Sidney Hillman won clothing workers a 44-hour week

Person: Sidney Hillman
Lived: 1887–1946
Field: Labour movement
From: Lithuanian-American

The story

In the early twentieth century the men's clothing industry was fiercely competitive, and workers paid the price in long hours and low wages. Sidney Hillman knew those conditions first hand. As an apprentice cutter at Hart Schaffner & Marx in Chicago, he worked fifty-four hours a week in deplorable conditions, according to the Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project. After the great 1910 strike he became a union leader, and in 1914 the first president of the new Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America.

During the First World War the federal government enforced labour peace in the making of army clothing through the Board of Control and Labor Standards for Army Clothing, in return for union recognition. Hillman welcomed this kind of government role. Unlike Samuel Gompers and other AFL leaders, he did not distrust government regulation, and he believed in an industrial democracy in which government helped mediate between labour and management. With support from progressives such as Felix Frankfurter and Walter Lippmann, the Amalgamated used the moment to organise non-union centres such as Rochester, New York, and to curb the cut-throat competition that had dominated the industry for decades.

That policy ended in 1919, when employers in nearly every industry with a history of unionism went on the offensive. The Amalgamated faced a four-month lockout in New York City. It not only survived but came out stronger, a sign of how firmly the workers stood behind their union.

By 1920 the union had contracts with 85 percent of the city's men's garment manufacturers and had cut the working week to 44 hours. The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project credits the union under Hillman with organising 85 percent of garment workers, enrolling 177,000 members and forcing a standard 44-hour week. For workers used to weeks like the fifty-four hours Hillman had once worked, the change meant time for family, rest and education.

The victory also gave the Amalgamated the strength to pursue its broader programme of cooperative housing, unemployment insurance and a workers' bank in the 1920s. The shorter week was an early step toward the national standards on working hours that Hillman later helped bring about under the New Deal through the Fair Labor Standards Act.

Why it matters

The 44-hour week freed clothing workers from the long hours Hillman himself had once worked at the cutting table, giving them more time for family and life outside the shop.