage the militant sewers to strike. Usually, union organizers moved in to settle strikes and to enforce control. The Farah strike of 1972 in El Paso, which lasted two years and became a national symbol of organized women workers, may seem an exception to this generalization. In fact, it was part of the pattern.
The El Paso garment industry was already almost seventy years old when the Farah strike began in 1972. From a small overall factory at the turn of the century, the industry grew slowly, finally burgeoning in the 1930s, when companies flourished in Los Angeles, San Antonio, Dallas, Laredo, and El Paso. As in Los Angeles, eastern union men never committed enough money to make the sporadic organizing drives of the 1930s successful. While clothing workers were “union-minded,” as one historian has emphasized, and the Hispanic workers militant, union leaders did not trust local Hispanic female leadership. When the trade in New York increased during World War II, the ILGWU lost interest in even its sporadic organizing attempts in Texas, and after the state passed its right-to-work law in 1947, it became difficult for women to organize.14
It was, as the authors of “Women at Farah” explain, the rapid expansion of Farah in the 1960s that led to the militant Chicana workers’ engaging in a protracted strike with the support of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers. The successful organization of a national boycott of Farah pants, the support of a Catholic church politicized by the civil rights movement, and a militant rank-and-file group within Farah calling for reforms, caused the company to sign a contract recognizing the union. But the victory faded as workers faced the prospect of new production techniques, company financial difficulties, and the union officials’ ensuing concern with keeping its new members at work. Instead of pressing for innovative ways to control runaways and increase wages of foreign women workers, unions once again chose to control women’s wages. The result has been the continued flight of sewing to Third World countries and the return of subcontracting, especially in New York and Los Angeles.15
In “A Stitch in Our Time,” Elizabeth Weiner and Hardy Green explain the conditions in the New York clothing district that have led to a resurgence of the sweatshops that the unions and their middle-class allies fought so hard to eliminate in the great uprisings of the 1910s. Similar conditions exist in clothing districts of Los Angeles. Streets there are lined with sweatshops where both legal and undocumented workers from Latin America and Asia sew under conditions little better than those that so outraged early twentieth-century reformers. Neither unions nor reformers any longer make any attempt to curtail these activities. Even the left seems stumped. Although equal pay for comparable work has made it possible to argue for increased wages for skilled and managerial women, sewing is simply not comparable.16 The number of women waiting to work for even sweated wages has created a Third World at home, a garment ghetto allowed to grow relatively unhampered.
So too have the Third World sewing ghettoes flourished abroad. Linked by multinationals that arrange for cutting in the United States and for sewing where women will work for low pay, the new clothing industry can ignore any pressure to raise wages at home or abroad. In Puerto Rico, the federal government gives companies tax incentives. Governments elsewhere do the same. With unions still dominated by male leadership, women have remained as they were—underpaid and overworked in homes and factories.
The history of sewing women is still being written. The women stitch on. The only possible solution to the continued degradation of their work is a unified demand by working-class and middle-class feminist allies for legislation that will enable the raising of women’s wages at home and abroad. Control of their unions is a first, long overdue step. Leadership must be assumed by union women, who are the most politically conscious of sewing women.17 Until that time, the sewing women of the world will remain united only by the stitches they take in the never-ending pieces of cloth that come to their worktables. They remain enslaved to the machines that could have liberated them to share in the benefits of their society.
1. Irving Bernstein, The Lean Years: A History of the American Worker, 1920–1933 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960), 136–141, sees conflict as between conservatives and Communists. For Communists in Los Angeles, I have relied on an unpublished paper by Dian Degnan, “The International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union in Los Angeles: 1919–1930.”
2. For a selection of the articles by moderate ILGWA supporters see Leon Stein, ed., Out of the Sweatshop: The Struggle for Industrial Democracy (New York: Quadrangle, 1977), 202–221.
3. Dwight Edwards Robinson, Collective Bargaining and Market Control in the New York Coat and Suit Industry (New York: Columbia University Press, 1949), 55–57, gives a brief, somewhat dispassionate union view.
4. Kessler-Harris, “Organizing the Unorganizable: Three Jewish Women and Their Union,” Labor History, 17 (Winter 1976), 14–20.
5. Ibid., 20–22; Rose Pesotta, Bread upon the Waters (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1945).
6. Degnan, “International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union,” gives the Los Angeles background. For similar difficulties see 7.
7. Dean Lan, “The Chinatown Sweatshops: Oppression and an Alternative,” Amerasia Journal, 1 (Nov. 1971), 43–45. In the 1938 pecan shellers strike in San Antonio, the union replaced a Hispanic woman leader who was Communist with a moderate Anglo male. Similar struggles seem to have gone on within the clothing unions. See Richard Croxdale, “The 1938 San Antonio Pecan Shellers’ Strike,” in Richard Croxdale and Melissa Hield, Women in the Texas Workforce: Yesterday and Today (Austin: People’s History in Texas, 1979).
8. Helen I. Safa, “Runaway Shops and Female Employment: The Search for Cheap Labor,” Signs, 7 (1981), 418–433.
9. “Sex Segregation Doesn’t Pay: Can Comparable Worth Close the Wage Gap,” Dollars & Sense, 76 (April 1982), 16–17.
10. The best discussion of New York’s clothing industry from the 1920s to the 1950s is in Max Hall, ed., Made in New York: Case Studies in Metropolitan Manufacturing (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959), esp. 98–122; the quote is from 122. See also Paul H. Nystrom, Economics of Fashion (New York: Ronald, 1928), 436–441.
11. Hall, Made in New York, 121–122.
12. Bernstein, Lean Years, 100–101; and Jesse Thomas Carpenter, Competition and Collective Bargaining in the Needle Trades, 1910–1967 (Ithaca: New York State School of Industrial and Labor Relations, Cornell University, 1972).
13. Florence Peterson, Strikes in the United States, 1880–1936 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1938), 50–51, 138, 161.
14. For El Paso see Mario T. Garcia, “The Chicana in American History: The Mexican Women of El Paso, 1880–1920—A Case Study,” Pacific Historical Review, 49 (1980), 315–338, and Melissa Hield, “Union-Minded: Women in the Texas ILGWA, 1933–50,” in Croxdale and Hield, Texas Workforce, 1–23.
15. Safa, “Runaway Shops,” 418–433; Elizabeth Weiner and Hardy Green, "Bringing It All Back Home,” In These Times (March 11–18, 1981), and Barbara Ehrenreich and Annette Fuentes, “Life on the Global Assembly Line,” Ms., 9 (Jan. 1981), 53–59, 71.
16. “Sex Segregation Doesn’t Pay,” 17; Mario F. Vazquez, “The Election Day Immigration Raid at Lilli Diamond Originals and the Response of the ILGWA,” and Lisa Schlein, “Los Angeles Garment District Sews a Cloak of Shame,” in Magdalena Mora and Adelaida R. Del Castillo, eds., Mexican Women in the United States (Los Angeles: Chicano Studies Research Center Publications, University of California, Occasional Paper No. 2, 1980).
17. Edna E. Raphael, “From Sewing Machines to Politics: The Woman Union Member in the Community,” unpublished paper that compares three samples of women: one unionized, one not, and one not in the paid labor force.