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| 133 21 “Unions with Brains” (1930) The Nation While most American trade unions clung to conventional methods and narrow aims during the 1920s, the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America and International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union stood out as innovators in the areas of education, social welfare, racial integration, and industrial relations . At the dawn of the Great Depression and amid renewed organizing efforts in the clothing industry, liberal observers hoped that the garment unions and their “Jewish socialist theories ” would revivify the American labor movement. The two most interesting trade unions in the United States today are in the garment trades. The Amalgamated Clothing Workers in the men’s clothing industry and the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union in the field of women’s wear have consistently applied brains to the solution of the practical problems facing them and have at the same time kept untarnished the social idealism of their Jewish socialist theories. As a result they have managed to give fresh hope to those who believe that labor organization is essential to a modern democratic society. The older union technique consisted in organizing the workers by hook or crook, and then taking the employer by the throat and compelling him to give up the most that he could be made to yield in the wages and hours. The technique worked fairly well until the employers learned the trick of organizing themselves into groups to fight the unions or until industries became organized into great trusts under unified management. Then the old union leadership was bankrupt. It had no tactics to meet the new conditions and no ideas by which to live. Consequently, despite the great growth in numbers that came with the war, American unionism has gone through a long period of intellectual sterility and practical impotence. A powerful organization like the United Mine Workers, failing to adjust itself to the new conditions , has been broken to pieces on the rock of stubborn economic facts; while the building trades, the heart of the American Federation of Labor, 134 | In Struggle though managing by various devices to maintain a high wage scale for their limited membership, have yet lost all significance for the great body of workers whom they can see no way of organizing. Among the clothing workers we behold a different scene. The International Ladies’ Garment Workers have just called a great strike in New York to bring about the organization of the dressmaking industry, having successfully accomplished the result for the cloak and suit industry by the strike of last summer. Faced with the fact that their earlier success in forcing union standards on the big factories by the older methods was simply hastening the process of driving the industry out of those factories into the little subcontracting shops and sweatshops, they broadened their conception to the actual organization of the whole industry, so that no one should be able to take advantage of sub-standard labor conditions. Further, they succeeded in having impartial machinery set up for the protection of employer and employee alike against unreasonable demands, thus obtaining for themselves a position of power and partnership in the industry. To those who fear the destructive effect of “radical” ideas, we commend a consideration of the activities of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers. Without surrendering their socialist principles these hard-headed unionists , who have consistently remained in good and regular standing with the American Federation of Labor, have come forward with a series of constructive plans for the stabilization and upbuilding of the industry in which they make their living. What “conservative” organization can show an equally good record? Source: “Unions with Brains,” The Nation, Feb. 19, 1930, p. 209. ...

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