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This chapter presents an essay from Justice, the English-language newspaper of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU), urging members to celebrate Labor Day. Traditionally, the ILGWU's leaders as socialists had considered May Day as the day of international workers' solidarity. Labor Day as celebrated by the American labor movement is considered wanting, however, the chapter emphasizes that despite its more recent lukewarm applications in mainstream society, Labor Day can still be celebrated based on its original purpose. Furthermore, the chapter encourages its members to go even further—by organizing demonstrations, assemblies, and similar during this year's Labor Day and the succeeding ones, in order to celebrate organized labor and denounce exploitations of labor.

This chapter extols both the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America and the International Ladies' Garment Workers Union for their innovations in the areas of education, social welfare, racial integration, and industrial relations. These two unions are praised for their creative efforts in facing the problems plaguing so many other unions during the 1920s—the suppression of conventional tactics which did not evolve or expand in scope along with changing business and labor practices. Likewise, other unions simply did not aim beyond their own workplaces, whereas the ILGWU 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. Furthermore, these unions were praised for maintaining their Jewish socialist ideals all throughout their campaigns for change.

This chapter discusses the aims and functions of workers' education, as set forth by the ILGWU's national education program. The purpose of the educational activities of the ILGWU is to provide the labor movement with intelligent, well informed, clear thinking men and women, as they can more effectively organize themselves in order to abolish the inequalities and injustices which they suffer. The courses provided by this program are geared toward the laborers' industries, organizations, and the labor movement as a whole. These courses also provide practical lessons concerning relations with fellow human beings, as well as inspiration via lessons in literature. The chapter then concludes with a sampling of the available courses in the ILGWU's Workers' University, which deal with a variety of topics.

In 1917, the AFL endorsed the British government’s Balfour Declaration, which called for a Jewish homeland in Palestine. This marked the first time that the American labor movement engaged with the issue of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. However, most Jewish trade unionists, centered in the garment industry, did not support the AFL’s endorsement of the Declaration as they rejected the nationalist overtones associated with it. Most Jewish trade unionists descended from the Bund, the General Federation of Jewish Workers of Lithuania, Poland, and Russia. Bundists viewed Zionist support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine as anathema to their socialist views, and they bitterly clashed with Zionists over the issue of Palestine. However, the creation of Histadrut, the General Federation of Jewish Workers in Palestine in 1920 altered the dynamic. By the early 1920s, a small number of labor leaders who were either Labor Zionists or Bundists who viewed Histadrut as a fellow labor movement worth supporting. Led by Max Pine, the leader of the United Hebrew Trades, these labor activists started raising funds for Histadrut in 1923 through the Gewerkschaften campaign. These fundraising drives continued through the 1920s and marked the true engagement of American labor with Jewish labor in Palestine.

With the founding of Israel in May 1948, the American labor movement rejoiced. However, it maintained steady pressure on the Truman administration to allow for weapons sales to Israel and to ensure a multi-million dollar U.S. government loan to Israel. In a remarkable sign of AFL and CIO cooperation, AFL President William Green and CIO President Philip Murray visited President Truman in the White House in 1950 to make their case for U.S. support of Israel. Also during the early 1950s, the ILGWU led an effort to fund affordable housing for Israeli workers through the Amun-Israel Housing Coporation. This effort marked the culmination of the American labor movement’s central role in the building of Israel’s infrastructure.

This chapter explains how the experiences of young Jewish women, many of whom fled Russia after the failed 1905 revolution, forged a particularly militant sensibility that led to the surge of union building at the end of the first decade of the twentieth century and through the second. It also explores how the evolving International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU) union structure provoked competition between local union autonomy and international authority. The tensions generated by these struggles played out along gender lines and involved control over educational and social institutions. Female activists who designed their educational programs in the militant local unions they helped to build were at odds with most of the male leaders, who typically regarded women as second-class union members and a threat to their personal power. Even the more enlightened leaders of the union, who welcomed and encouraged women's participation and low-level leadership, were suspicious of women's assertions of power at its upper levels.

This chapter explores the elements of Yiddishism that underpinned the ideology of Jewish radicalism through World War I and survived the crisis on the Left that was precipitated by the Russian Revolution. It places the educational programs of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU) in the context of the rivalry between radical groups and discusses the significance of women and non-Jews, especially Italians and Blacks, in the battles that took place through the 1920s. It argues that marginalized women and sympathetic men sought a political voice at all levels of union authority, including education. The efforts to control the content of courses and the operation of institutions such as Unity House were contests over union citizenship: who belonged and who deserved a voice. Just as in czarist Russia, where Jews developed educational and cultural forms to resist Russian domination, Fannia Cohn and others clung to their faith that education would serve to build a more democratic, inclusive union.

