Every day at noon, the shmooze begins. All over Manhattan's grimy Garment Center, in its warrens of disheveled one-room "shops" crammed into loft buildings and slatternly tenements, the sharp whir of sewing machines stops. Workers and bosses pour onto the sidewalk and gather in clots at the curb under the glowering sun. Above the bray of automobile horns, hunched, rumpled men shout in Yiddish, Italian and English, leaning against the clogged trucks, stepping out of the way of rattling racks of dresses without missing a verb or a gesture.
Pressers and cutters, sample-makers and finishers, their clothes all somehow keep a memory of the immigrants' bundle, of steamy East Side kitchens, of under-shirted evenings at an open window. In the shops above, "the girls" gossip over their box lunches at the long tables among stacks of unfinished "garments" (it is never "blouses" or "slips" or "dresses" in the Center).
The Leader. The shmoozers are the ladies' garment workers, who clothe the U.S. woman above the wrist, below the neck, and above the ankle. Just about everything that goes into a woman's bureau drawer or hangs in her closet comes from this compact, 23-block area that runs north from 34th Street to Times Square, west from Broadway to Ninth Avenue. Flanking it to the south is the U.S. fur center, seven noisome streets. On its eastern border are the millinery shops where half of U.S. ladies' hats are fashioned.
As individuals, the garment workers are the most disputatious, diverse, and in some ways the most innately disrespectful of authority of any segment in all U.S. labor. But they have a boss who is much more than a boss. To them, busy, bumptious little David Dubinsky is leader, father, prophet and demigod. To his I.L.G.W.U., they display furious devotion. It is a school, a welfare clinic, a social life and a political mentor. It is, as some of them say, a way of life.
Twelve blocks north of. the Center on Broadway, David Dubinsky runs his International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union from a chromium and air-conditioned building once owned by Henry Ford. To a large extent, he also runs the Manhattan garment district (where 70% of all women's clothes are made) and all the other centers of the industry scattered across the U.S. and Canada.
Plunging from a chuckle to a shout, bellowing into a telephone in his broad Yiddish accent, flourishing an unlit cigar, Dubinsky directs this show with shirt-sleeved zest and an even hand. Says he: "You've got to be on your toes, not on your bottom."
The Way Is Untraditional. The industry takes his orders and likes it. So do his workers. The country over, the little ex-tailor from Lodz is cited even by hard-shelled reactionaries as "the one good labor leader." Says one employer: "That Dubinsky runs a union the best goddam way a union can be run."