WE WERE NOT BORN TO FOLLOW

Today in Labor History: November 22

20,000 female garment workers are on strike in New York; Judge tells arrested pickets: "You are on strike against God" – 1909

The population of New York City was more than half immigrant in the early 1900s, many of the shirtwaist workers were immigrants. These immigrants came from a wide variety of backgrounds(such as Jews and Italian), and crowded into immigrant neighborhoods like the Lower East Side of Manhattan Island, which at the time had one of the highest population densities in the world. Many of these immigrants, men, women, and children alike, worked for low pay in factories with terrible working conditions to help support themselves and their families. But they were also exposed to a bustling new world, and to the political and union organizers therein. Immigrant women especially often came from conservative social backgrounds which limited their interaction with men and people outside the family. But New York in the early 1900s provided the opportunity for these women to explore such social interactions, and exhibit a new level of independence.

Many of these women immigrants toiled in the garment industry, which was New York's best known industry at the time. They worked not for a single, large conglomerate but many smaller companies spread across lower Manhattan, among the largest of which were the Triangle and Leiserson shirtwaist factories. This workforce was more than 70% women, about half of whom were not yet twenty years old, and about half of whom were Jewish and a third Italian. In the production of shirtwaists in particular, the workforce was nearly all Jewish women. Some of them had belonged to labor unions in Europe before their immigration; many of the Jewish women in particular had been members of the Bund. Thus, they were no strangers to organized labor or to its tactics. Indeed, Jewish women who worked in the garment industry were among the most vocal and active supporters of women's suffrage in New York.

Garment industry workers often worked in small sweatshops, with the men doing the higher-paid work of cutting and pressing while women were paid less for assembling and finishing garments. Work weeks of 65 hours were normal, and in season they might expand to as many as 75 hours. Despite their meager wages, workers were often required to supply their own basic materials, including needles, thread, and sewing machines. Workers could be fined for being late for work or for damaging a garment they were working on. At some worksites, such as the Triangle Shirtwaist Company, steel doors were used to lock in workers so as to prevent workers from taking breaks, and as a result women had to ask permission from supervisors to use the restroom.
A sign in the elevator at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company warned, "If you don’t come in Sunday, don’t come in Monday." Workers who arrived to work five minutes late would be docked half a day’s pay.

On November 22, 1909, 19 year old Clara Lemlich had been listening to men speak about the disadvantages and cautions about the shirtwaist workers going on a general strike. After listening to these men speak four or more hours at a local 25 union meeting, she rose and declared in Yiddish that she wanted to say a few words of her own.

"[The bosses] yell at the girls and "call them down" even worse than I imagine the Negro slaves were in the South. There are no dressing rooms for the girls in the shops, no place to hang a hat where it will not be spoiled by the end of the day. We're human, all of us girls, and we're young. We like new hats as well as any other young women. Why shouldn't we? And if one of us gets a new one, even if it hasn't cost more than 50 cents, that means that we have gone for weeks on two-cent lunches--dry cake and nothing else."

"I am one of those who suffers from the abuses described here, and I move that we go on a general strike."

She declared that the shirtwaist workers would go on a general strike. Her declaration received a standing ovation and the audience went wild. Clara then took an oath.

"If I turn traitor to the cause I now pledge, may this hand wither from the arm I now raise."
-- Jewish oath taken by the shirtwaist makers after deciding to stage a general strike

From the outset, the young strikers faced three-way opposition from the manufacturers, the police, and the courts. Triangle and Leiserson hired thugs and prostitutes to abuse strikers, often with aid from policemen who then arrested strikers on trumped-up charges of assault. In court, strikers faced hostile magistrates who upbraided the young women ("You are striking against God and nature," scolded one enraged judge), fined them, and, in some cases, sentenced them to the workhouse. In an attempt to curb abuses, the fledgling Local 25 of the ILGWU, which represented shirtwaist makers, asked the Women’s Trade Union League (WTUL) (established by upper-class suffragists in 1904 to promote the welfare of working women) to monitor the picket lines. After police arrested Mary Dreier, head of the WTUL, for allegedly harassing a scab, strikers won the sympathy of a previously indifferent public. The WTUL proved a valuable ally; its members walked the picket lines, raised funds, and pleaded the strikers’ case to the general public. The Forverts, the United Hebrew Trades, the Arbeter-ring (Workmen’s Circle), and the Socialist Party and its weekly The Call also provided important logistical and financial support.

