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| 123 5 All Together Different Social Unionism and the Multicultural Front, 1933–1937 On August 16, 1933, the dressmakers in New York’s garment industry went out on strike despite, or perhaps because of, the dire condition of the ILGWU. Beyond the most optimistic expectations of union leaders, sixty thousand mostly female dressmakers walked off their jobs and flooded union halls throughout the city. Two months earlier, the U.S. Congress passed the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), a foundation of President Roosevelt ’s first New Deal, promising for the first time “that employees shall have the right to organize and bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing and shall be free from the interference, restraint, or coercion of employers of labor, or their agents.”1 David Dubinsky was among those labor leaders who saw that provision as a watershed moment for unions. But the promise carried no teeth. Without a government mechanism to implement unions’ right to exist and to enforce labor-management contracts, little changed in how unions organized.2 Indeed, the NIRA offered management within each industry the opportunity to create “codes” that established uniform wages and maximum hours based on prevailing rates and conditions. For many small garment manufacturers who were competing in a cutthroat industry, fearful of going out of business because of competitors underbidding them or unions demanding higher wages, the codes held out the hope of a rationalized system and a stable, low-wage structure. For many union activists, especially in the garment industry, the threats inherent in the NIRA provided more motivation to organize than did its promises. The ILGWU began to sign up new members at a rate that stunned the industry. More workers walked out, and as many as twenty thousand dressmakers struck in out-of-town centers such as New Haven, Connecticut, and Camden, New Jersey.3 Neither Sasha Zimmerman nor David Dubinsky expected the rush of workers who responded to the dressmakers’ call to 124 | All Together Different Only four days into the strike, individual manufacturers began to seek settlement with the dressmakers’ joint board, which comprised the four local strike. Zimmerman remembered, “The response was so overwhelming that we were astonished ourselves. We had estimated that 30,000 workers might go out, or at most 35,000. The actual outpouring was in the neighborhood of 70,000, shops we had never been near, shops that did not have a single union member. We did not have halls enough to hold them, so we had to take an armory. It was enormous, just enormous.”4 The energy and confusion that reigned among the tens of thousands of new recruits recalled the shirtwaist strike twenty-four years earlier. Like that organizational surge, the 1933 strike required immediate conscription of a new class of leaders. People had to hire halls to accommodate the strikers and to register and instruct new union members. Strike leaders needed to rally troops, to run picket lines, and to hold those lines against strikebreakers. At the same time, local union leaders were negotiating with hundreds of garment manufacturers. For union leaders on all levels, maintaining order on the streets, at the union offices, in strike halls, and in the shops required a level of coordination that proved difficult , but not impossible, to achieve. Zimmerman and other veteran union leaders called on years of experience running strikes, leading mass meetings, and identifying leadership among new recruits. In addition, just as in the 1909–1910 strike of shirtwaist makers, the dressmakers relied on Socialist Party activists to train strike leaders quickly. Union organizers pressed rank-and-file members such as Maida Springer-Kemp into service for the union. Springer-Kemp, who joined the union only a few months prior to the strike, remembered the heady atmosphere and disarray that accompanied it. I was working in a shop when the call for the general strike went out. They poured out by the thousands. The Local 22 couldn’t keep up. I was asked to learn something about parliamentary procedure. The young socialists would come to teach parliamentary procedure. My husband must have thought I took leave of my senses. . . . The strike committee is almost a euphemism. They were so overwhelmed that they took anyone, and you started work; it was that informal . . . . I just came out with my shop and went to one of the halls assigned and was overwhelmed by what was going on. You joined committees and had sandwiches, pumpernickel and corned beef. . . . You were...

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