About Us -- No Sweat -- Union-Made Casual Apparel

While we are on the subject of evil...

HISTORICAL EVIL:
"The Triangle Fire," by Leon Stein with a new introduction by William Greider. (Cornell University Press, 2001.)

EVIL IN THE RAG TRADE:
"NO SWEAT: Fashion, Free Trade, and the Rights of Garment Workers," edited by Andrew Ross. (Verso Press 1997.)

BORDERLINE EVIL:
"Border Witness," by Maureen Casey and Brian Casey. (The New York State Labor-Religion Coalition, 2002).

COSMIC EVIL:
"Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy," by Susan Neiman. (Princeton U. Press, 2002.)

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> NO SWEAT NEWS > NEWS ARCHIVE

If Not Now When: The strike of 1909

Pat Sherman is an archivist who also writes for children and young adults. She is currently completing a novel for young adults based on the strike of 1909.

By Pat Sherman

Women continued to picket thoughout the winter of 1909-10. In spite of their great hardships, they always tried to look their best. Many even went to jail still wearing their stylish hats.

IGLWU Archivews, Keehl Center, Cornell U. photographer unknown

On the evening of November 22, 1909 several thousand people--men, women and even children as young as eleven and twelve- gathered in the Great Hall at New York City's Cooper Union. Most lived in the nearby Jewish and Italian neighborhoods of the Lower East Side. Virtually all had come to the meeting directly from the garment factories where they worked. News of the meeting had been circulated via flyers printed in Yiddish, Italian and English. The purpose of the assembly was to discuss the need for what they called a "general strike."

The idea of a strike was not universally popular. Unemployment ran high and unions, especially the newly formed International Ladies Garment Workers Union, were weak. Several smaller strikes had broken out over the summer and none had brought about permanent change. Nationally known labor leaders, including Samuel Gompers, head of the American Federation of Labor, had come to Cooper Union to plead the union's cause. Still the workers hesitated. The union had no funds, and without their weekly pay, however small, few could afford to eat much less pay the rent.

The meeting went on far into the night. Translators switching from Yiddish to English to Italian and back again added to the confusion and din. Finally a young woman began to push her way onto the stage. At twenty-three, Clara Lemlich, still looked much younger. She could barely see over the podium. "I am working girl," she told the audience. "One of those on strike against intolerable conditions..." Her person may have been small, but her voice became big. "I offer a resolution that a general strike be declared--now." A resounding cry of affirmation began to move through the crowd. "If not now, when?" Weary workers jumped to their feet. "If not now when?" they demanded. They waved hats and handkerchiefs. "If not now when?"

After five minutes the chairman was finally able to ask for someone to second the motion. Every voice replied. When he asked if they would take "the old Jewish oath" every hand went up. Even those who did not speak Yiddish understood the words. "If I turn traitor to the cause I now pledge, may this hand wither from the arm I now raise."

Garment workers, ca. 1910. Workers were expected to supply their own machines, needles, scissors and other necessary tools of the trade. Many were also charged a weekly fee for electricity, heat and even the chairs they sat on.

Lewis Hine, George Eastman House Collection.

The next morning nearly twenty thousand striking workers, most of them young women and teen-age girls, filled the streets. Sympathetic reporters dubbed it "The Uprising of the Twenty Thousand." It was the largest strike in New York's history.

That this event should be precipitated by a young woman and for young women, should come as no surprise. Woman and girls formed the backbone of the textile and clothing industry. They had been its mainstay from the beginning.

When the first U.S. textile mills opened in Lowell, Massachusetts in the 1820's, factory owners advertised for "young ladies of good character" to operate the new power looms. Girls from the surrounding farms flocked to Lowell. Factory work offered steady wages. Cash was hard to come by in rural America. Some girls had never touched it until they received that first pay envelop holding approximately $1.25, a good sum for that time. Unlike farm laborers, textile operators worked indoors. And they could earn money all year round. The owners built dormitories for the girls and even allowed them to form educational societies among themselves. Visitorscame from Europe to observe these model living arrangements and praise the industrious girls.

But the visitors did not see the inside of the factories where lint from the cotton thread filled the air like a constant snowstorm. The workday started at 5:00 in the morning and ended at 7:30 in the evening or later during the summer. During the winter oil lamps gave off a lot of smoke but little useful light. Long skirts soaked with grease from the machines made every girl a walking fire hazard. Within a decade the factory girl had gone from being an American ideal to a figure of pathos. "No more shall I work in the factory to greasy up my clothes," they sang:

No more shall I work in the factory with splinters up my toes.
Oh pity me my darling, pity me I say,
Pity me my darling and carry me away.

Few girls, though, could count on "darling" to carry them away. If things were to change, they would have to do something for themselves. Staring in the 1830's a series of strikes or "turn-outs" began to disrupt the textile mills. Sometimes the girls struck in conjunction with men in the higher paying tailor trades, but more often they "turned out" en masse in the factory courtyard on their own to protest long hours, pay cuts and unsanitary conditions. By 1850 their song had changed:

If I still must wend my way,
Uncheered my hope's sweet song,
God grant that in the mills a day
May be but ten hours long.

