- Person
- Sidney Hillman
- Lived
- 1887–1946
- Field
- Labour movement
- From
- Lithuanian-American
The story
Sidney Hillman was born in 1887 in Žagarė, Lithuania, then part of the Russian Empire, into a family of rabbis. He left yeshiva as a teenager, joined the Jewish workers' movement known as the Bund, and was arrested for his activities. After the failed revolution of 1905 he emigrated, first to Manchester and in 1907 to the United States. In Chicago he worked at Sears, Roebuck and then as an apprentice cutter at the clothing maker Hart Schaffner & Marx, and he emerged as a leader in the great garment strike of 1910 and then as business agent of his local union.
The conservative leadership of the United Garment Workers, an AFL affiliate, mistrusted its militant big-city locals. At the union's 1914 convention it tried to disenfranchise their members. Those locals, representing two thirds of the union's membership, walked out and formed a new union, the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America.
Hillman had recently taken a post as chief clerk with the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union in New York, where he worked under the Protocols of Peace that governed that industry. The insurgents telegraphed him, begging him to become their president, and a second telegram came from his fiancée, Bessie Abramowitz, one of the original leaders of the 1910 strike. Hillman accepted, saying, "The tailors made me. They can have me."
It was a risky choice. The American Federation of Labor refused to recognise the new union, and the United Garment Workers raided it, supplied strikebreakers and signed contracts with struck employers. Hillman steadied the Amalgamated, extended its power in Chicago through a series of strikes, and pushed into Baltimore and Rochester, New York, overcoming ethnic divisions among workers. By 1920 the union had contracts with 85 percent of New York's men's clothing manufacturers and a 44-hour week, and according to the Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project it grew to 177,000 members.
Hillman led the Amalgamated from its founding until his death in 1946. Under him it pioneered cooperative housing, unemployment insurance and a workers' bank, and it helped found the Congress of Industrial Organizations. Through mergers its successor today is Workers United, carrying on a union he built for the people who made America's clothes.
Why it matters
Under Hillman the Amalgamated grew into one of America's strongest unions, transforming pay and conditions for men's clothing workers.
About Sidney Hillman
Yeshiva student turned garment cutter who built the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, co-founded the CIO and helped write the New Deal’s labour laws.
More about Sidney Hillman
- Sidney Hillman built a union for 100,000 textile workersSidney Hillman oversaw and helped fund the CIO drive that created the Textile Workers Union of America, with more than 100,000 members, in 1939.
- Sidney Hillman helped found the CIOIn 1935 Sidney Hillman joined John L. Lewis in founding the Committee for Industrial Organization to unionise mass-production workers ignored by craft unions.
- Sidney Hillman helped write the Wagner ActSidney Hillman gave key help to Senator Robert Wagner in drafting the National Labor Relations Act and to Frances Perkins in winning the Fair Labor Standards Act.
- Sidney Hillman rose to lead in the great 1910 Chicago strikeWhen a few women walked out of a Chicago clothing factory in 1910, the strike grew to some 45,000 garment workers, and the young cutter Sidney Hillman emerged as a leader.
- Sidney Hillman's union founded a bank for working peopleIn the 1920s Sidney Hillman's Amalgamated pioneered "social unionism", offering members unemployment insurance and cooperative housing and founding the Amalgamated Bank.
- Sidney Hillman won clothing workers a 44-hour weekAfter surviving a four-month lockout in 1919, Sidney Hillman's union had contracts with 85 percent of New York's men's clothing makers by 1920 and a 44-hour working week.
- Sidney Hillman inspired a foundation for a better AmericaAfter Sidney Hillman died in 1946, his union created the Sidney Hillman Foundation, which has given Hillman Prizes for journalism in the public interest since 1950.
- Sidney Hillman backed the first limited-equity co-opThe Amalgamated Housing Cooperative in the Bronx, funded and inspired by Sidney Hillman and Abraham Kazan, was the first limited-equity housing cooperative in the United States.
Sources
- Sidney Hillman Wikipedia
- Sidney Hillman (1887-1946) Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project, George Washington University
- About the Sidney Hillman Foundation The Sidney Hillman Foundation
- Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America Wikipedia
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