Making the Amalgamated: Gender, Ethnicity, and Class in the Baltimore Clothing Industry, 1899-1939 (review)

Making the Amalgamated: Gender, Ethnicity, and Class in the Baltimore Clothing Industry, 1899-1939. By Jo Ann E. Argersinger. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. Pp. x+229. $39.95.

In Making the Amalgamated, Jo Ann Argersinger focuses on the social, economic, and political dynamics of the industrial workplace. Her subject is the organizational history of the Baltimore chapter of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union (ACWU), and she attempts to do for the garment industry what other scholars have done for textile workers, shoe factory workers, and iron molders, among others--namely, to show how differences in ethnicity, class, and gender shaped the organizational history of industrial unions and affected the industries themselves.

The dramatic growth of the garment industry in Baltimore after the Civil War coincided with the great foreign immigration of those decades. Mostly segregated into residential ghettos, immigrant groups came together in the workplace, where their differences often created social tensions and complicated organizational efforts. By the 1890s Baltimore's garment industry was characterized by two types of production facilities: a handful of large factories, owned and operated by German-Jewish families who had for the most part arrived in America before the Civil War, and a large number of small shops, many of which were part of a contracting system controlled by the large factories. Design, cutting, and pressing were done in the large plants, sewing in the contract shops. Workers in the large plants were German-Jewish, or American-born sons of German and Irish immigrants, or from other immigrant groups such as Poles, Lithuanians, and Italians, who considered themselves skilled workers. Most of the contract shops were managed by a tailor whose wife and family served as the labor force. Many were owned by the Russian Jews who immigrated in the last decades of the century.

The cultural rift between Americanized German Jews and recently arrived Russian Jews has been well documented elsewhere and undoubtedly made it easier for the former to "sweat" the latter when economic conditions required. Add to this the fact that many of the least skilled in both factories and shops were young women who spoke no English and it is easy to see why labor organizers faced significant obstacles to creating the class-consciousness necessary for union formation in this milieu.

The struggles faced by ACWU organizers reflect a recurring pattern in the industrialization of traditional crafts. Early stages of mass production divided the relatively complex hand process of tailoring into a series of simple steps that could be easily learned in a short time. Workers in the more difficult or physically demanding jobs, such as design, cutting, and pressing, had bargaining power with management. In 1892 they organized into a craft union, the United Garment Workers (UGW), which affiliated with the American Federation of Labor and eventually became an obstacle to the formation of an industrial union of all garment workers.

Manufacturers created the setting for the next phase of union activity by introducing more elaborate "scientific management" techniques into their processes. By 1905 the large manufacturers had expanded their operations and begun to incorporate some of the contract work under their own roofs, further stratifying the work process. A large part of the increased workforce in the major factories was composed of immigrants, mostly young Russian Jewish women.

Efforts to form an industry-wide union began in 1909, when the ACWU was founded in New York. Dorothy Jacobs, a young Russian Jewish girl in Baltimore, organized a local union of buttonhole makers that became the nucleus of the ACWU four years later. In 1913 a massive citywide strike by the UGW resulted in a negotiated agreement that fragmented the union. Many of the unskilled workers opposed the settlement and ultimately joined with groups in other garment-making cities to form the ACWU in December 1914. Argersinger maintains that in Baltimore...