　

Nonetheless, by early November, Local 25 had almost depleted its strike fund, and many strikers chose to return to work rather than suffer arrest, harassment, and personal injury. Furthermore, Triangle and Leiserson partially circumvented the strike by subcontracting work to smaller shops (though, on at least one occasion, subcontracted workers went on a sympathy strike). Instead of conceding defeat, Local 25’s fifteen-member executive committee (six of whom were women and all socialists) called for a general strike to shut down production entirely in the shirtwaist industry. On November 22, thousands of young women packed into Cooper Union to discuss Local 25’s recommendations. Samuel Gompers and Mary Dreier spoke, along with a number of luminaries of the Jewish labor movement, including Meyer London, labor lawyer and future Socialist Party congressman; Benjamin Feigenbaum, the meeting’s chair and popular Forverts writer; and Bernard Weinstein, head of the United Hebrew Trades. In speech after speech, speakers offered support, but urged caution. Frustrated after two hours, Clara Lemlich Shavelson—a leader of the Leiserson strike and a member of Local 25’s executive committee—demanded the floor and delivered what the press termed a "Yiddish philippic." In words now legendary, the impassioned twenty-three-year-old declared, "I am a working girl, one of those who are on strike against intolerable conditions. I am tired of listening to speakers who talk in general terms. What we are here to decide is whether we shall or shall not strike. I offer a resolution that a general strike be declared—now." Lemlich ignited the audience. In unison, the crowd pledged support for the general strike by reciting a secularly adapted Hebrew oath chanted by Feigenbaum.

　

The following morning, approximately fifteen thousand shirtwaist workers took to the streets. By evening, the number swelled to more than twenty thousand. According to some estimates, almost thirty thousand workers participated in the strike during its eleven-week duration, 90 percent of whom were Jewish and 70 percent women. "Learners" and "operators" made up the bulk of the strikers, but male craftsmen (who themselves employed "learners" and occupied a critical position in the production process) also marched on the picket line, thereby guaranteeing a complete work stoppage. Pandemonium reigned during the uprising’s initial days as thousands of workers rushed to meetings, swarmed union locals, and milled the streets. In the confusion, some workers returned to their jobs, demoralized. At the same time, a number of small shops quickly negotiated with the union to gain an edge on their larger competitors. Thus, hundreds of workers returned to their shops, even as hundreds of others joined the picket lines.

Throughout the uprising, arrests and harassment continued unabated. In one month, 723 people were arrested and 19 sentenced to the workhouse. Bail averaged $2,500 per day, and court fines totaled $5,000. Overall, the strike cost $100,000. Clara Lemlich suffered six broken ribs and was arrested a total of seventeen times. In one egregious miscarriage of justice, a ten-year-old girl was tried without testimony and sentenced to five days in the workhouse for allegedly assaulting a scab. In response to such outrages, the WTUL organized mass rallies at the Hippodrome, Carnegie Hall, and City Hall in which the strikers’ plight was connected to the suffragist cause. Although a degree of mutual suspicion existed behind the scenes, this alliance produced a new perspective that merged class consciousness with feminism (later named "industrial feminism").

"Learners" and "operators" conducted much of the uprising’s daily legwork. These bold young women—malnourished and poorly clad in the bitter winter cold—handed out leaflets, raised funds, distributed strike benefits, scheduled meetings, and maintained the crowd’s morale. Some of the outstanding organizers, such as Clara Lemlich, Pauline Newman, and Rose Schneiderman, had been active in radical politics even before their emigration from Russia. Hundreds of other women assumed leadership roles spontaneously, only to disappear after the strike.

　

For much of the eleven-week strike, workers and manufacturers were locked in a stalemate. The Associated Waist and Dress Manufacturers, representing the large employers, rejected the closed union shop. Exhausted, but determined, workers refused to budge on this point, fearing that an open shop would leave the union powerless to enforce agreements. However, the strikers (represented at the negotiating table by Socialist Party leader Morris Hillquit and John Mitchell of the United Mine Workers) could not hold out. The general strike was called off unceremoniously on February 15, 1910, with about a thousand workers still on the picket line.

　

Though not a complete victory, the uprising achieved significant, concrete gains. Out of the Associated Waist and Dress Manufacturers’ 353 firms, 339 signed contracts granting most demands: a fifty-two-hour week, at least four holidays with pay per year, no discrimination against union loyalists, provision of tools and materials without fee, equal division of work during slack seasons, and negotiation of wages with employees. By the end of the strike, 85 percent of all shirtwaist makers in New York had joined the ILGWU. Local 25, which began the strike with a hundred members, now counted ten thousand. Furthermore, the uprising laid the groundwork for industrial unionism in the garment industry. Inspired by the shirtwaist makers, sixty thousand cloak makers—men, this time—launched the Great Revolt in the summer of 1910, and other garment strikes ensued across the country. After five years of unrest, the "needle trades" emerged as one of the best organized in the United States.

Less tangible, but equally important, the general strike convinced conservative veterans to accept women as capable union activists. The young women themselves discovered their own self-worth through the ideological ferment and economic struggles of 1909–1910. Many of them remembered the Uprising of the 20,000 as the formative event of their adult lives.