Sidney Hillman

Sidney Hillman

Sidney Hillman (1887-1946), was a major labor union leader of the New Deal era, and a leading liberal. He began his career as one of the organizers of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America and at 27 became its first president. He held that post to the day of his death and during that time was the unquestioned czar of this union. He was one of the founders of the CIO in the late 1930s, launching a major rival to the more conservative AFL. He directed CIO political operations on behalf of liberal Democrats and the New Deal Coalition, making a special effort to reelect his close ally, President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1940 and 1944.

Career

Hillman was born to a family of rabbis and small business owners in Lithuania in 1887. He arrived in the United States in 1907. By the age of sixteen he was organizing the typesetters of Kovno for the Bund, the outlawed Jewish trade union movement. The Czarist police imprisoned him in 1904 for organizing in a labor parade, and again during the revolution of 1905 while working for the Social Democratic party. When the revolution was defeated he fled to the United States. In Chicago he worked for $8 a week as a cutter at the giant the men's clothing factory of Hart, Shaffner and Marx. In 1910 the workers there went on strike, sparking a a strike in the entire Chicago men's clothing industry. Hillman became a strike leader and negotiated a compromise settlement calling for arbitration. He was elected business agent of the newly formed Local 39, United Garment Workers of America. His moderation and realism now made the arbitration plan work, as Hillman gained the trust of workers and management. Meanwhile a new national union formed of needle workers, the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America. It named Hillman president and became his base of power until his death.

Amalgamated

The Amalgamated could not join the AFL, which recognized its rival the more established United Garment Workers.

The breakthrough came with World War I: the military needed uniforms fast, and the Amalgamated, after winning several bloody strikes in Chicago and Baltimore, was an all-out supporter of the war effort. Hillman shrewdly mixed militancy and reasonable negotiation, and added a new dimension with his cooperation with the new federal Board of Control and Labor Standards for Army Clothing. By 1920 the Amalgamated enrolled 177,000 dues paying members, with contracts covering 85% of the men's clothing industry. The Amalgamated forced companies to stop using sweatshops (that is, families working in their own apartments for much lower pay), and achieved the forty-four-hour week by 1920.

Industrial unionism

Hillman disagreed with the strategy of the AFL to concentrate on skilled workers. He believed in "industrial unionism", which involved unionizing all he workers in an industry of all skill levels. He was quite successful with this approach to clothing workers; John L. Lewis was developing a similar approach at the same time regarding coal miners. Hillman and Lewis, however, had a deeper strategy. They saw that industries like sewing and coal mining were dominated by hundreds of small firms, that engaged in ruinous competition. Wage comprised most of the cost of doing business in the needle trades and coal mining, so brutal competition meant lower wages. The way to improve conditions, raise wages and raise profits was to have the union control the industry by setting high wages. In a competitive marketplace, other firms were helpless when a competitor cut prices--they had to follow. But if the union policed the industry and prevented wage cuts and thus price cuts, then cutthroat competition with low wages and low wages would be impossible. The solution only worked in a few industries (especially clothing and coal) where conditions were exactly right (many small companies, wages the biggest expense.) These conditions did not apply in most industries. The problem in the 1920s was that unions were too weak to police their industries, so when the New Deal arrived in 1933, Hillman jumped at the chance to have the NRA police the industries and keep wages high. When NRA ended in 1935, Hillman helped Congress pass the Wagner Act

Communism

Hillman was never a Communist Party member. He understood the Communist Party and its methods and would not permit his union to be controlled by the Party. The membership of his union was overwhelmingly Socialist who lived within the capitalist system.

When the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) was formed in the mid-1930s all the leaders were aware that certain Communist activists were moving in, especially at the invitation of CIO leader John L. Lewis. Hillman knew Michael Quill, Joseph Curran, Harry Bridges, Ben Gold, Abram Flasner and numerous others who had moved into the CIO were Communists. And Hillman understood Communists in labor unions are not interested in the welfare of the members but in the use of the union apparatus for pro-Soviet activities.

Hillman was one of many labor leaders to use the goon as part of his enforcement machinery.

"Clear Everything with Sidney"

Hillman organized in 1943 the CIO Political Action Committee to mobilize voters in upcoming elections.

At the 1944 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, DNC Chairman Bob Hannegan went for instructions to President Franklin Roosevelt's private railway car just before the July convention officially began. Roosevelt had decided to dump incumbent Vice-President Henry Wallace. Worried over dissension on the choice of a successor, the New York Times reported Roosevelt told Hannegan: "Go on down there and nominate Truman before there's any more trouble. And clear everything with Sidney." That is, the President could not make the selection of Truman until Hillman. approved it.

The Democratic party could win the Presidential election of 1944 if it could carry the Southern states and in addition New York, Massachusetts, Illinois, Michigan and New Jersey. These states were carried with the support of the CIO.

Further reading

• Bernstein, Irving. Turbulent Years: A History of the American Worker, 1933-1941 (1970), the best overview of the era
• Fraser, Steve. Labor Will Rule: Sidney Hillman and the Rise of American Labor (1993). excerpt and text search, the standard scholarly biography
• Fraser, Steve. "From The 'New Unionism' To The New Deal." Labor History 1984 25(3): 405-430. 0023-656x online
• Galenson, Walter. The CIO Challenge to the AFL: A History of the American Labor Movement, 1935-1941 (1960) online editiononline edition
• Josephson, Matthew. Sidney Hillman (1952), good older biography
• Lichtenstein, Nelson. Labor's War at Home: The CIO in World War II (2003)
• Zieger, Robert H. The CIO, 1935-1955 (1995) online edition, the standard scholarly history

See also

• CIO
• New Deal

External links

• Vladimir I. Lenin to Sidney Hillman, Lenin Collected Works, Progress Publishers, 1976, Moscow, Volume 35, pages 526-527.