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Union wages are high, but management gets its money's worth. The standard I.L.G.W.U. work-week is 35 hours, the average wage $70. Slowdowns and featherbedding, the plague of many industries, have no place in the garment district. An operator, guaranteed $57.75 a week minimum by contract, can make up to $150 at piecework rates if she is unusually quick and skillful. In 1941, the I.L.G.W.U. instituted labor's first management-engineering department to help firms run their businesses better.
Initiation fees average $10 (though some aristocratic locals like the cutters exact a week's pay). In return, the union member gets $30 worth of free medical treatment ($1.25 for a general examination), vacation pay, sickness insurance, old-age pension plan, and a $500 death benefit. All but the death benefit is paid for by the employer, who puts 3% to 5% of his weekly payroll into a general welfare fund.
The International's proudest showpiece is Unity House, in Pennsylvania's Pocono Mountains. For $38 a week, the unionist can get all his meals, and swimming, boating, tennis, and dancing every night. Unity's handsome main building was designed by famed Architect William Lescaze and in its lounge are the Rivera murals turned down by Rockefeller Center as too Marxist (the union doesn't fear the ideology, thinks it got a bargain on the art).
The Policeman. The purse strings to all this wealth are tightly controlled by Dubinsky himself. But he is one of the U.S.'s lowest-paid major labor leaders, and at his own insistence. John L. Lewis gets $50,000; the teamsters' Dan Tobin, $30,000. Dubinsky's salary is $15,600. To the disgust of his staff, he keeps other union salaries down comparably. Says he: "If we took more, we would not give a good goddam about the workers." He insists every penny be accounted for publicly, spends $100,000 a year to send 32 accountants from local to local checking their books. They seldom find much, but the local learns the lesson that little David teaches: "There's no profit in trying to beat Dubinsky."
The I.L.G.W.U. prowls the clattering industry like a policeman on a beat. Its business agents drop in to inspect a jobber's books. Its committees negotiate piece rates for new garments. With its efficient research department, it knows more about an employer's business than he does himself.
Grievances are handed up smoothly through echelons to an impartial chairman, a $25,000-a-year job which such men as Harry Hopkins, Charles Poletti and Jimmy Walker have filled.
Contractors cut wages at their peril. If shops try to escape and take to the hinterland in quest of cheaper labor, the union pursues them like the bloodhounds after Eliza. "There are some in hiding," says Dubinsky, "but not for long."
Like other well-policed citizens, some employers wistfully look back to the days when a red-blooded man could go on a tear. Bosses cannot easily fire any worker. They complain that they are "married" to their contractors for good or evil, but admit the return to cutthroat competition would be disastrous. Others mutter about "protected shops," to which the union gives preferential treatment because they signed up early. (The union confesses it made such deals in its youth, insists that they are made no longer.)