Part 12 (2/2)

Between the cloak makers and the manufacturers of New York a contest waged in numerous strikes had continued for twenty-five years. The agreements reached at the close of these strikes had been only temporary, because the cloak makers were never able to maintain a Union strong enough to hold the points won at the close of the struggle. The cloak makers had always proved themselves heroic strikers, but feeble Unionists, lacking sustained power. Again and again, men and women who had been sincerely ready to risk starvation for the justice of their claims during the fight would in peace become indifferent, fail to attend Union meetings, fail to pay Union dues; and the organization, strong in the time of defeat through the members' zeal, would weaken through their negligence in the critical hour of an ill-established success.

The main contestants in this struggle had been the cloak makers on one side, and on the other the manufacturers belonging to the Cloak and Suit Manufacturers' Protective a.s.sociation. The majority of the manufacturers in the a.s.sociation are men of standing in the trade, controlling large West Side establishments, and supplying fifty per cent of the New York output, though they represent only a small percentage of the cloak houses of New York. These cloak houses altogether number between thirteen and fourteen hundred, most of them on the East Side and the lower West Side, manufacturing cheap and medium-grade clothing. Such smaller houses had frequently broken the strikes of the last twenty-five years by temporary agreements in which they afterwards proved false to the workers. Many small dealers had become rich merchants through such strike harvests.

On this account the cloak makers naturally distrusted employers'

agreements. On the other hand, in many instances in the settlement of former strikes, cloak makers had made with certain dealers secret terms which enabled them to undersell their compet.i.tors. For this reason the manufacturers naturally distrusted cloak makers' agreements. With this mutual suspicion, the strike of 1910 began in June in two houses, an East Side and a West Side house. From the first house the workers went out because of the subcontracting system, and from the second practically on account of lockout.

On the 3d of July, a ma.s.s meeting of 10,000 cloakmakers gathered in Madison Square Garden. It was decided that the question of a general strike should be put to the vote of the 10,000 Union members. Balloting continued at the three polls of the three Union offices for two succeeding days. Of these 10,000, all but about 600 voted in favor of the strike, and of these 600 the majority afterward declared that they, too, were in sympathy with the action.

The wide prevalence of the difficulties which led to the decision of the 10,000 workers a.s.sembled at Madison Square Garden was evinced by the fact that within the next week an army of over 40,000 men and women in the New York garment trade joined the Cloak and Suit Makers' Union.

These crowds poured into the three Union offices, filled the building entries, the streets before them, reached sometimes around the block--great processions of Rumanians, Hungarians, Poles, Germans, Italians, Galicians, and Russians, the last two nationalities in the greatest numbers, men and women who had been driven out of Europe by military conscription, by persecution and pillage, literally by fire and sword, bearded patriarchs, nicely dressed young girls with copies of Sudermann and Gorky under their arms, shawled, wigged women with children clinging to their skirts, handsome young Jews who might have stood as models for clothiers' advertis.e.m.e.nts--cutters, pressers, operators, finishers, subcontractors, and sub-subcontractors; for these, too, struck with all the rest. In watching these sewing men and sewing women streaming through the Union office on Tenth Street--an office hastily improvised in an old dwelling-house in a large room, evidently formerly a bedroom, and still papered with a delicate design of white and blue stripes, and a border of garlands of rosebuds--it seemed to an onlooker that almost no economic procession could ever before have comprised elements so very catholic and various. Who could lead such a body? How could the position of their great opponents, from day to day, be made known to them? As a matter of fact, no one man can be said to have led the 60,000 New York cloak makers. In the absence of such control, the corps of more prominent Union officers and their attorney, Meyer London, and through these men the mult.i.tudes of the Union members, were virtually guided by an East Side Yiddish paper, the _Vorwarts_.

In the meantime, while these mult.i.tudes were flocking into the Union early in July, the Cloak Manufacturers' a.s.sociation, representing beforehand about seventy-five houses, had by the inclusion of many smaller firms extended its members.h.i.+p to twelve hundred establishments.[25]

Soon after the formation of the alliance, it became apparent to the smaller firms that the larger ones were not in any haste for settlement.

The latter felt that they could beat their opponents by a waiting game; while the smaller firms, with their lesser capital, scarcely more able than their workers to exist through a prolonged beleaguering of the cloak makers, felt that the present stand of the larger manufacturers involved, not only beating the Unionists, but driving themselves, the weaker manufacturers, out of the industry.

One by one, they left the a.s.sociation, sought the Union headquarters, and settled with the cloak makers. The profit reaped by these firms starting to work induced others to meet the workers' demands. By the end of July and the first week in August, six hundred smaller firms, employing altogether 20,000 cloakmakers, had settled.[26] In many instances the men and women marched back to their work with bands of music playing and with flying flags and banners.

In July two attempts were made, on behalf of the cloak makers, by the State Board of Arbitration to induce the manufacturers to meet the Union members and to arbitrate with them. These attempts failed because the Union insisted on the question of the closed shop as essential. The manufacturers refused to arbitrate the question of the closed shop.

At this juncture a public-spirited retailer of Boston, Mr. Lincoln Filene, entered the controversy. Mr. Filene resolved that, as a large consumer, he and his cla.s.s had no right to s.h.i.+rk their responsibility by pa.s.sively acquiescing in sweat-shop conditions. As an intermediary between the wholesaler and the public, the retailer had an important part in the conflict, not only because he suffered directly from the temporary paralysis of the industry, but also because his indifference to the claims of the worker for a just wage, sanitary factory conditions, abolition of home work, and for a decent working-day was equivalent to an active complicity in the guilt of the manufacturer. Through Mr. Filene's intervention, the manufacturers and the Union officials agreed to confer, and to request Mr. Louis Brandeis of Boston to act as chairman.

