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Its books are an economist's nightmare, and a fact-finder's despair. For every firm that goes broke because of production costs, ten fail because they were caught with their racks full of dresses that women didn't happen to like. What is good today is instantly copied and a glut tomorrow. If Eve walked down Seventh Avenue wearing the first fig leaf, two manufacturers would be making fig leaves with ermine trim within three days, three would be promoting oak leaves instead, and nine would be offering Eve's "same identical garment"—but cheaper.
Out of the Past. The I.L.G.W.U's history and nature are deeply rooted in New York City's immigrant past. In a great, terrorized wave, a tide of Russian, Polish and Rumanian Jews swept into New York at century's end, fleeing from the czar's pogroms and from poverty to a visionary El Dorado. They settled in the slums of the Lower East Side, bewildered, lonely people whose Yiddish tongue made them strangers in a strange land.
With the invention of the commercial sewing machine, more & more U.S. housewives got rid of the stuffed dress forms that had stood for generations like lumpy ghosts in back parlors. The burgeoning garment trade fell upon the immigrants. Bane of the industry were the contractors, hard-pressed men who drove wages down & down as they bid against each other for jobbers' work. Contractors crammed workers into airless, squalid rooms, forced them to rent their sewing machines and pay for the thread they used, imposed fines for laughing or looking out the window. To earn $9 a week, men worked from 5 a.m. to past midnight. They bought bagels from shop peddlers, hung them from hooks so that they could eat without stopping work.
The immigrants brought with them a vociferous passion for brave new worlds. They were Socialists and anarchists, Marxists, Kropotkinites and syndicalists, looking to America not simply for better wages, but for the better life.
The Firebrand. With them came David Dubinsky, born Dobnievski, from his native Poland. He arrived with the reputation and history, at 18, of a revolutionary firebrand. The youngest of six children, David went to work at his father's bakery in Lodz at the age of 13, called his first strike (against the local bakers, including his father) at 15. Promptly jailed as a strike leader, young, sharp-witted David soon had one cell of prisoners rolling cigarettes for Dubinsky to sell to the others. He smuggled letters for a small fee. When someone squealed, Dubinsky got the knout.Said the warden to his father: "Such a little louse, and such a great dirt he has done."
Exiled to Siberia a year later for socialistic agitation, Dubinsky escaped and beat his way back to Lodz, hiding from the police. Late in 1910 he smuggled himself over the boarder and came to New York.
With the help of the socialist friends, the young baker became a "cutter" overnight and joined the I.L.G.W.U.'s powerful Local 10. "In the union," he admits, "I was merely paying dues. My activity was the Socialist Party."