This chapter discusses political, economic, and ideological developments in the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU) that influenced the progress and direction of union building. On the one hand, ILGWU activists faced new obstacles. Stalin's accession to power in the Soviet Union led to an open dual-union movement in the United States and to splits in the Communist Party. The Great Depression that began in the winter of 1929–1930 ushered in new depths of privation for garment workers. Manufacturers stepped up the hiring of non-Jewish and non-Italian workers, partly because the new restrictions on immigration dried up the usual source of cheap labor and partly in the hope of keeping workers divided along language, racial, and ethnic lines. On the other hand, the more moderate administration of Benjamin Schlesinger and David Dubinsky tolerated and at times encouraged Fannia Cohn and other activists to develop multicultural programs of education and to reach out to new constituencies, especially African American workers.

This chapter examines the complexities of social unionism in the mid-1930s, particularly in the Dressmakers' Local 22. Social unionism in the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU) reflected the sensitivity of Yiddish socialists to the linkages between Jewish identity, revolutionary political organizing, and mutual ethnic cultural celebration among union members and comrades. As in Russia at the turn of the century, for Jewish garment workers, the face of capitalist exploitation in the American sweatshop was most often Jewish. When the union was nearly mortally wounded at the onset of the Great Depression, young Jewish women had to suppress their ideas and even their Jewish identities to get jobs with Jewish bosses. But the revival of the ILGWU and the surge of radical movements ushered in a shining moment of Jewish cultural pride predicated on mutual culturalism. With the ladies' garment industry almost completely unionized, expressions of ethnic Jewish cultures mingled prominently with expressions of African American, Hispanic, and Italian cultures in the ILGW.

This chapter looks at how multiculturalism intersected with different sectors of power critical to the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU), especially the roles of gender, race, and citizenship in the contexts of the broader Jewish Left, interpersonal politics, contests between sectors of power in the union, and differing visions of state reformation. While social unionism prevailed for several years in the mid-1930s, neither members nor leaders in the ILGWU universally or unconditionally accepted the social unionism formulated by Fannia Cohn and others. Over time, social and political forces that operated below the surface of the multicultural experiment weakened the union's commitment to the mutual embrace of ethnic cultures, especially when leaders no longer deemed it critical to the health of the union.

This chapter discusses how leaders of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU) began to assign new meaning to the union's cultural activities as they devoted an enormous portion of educational resources of the union to the Broadway production Pins and Needles. The revue, created at the height of the Popular Front, demonstrates the aspirations of union leaders struggling to come to terms with their new role in the welfare state and as players in helping to shape foreign policy. For ILGWU leaders, Pins and Needles became a venue to express their position as political and cultural insiders. The show points to the union's weakening commitment to diverse ethnic and racial cultures and isolates the moment when the ILGWU leadership began to accept a dominant American culture.

This chapter discusses the transformation of the radical political and social agenda of the Jewish labor movement into a more liberal agenda beginning around 1937 and accelerating through World War II. The International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU) began promoting a singular American working-class identity at the expense of multiple cultural identities. With the advent of World War II, Local 22 and the International drastically changed the focus of their educational programs toward inculcating patriotism and reinforcing more restrictive gender roles. As ILGWU leaders moved closer to the center of political power in the United States, they alternately encouraged and dismissed the critical importance of social and recreational activities emanating from the lower ranks of the union. Mutual culturalism persisted at the grassroots, not only as an alternative to liberal cosmopolitanism but also as a militant, democratic challenge to cautious, top-down leadership.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's main themes. This book highlights an alternative vision of unionism that coexisted in the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU) along with, and for a while held sway over, the more moderate vision that eventually eclipsed it. It describes the expression of a form of multiculturalism in the United States called mutual culturalism, which can be seen in a movement of union building in the ILGWU that began in the first decade of the twentieth century, climaxed in the 1930s, and had a far-reaching influence on American social and political culture. It argues for a rehabilitation of multiculturalism to counter the prevalent assumption that ethnic affiliations are inherently incompatible with militant class consciousness.

This chapter shows how, in the late 1950s, a trio of local labor struggles would bring the African American, Mexican American, and white labor and civil rights activists together in new, surprising ways. Two union campaigns would force the San Antonio labor movement to reconnect to the masses of mexicano (and to a lesser extent black) workers in the city. In so doing, the unions would also be compelled to confront and better understand the growing black and brown civil rights movements.

Chapter 1 traces Schneiderman’s, Newman’s, Cohn’s and Lemlich’s early years in New York garment shops at a time when electric sewing machines were doubling the speed at which workers were expected to produce. It examines their first exposure to “the Jewish labor movement,” their battles with male union leaders, their early attempts to organize young women garment workers, prior to 1909.

From the moment that garment workers began reading to each other on the garment shop floor to make up for their inability to attend school, the drive for education was a central thrust of industrial feminists in the labor movement. Fannia Cohn, long-time activist in the ILGWU Education Department was a visionary in that struggle. This chapter traces her commitment to educate workers and her isolation by male leaders of the ILGWU. Also it examines cross-class collaborations such as the Bryn Mawr School for Women Workers.