- Person
- Sidney Hillman
- Lived
- 1887–1946
- Field
- Labour movement
- From
- Lithuanian-American
The story
Sidney Hillman was born in 1887 in Žagarė, Lithuania, into a family of rabbis. He was sent to yeshiva in Slobodka, near Kovno, but left as a teenager after discovering secular learning and joined the Bund, the underground Jewish workers' movement. He led a May Day march in Kovno in 1904 and was arrested, and was arrested again in 1905. After the failed revolution he emigrated, first to Manchester and then, in August 1907, to New York. Unhappy there, he soon moved to Chicago, took English classes at the Hebrew Institute of Chicago, worked for almost two years as a clerk at Sears, Roebuck, and in 1909 became an apprentice garment cutter at Hart Schaffner & Marx, a leading maker of men's clothing.
Conditions in the shops were harsh. According to the Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project, Hillman worked fifty-four hours a week in deplorable conditions. On September 22, 1910, a small group of women at the firm, among them his future wife Bessie Abramowitz, walked off the job. The walkout spread into a citywide strike that, by late October, involved some 41,000 to 45,000 garment workers.
The strike was bitter. It pitted the strikers not only against their employers and the local authorities but also against their own union, the conservative United Garment Workers. Progressive reformers such as Jane Addams and Clarence Darrow assisted the strikers. Hillman emerged as a rank-and-file leader, negotiating with factory heads and encouraging workers to accept a workable settlement. When the union's leaders accepted an inadequate deal, the members rejected it and kept striking, winning gains at Hart Schaffner & Marx, where management agreed to accept the union.
Hillman became business agent for the new local, and by 1911 he was in charge of it. The experience taught him the power of collective action and the value of impartial arbitrators as mediators between labour and management, a lesson that shaped his whole career.
In 1914 the militant locals born of the strike broke away to form the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, with Hillman as its first president. The 1910 strike thus launched both a great union and the career of one of America's most important labour leaders.
Why it matters
The 1910 strike won Chicago's clothing workers union recognition and launched the career of one of America's most important labour leaders.
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 led the Amalgamated Clothing WorkersIn 1914 Sidney Hillman became the first president of the new Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, saying "The tailors made me. They can have me."
- 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'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 EBSCO Research Starters
- Sidney Hillman (1887-1946) Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project, George Washington University
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