Women Garment Workers: “Within the Gates” 1930 US Deptartment of Labor
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“On the employment of women in the textile and garment industries. Reel 1 analyzes economic factors which compel women to work. Cotton is picked and processed (graded, combed, spun, and warped). Reel 2, cloth is cut and stitched. Shirts are sewed, ironed, folded, and boxed.” Silent.
Originally a public domain film from the National Archives, slightly cropped to remove uneven edges, with the aspect ratio corrected, and one-pass brightness-contrast-color correction & mild video noise reduction applied.
Wikipedia license:
The International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU) was once one of the largest labor unions in the United States, one of the first U.S. unions to have a primarily female membership, and a key player in the labor history of the 1920s and 1930s. The union, generally referred to as the “ILGWU” or the “ILG,” merged with the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union in 1995 to form the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees (UNITE). UNITE merged with the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Union (HERE) in 2004 to create a new union known as UNITE HERE. The two unions that formed UNITE in 1995 represented 250,000 workers between them, down from the ILGWU’s peak membership of 450,000 in 1969…
Early history
The ILGWU was founded on June 3, 1900 [2] in New York City by seven local unions, with a few thousand members between them. The union grew rapidly in the next few years but began to stagnate as the conservative leadership favored the interests of skilled workers, such as cutters. This did not sit well with the majority of immigrant workers, particularly Jewish workers with a background in Bundist activities in Tsarist Russia, or with Polish and Italian workers, many of whom had strong socialist and anarchist leanings…
The ILGWU had a sudden upsurge in membership that came as the result of two successful mass strikes in New York City.
The first, in 1909, was known as “the Uprising of 20,000” and lasted for fourteen weeks…
Several months later, in 1910, the ILGWU led an even larger strike, later named “The Great Revolt”, of 60,000 cloakmakers…
The union also became more involved in electoral politics, in part as a result of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire on March 25, 1911…
The New York Joint Board called a general strike on July 1, 1926.
The left wing locals may have hoped that a general strike, which had the support of even the right wing locals loyal to Sigman, would be a quick success; it was not. Employers hired “Legs” Diamond and other gangsters to beat up strikers; the union hired their own protection, led by “Little Augie” Orgen, to fight back. When the strike went into its third month, the left wing leadership went to A.E. Rothstein, a retired manufacturer, to ask him to intercede…
The failed 1926 strike nearly bankrupted the ILGWU…
As weak as the ILGWU was in the aftermath of the 1926 strike, it was nearly destroyed by the Great Depression. Its dues-paying membership slipped to 25,000 in 1932 as unionized garment shops shut or went nonunion or stopped abiding by their union contracts.
The union recovered, however, after the election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the passage of the National Industrial Recovery Act, which promised to protect workers’ right to organize…
The ILGWU sponsored a contest among its members in the 1970s for an advertising jingle to advocate buying ILGWU-made garments. The winner was “Look for the Union Label”…