The ten hour day was still more than a half century away.

Lunchbreaks were brief, but they became opportunies for socializing and organizing.

Lunchtime, ca. 1910. Lewis Hine, George Eastman House Collection

The great waves of European immigrants arriving after the Civil War brought millions of eager, unskilled women into the clothing industry. Technological innovation made it possible to produce garments almost entirely by machine. One girl seated at a sewing machine would sew a single seam and pass the garment on to the next girl, and so on down the line. A woman could work at a single task for years, sometimes a lifetime. Unlike textile mills, garment factories required little start-up capital. The girls owned or rented their own machines. For the cost of rent, two or three floors of building could become an instant factory or "shop." In 1909 nearly 600 of these shops existed in New York City. Many of them churned out the ubiquitous shirtwaist dress, a favorite fashion among both working and middle class women. With its button-front blouse and smooth, flaring skirt the shirtwaist was easy to make and ready to wear. It could go straight from the factory line onto the racks of the "department store" emporiums.

Young middle class women loved the freedom and ease of the dress. This new generation scorned the life of endless fittings with the seamstress led by their mothers. They wanted to try new things--sailing, bicycling, golf and, yes, college. They aspired to be social workers rather than debutantes. But did any of these women ever wonder who made the dress they wore?

In the winter of 1909-10, Clara Lemlich and her comrades acquired some surprising allies. Women from uptown began to appear on the downtown picket lines. "The mink brigade" many pundits cynically dismissed them. Mink had its uses. When the strikers' funds ran dangerously low, they organized benefits. They embarrassed police officers and judges by insisting on being arrested along with the workers. When not arrested, they showed up in court, often with reporters in tow, to offer bail and moral support.

"It's a you-a-girl, me-a-girl spirit," the New York Sun came to their defense. "One wears the shirtwaist, the other makes it...The factory girl and the college girl are making a fight together." For the first time, consumers became conscious participants in the labor movement.

The Uprising of the 20,000 ended in the spring of 1910. The strike was not an unmitigated success. A little over 300 employers signed contracts recognizing the union--a dramatic increase over the previous number. Nearly half of the striking workers, however, were forced to return to same conditions they had left.

One year after the strike, on March 25, 1911, the Triangle Shirtwaist factory burst into flames. The doors had been locked from the outside to keep the women inside. The fire escapes proved useless, quickly collapsing when desperate workers swarmed onto them. The factory occupied the top three floors of a ten story building on the corner of Greene Street and Washington Place. As a horrified crowd gathered, 146 people, most of them young women and teen-aged girls, jumped to their deaths. The water from the firemen's hose ran red with blood.

Clara Lemlich started union organizing when she was fifteen. No stranger to violence on the picket lines, she had already been arrested seventeen times before she spoke at Cooper Union. She remained active in labor politics throughout most of her adult life.

Clara Lemlich, ca. 1910, ILGWU Archives, Keehl Center, Cornell U. photographer unknown

The ILGWU quickly organized a relief fund for the families of the dead workers, many of whom had lost their main breadwinner. $120,000 filled the union coffers, much of it from fellow factory workers. A month later, on April 5, the union sponsored the city's only memorial procession. 100,000 members from sixty trade unions marched from Washington Place up Fifth Avenue in the pouring rain. 400,000 spectators lined the streets watching in absolute silence.

The aftermath of the tragedy raised the profile of the ILGWU and the esteem in which it was held among both the working and middle class. Between 1910 and 1920 union membership increased to over 90,000. The ILGWU had emerged as the voice of garment workers throughout the nation. Equally important, ordinary consumers--those women who had never seen the inside of a factory--began to look for and demand the "union label" inside their clothes.

UNITE

Although the U.S. garment industry has shrunk considerably from its heyday at the turn of the twentieth century, needle trades still employ thousands of poor and immigrant women. Today's needle workers are largely Asian and Hispanic rather than Jewish and Italian, yet the obstacles they face remain the same. Sweatshops are not buried in history. Unfortunately, they are thriving in non-union shops across the country.

In 1982 workers from locals 23 and 25 in New York's Chinatown organized one of the largest demonstrations against poor factory conditions that the city had seen in decades. The ILGWU responded to the protest by creating the Immigration Project to assist workers in obtaining legal status and protection. In addition the union established the Campaign for Justice which reached out to consumers and alerted them to the rise of sweatshops world wide.

After much negotiation, the ILGWU merged with the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union in 1995 to form UNITE: The Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees. The Global Justice for Garment Workers campaign, launched by UNITE in 2002, continues the tradition and ideals of the ILGWU. Through the efforts of UNITE's women (and men,too) the union label is becoming an international symbol of justice and human dignity for a new generation.