Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America

The Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America was a United States labor union known for its support for "social unionism" and progressive political causes. Led by Sidney Hillman for its first thirty years, it helped found the Congress of Industrial Organizations. It merged with the Textile Workers Union of America in 1976 to form the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union, which merged with the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union in 1995 to creat the union known as UNITE.

Contents

1 Founding

2 Growth

3 The Great Depression and the founding of the CIO

4 Merger with the TWUA and the ILGWU

5 Political activities

6 Further reading

Founding

The Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America—also known as "ACWA" or simply "the Amalgamated"—formed in 1914 as a result of the revolt of the urban locals against the conservative AFL affiliate the United Garment Workers . The roots of this conflict date back to the general strike of Chicago, when a spontaneous strike by a handful of women workers led to a citywide strike of 45,000 garment workers in 1910, That strike was a bitter one and pitted the strikers against not only their employers and the local authorities, but also their own union.

The leadership of the United Garment Workers mistrusted the more militant local leadership in Chicago and in other large urban locals, which had strong Socialist loyalties. When it tried to disenfranchise those locals' members at the UGW's 1914 convention, those locals, representing two thirds of the union's membership, bolted to form the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America. The AFL refused to recognize the new union and the UGW regularly raided it, furnishing strikebreakers and signing contracts with struck employers, in the years to come.

The Amalgamated's battles with the UGW's leadership also soured the union's relations with Abraham Cahan and the Daily Forward, which Cahan edited. During the 1913 strike by the United Brotherhood of Tailors in New York City, Cahan and the United Hebrew Trades had taken sides with the UGW leadership against the strikers by endorsing a settlement that the strikers rejected. The same split surfaced again the following year when the Forward and members of the Socialist Party who had a stake in the AFL supported the new union, but only tepidly, when it split from the UGW and the AFL. While the Forward played a direct role in the internal politics of the other major garment union, the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union, in years to come, it had far less influence over the ACWA.

Growth

The Amalgamated solidified its gains and extended its power in Chicago through a series of strikes in the last half of the 1910s. The ACWA also benefited from the relatively pro-union stance of the federal government during World War I, during which the federal Board of Control and Labor Standards for Army Clothing enforced a policy of labor peace in return for union recognition.

That policy ended in 1919, when employers in nearly every industry with a history of unionism went on the offensive. The ACWA not only survived a four month lockout in New York City in 1919, but came away in an even stronger position. By 1920, the union had contracts with 85 percent of men's garment manufacturers and had reduced the workweek to 44 hours.

Under Hillman's leadership, the union tried to moderate the fierce competition between employers in the industry by imposing industry wide working standards, thereby taking wages and hours out of the competitive calculus. The ACWA tried to regulate the industry in other ways, arranging loans and conducting efficiency studies for financially troubled employers. Hillman also favored "constructive cooperation" with employers, relying on arbitration rather than strikes to resolve disputes during the life of a contract. As he explained his philosophy in 1938:

Certainly, I believe in collaborating with the employers! That is what unions are for. I even believe in helping an employer function more productively. For then, we will have a claim to higher wages, shorter hours, and greater participation in the benefits of running a smooth industrial machine....

The ACWA also pioneered a version of "social unionism" that offered low-cost cooperative housing and unemployment insurance to union members and founded a bank that would serve labor's interests. Hillman and the ACWA had strong ties to many progressive reformers, such as Jane Addams and Clarence Darrow.

Hillman was, on the other hand, opposed to revolutionary unionism and to the Communist Party USA. While Hillman had maintained warm relations with the Communist Party during the early 1920s—at a time when his leadership was being challenged both by the Forward on the right and by Lithuanian and Italian syndicalists and Jewish anarchists within the union on the left—those relations cooled in 1924 when the CP withdrew its support for the Farmer-Labor Party created to support LaFollette's candidacy for President. From that point forward Hillman battled the CP activists within his union, but without the massive internecine strife that nearly tore apart the ILGWU in this era.

The Great Depression and the founding of the CIO

The Great Depression reduced the Amalgamated's membership to one third or less of its former strength. Like many other unions, the ACWA revived with the passage of the National Industrial Recovery Act, whose promise of legal protection for workers' right to organize brought thousands of garment workers back to the ACWA. The AFL finally allowed the ACWA to affiliate in 1933.

Hillman and the ACWA were supporters of the New Deal and Roosevelt from the outset. FDR named Hillman to the Labor Advisory Board of the National Recovery Administration in 1933 and to the National Industrial Recovery Board in 1934. Hillman provided key assistance to Senator Robert F. Wagner in the drafting of the National Labor Relations Act and to Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins in winning enactment of the Fair Labor Standards Act.

Within the AFL, the ACWA was one of the strongest advocates for organizing the mass production industries, such as automobile manufacture and steel, where unions had almost no presence, as well as the textile industry, which was only partially organized. Hillman was one of the original founders in 1935 of the Committee for Industrial Organizing, an effort led by John L. Lewis, and the ACWA followed the Mine Workers and other unions out of the AFL in 1937 to establish the CIO as a separate union confederation.

The ACWA provided major financial support for the Textile Workers Organizing Committee, which sought to establish a new union for textile workers after the disastrous defeat of the United Textile Workers' strike in 1934. The Textile Workers Union of America, with more than 100,000 members, came out of that effort in 1939. The ACWA also helped create the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Workers Union of America through the CIO's Department Store Workers Organizing Committee.

Hillman and Lewis eventually had a falling out, with Lewis advocating a more independent tack in dealing with the fedral government than Hillman. Lewis, however, gradually distanced himself from the CIO, finally resigning as its head and then withdrawing the United Mine Workers from it in 1942. Hillman remained in it, still the second most visible leader after Philip Murray, Lewis' successor.

Jacob Potofsky , a fellow veteran of the Hart. Schaffner & Marx strike of 1910, succeeded Hillman upon his death in 1946. The Amalgamated continued to grow during the 1950s, but, like other garment unions, faced long-term pressures from the flight of unionized work to non-union manufacturers in the South and abroad.

Merger with the TWUA and the ILGWU

The ACWA had played a leading role in the funding and leadership of the Textile Workers Organizing Committee, an organization founded by the CIO in 1939 as part of its effort to organize the South. The TWOC, which later renamed itself the Textile Workers Union of America, grew to as many as 100,000 members in the 1940s, but made little headway organizing in the South in the decades that followed.

The ACWA merged with the TWUA in 1976 to form the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union. The ACTWU merged with the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union in 1995 to create the union known as UNITE.

Political activities

The ACWA had been active in trying to form a labor party in the 1920s, combining some elements of the Socialist Party with supporters of La Follette.

Hillman used the ACWA as a base, along with the ILGWU led by David Dubinsky, in founding the American Labor Party in 1936, an ostensibly independent party that served as a halfway house for Socialists and other leftists who wanted to support FDR's reelection but were not prepared to join the Democratic Party. Dubinsky later split from the Labor Party over personal and political differences with Hillman to found the Liberal Party of New York.

The ACWA dropped its support for the Labor Party in 1948, when it supported Henry Wallace, rather than Harry S. Truman, the CIO's chosen candidate. The Labor Party dissolved in 1955.