Mr. Brandeis had, at the outset, the confidence of both parties. Each side recognized in him that combination of wide legal learning and a social economic sense which had made him an effective partic.i.p.ant in the development of the progressive political and industrial policies of the nation. The employers welcomed Mr. Brandeis because they had faith in his sense of fairness. The cloak makers welcomed him because of his brilliant and signal service to the entire trade-union movement and to American working women in securing from the United States Supreme Court the decision which declared const.i.tutional the ten-hour law for the women laundry workers of Oregon.

The conference that was to have determined the industrial fortunes of more than 40,000 New York workers for the following year opened on Thursday morning, July 28, in a small room in the Metropolitan Life Building. Mr. Brandeis was in the chair. On one side of a long table sat the ten representatives of the cloak makers, including their attorney, a member of the _Vorwarts_ staff, and the Secretary of the International Garment Workers' Union, all these three men of middle age, intellectual faces, and sociological education, keenly identified with the ideas and principles of the workers; three or four rather younger representatives of the cloak makers, alert and thoroughly Americanized; and three older men, who had fought throughout the quarter-of-a-century contest, men with the sort of trade education that nothing but a working experience can give, deeply imbued with the traditions of that struggle, a hostility to ”scabs,” a distrust (too often well founded) of employers, and an unshaken belief in the general panacea of the closed shop--a subject which was, by agreement, to remain undiscussed in the conference. All these men, with the exception of their attorney, Mr. London, had cut and sewed on the benches of the garment trade. On the other side of the table sat the ten representatives of the manufacturers, some of them men of wide culture and learning, versed in philosophies, and prominent members of the Ethical Society, some of them New York financiers who had come from East Side sweat shops. Perhaps the most eager opponent of the closed shop in their body was a cosmopolitan young manufacturer, a linguist and ”literary” man, interested in ”style” from every point of view, who had introduced into the New York trade from abroad a considerable number of the cloak designs now widely worn throughout America. This man felt the keenest personal pride in his output. He is said at one time to have remarked, _”Le cloak c'est moi”_ And, bizarre as it may seem to an outsider, a really sincere reason of his against accepting workmen on the recommendation of the Union was that the cloak manufacturer as an artist should adopt toward his workers ”the att.i.tude of Hammerstein to his orchestra.” One of the manufacturers had been a strike leader in 1896. ”Your bitterest opponent of fourteen years ago sits on the same side of the table with you now,” said one of the older cloak makers, in a deep, intense voice, as the men took their places.

Mr. Brandeis opened the conference with these words: ”Gentlemen, we have come together in a matter which we must all recognize is a very serious and an important business--not only to settle this strike, but to create a relation which will prevent similar strikes in the future. That work is one which, it seems to me, is approached in a spirit that makes the situation a very hopeful one, and I am sure, from my conferences with counsel of both parties[27] and with individual members whom they represent, that those who are here are all here with that desire.”

Up to a certain point in the conference, which lasted for three days, this seemed to be true. The manufacturers agreed to abolish home work, to abolish subcontracting, to give a weekly half-holiday, besides the Jewish Sabbath, during June, July, and August, and to limit overtime work to two hours and a half a day during the busy season, with no work permitted after half past eight at night, or before eight in the morning. Beyond this, the question of hours was left to arbitration. Also, the question of wages was left to arbitration.

The last subject to be dealt with at the Brandeis conference was the general method of enforcing agreements between the Manufacturers'

a.s.sociation and the Union. It was in this discussion that the question of the closed shop and the open shop came before the conference.

Though the Union leaders had agreed to eliminate the discussion of the closed shop before they entered into negotiations, it was almost impossible for them to refrain from suggesting it as a means of enforcing agreements. As one of the cloak makers, one of the old leaders of the labor movement in America, said: ”This organization of cloak makers in the city of New York can only control the situation where Union people are employed. They have absolutely no control of the situation where non-union people are employed. They cannot enforce any rules, nor any discipline of any kind, shape, or description, and if we are to cooperate in any way that will be absolutely effective, then the ... Manufacturers'

a.s.sociation, ... it seems to me, should see that the necessary first step is that they shall run Union shops.”[28]

The Union shop the speaker had in mind, the Union shop advocated by the _Vorwarts_ and desired, as it proved, by a majority of the workers, was a different matter from the closed shop, which const.i.tutes a trade monopoly by limiting the members.h.i.+p of a trade to a certain comparatively small number of workers.

The inst.i.tution of the closed shop is by intention autocratic and exclusive. The inst.i.tution of the Union shop is by intention democratic and inclusive. With the cloak makers' organization, entrance into the Union was almost a matter of form. There were no prohibitive initiation fees, or dues, as in other unions. They offered every non-union man and woman an opportunity to join their ranks.

The manufacturers contended that they had no objection to the voluntary enlistment of non-union men in Union ranks; but they would not insist that all their workers belong to the Union.

This deadlock was reached on the third day of the conference. At this point Mr. Brandeis brought before the meeting the opinion that ”an effective cooperation between the manufacturers and the Union ... would involve, ... of necessity, a strong Union.” ”I realize,” he said, ...

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