David Dubinsky
David Dubinsky (
David Dubnievski) (
February 22,
1892 -
September 17,
1982) was a
American labor leader. He served as president of the
International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU) between
1932 and
1966, took part in the creation of the
CIO and was one of the founders of the
American Labor Party and the
Liberal Party of New York.
Born in
Brest-Litovsk, Dubinsky and his family moved to
Łódź,
Poland when he was three. He worked from early childhood as a delivery boy in his father's bakery while going to school, then graduated to being a baker. As a baker he joined the
Bund, where his facility in
Polish and
Russian as well as
Yiddish helped him to be elected assistant secretary within the union by
1906.
Arrested after participating in a bakers' strike, then released on the condition that he leave Łódź, he went to Brest-Litovsk to live with relatives, then returned to Łódź only to be arrested again at another meeting of the bakers union. While en route to exile in
Siberia he walked out of the prison camp where the authorities were holding him and, after several months hiding in
Chelyabinsk and
Bialystok, managed to make his way to the United States in
1911 with a ticket sent to him by one of his brothers, who was living in
New York City.
Dubinsky went to work in a garment factory in
Brooklyn, then joined the
Socialist Party in the aftermath of the
Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. With the help of his brother's connections through the Bakery Workers Union, Dubinsky got a job as a cutter in a cloak shop, then a desirable job in an industry otherwise dominated by
sweatshops.
Now a member of Local 10 of the ILGWU, Dubinsky joined a group of members who rebelled against the old guard leadership of that union to argue for fairer distribution of job opportunities within the union. Dubinsky was elected to the local's executive board in
1918, became vice-president of it the following year and president in
1921. He was elected to the International's Executive Board as a Vice-President in
1922.
Shortly after Dubinsky was elected to the International Executive Board
Benjamin Schlesinger, the International's President, resigned. Dubinsky campaigned hard for election of
Morris Sigman, a former
IWW member who took office in
1923. Sigman began to remove
Communist Party members from leadership of locals in New York,
Chicago,
Philadelphia and
Boston. Dubinsky supported Sigman's campaign.
Sigman could not, however, regain control of the New York locals, including Dressmakers' Local 22 and Cloak Finishers Local 9, where the CP leadership and their left wing allies, some anarchists and some Socialists, enjoyed strong support of the membership. Dubinsky, by his own account, thought that Sigman was too rash and appears to have urged him to call a truce after the left wing-led unions led a campaign to reject a proposed agreement that Sigman had negotiated with the industry in
1925, bringing more than 30,000 members to a rally at
Yankee Stadium to call for a one-day stoppage on
August 10, 1925.
The left wing won control of the New York Joint Board, the body that coordinated the activities of all of the New York City ILGWU locals in all aspects of the industry, that year. When it called a general strike on
July 1,
1926 Dubinsky was given a nominal role in the strike, reflecting his power base in the cutters' union, but was largely sidelined. That strike was a disastrous failure, leading to the rout of left leadership from the Joint Board and ultimately from the industry, other than the independent
International Fur Workers Union.
Dubinsky was somewhat disenchanted with Sigman's leadership by this point; while he was a wholehearted supporter of Sigman's attack on the CPUSA within the union, he thought that Sigman was too abrasive, alienating the right wing almost reflexively, given his dislike of "union bureaucrats" gained through his years in the IWW. At the
1928 convention of the ILGWU he first proposed that Sigman resign in favor of Schlesinger – a suggestion seen by many as part of a plan by Dubinsky to become the eventual head of the union. Dubinsky denied any personal ambitions and rebuffed a proposal from Abraham Cahan of the
Forward to promote him as Sigman's
heir apparent.
When
Morris Hillquit, the union's long-time counsel, advanced a proposal to create a new position of Executive Vice-President, which Schlesinger would hold, giving up his position as General Manager of the
Forward, Sigman agreed. Five months later, after the union's Executive Board rejected an attempt by Sigman to merge two unions, Sigman resigned and Schlesinger returned to office.
By that point, however, the union was in a shambles, still struggling with the huge debts acquired during the failed strike, fighting expelled local leaders, some of whom had taken their unions out of the ILG, and facing an even more disorganized and piratical industry. Dubinsky set out to rebuild the ILGWU's base in New York City by striking a deal with the major manufacturers' group in
1929 that provided no pay raises but made it possible for the union to police the contract by cracking down on subcontractors who "chiseled", cheating workers out of pay or hours in order to gain a competitive advantage. The CPUSA opposed the new agreement but was by that time too weak to muster any effective resistance to Dubinsky.
Dubinsky was elected Secretary-Treasurer of the ILGWU at the end of
1929. He was elected President after Schlesinger died in
1932, retaining the position of Secretary-Treasurer in order to avoid the sort of internecine battles that previous officers had waged in the past. He held the Presidency until 1966, while remaining Secretary-Treasurer until
1959.
Dubinsky proved to be far more durable than his predecessors. He did not brook dissent within the union and insisted that every employee of the International first submit an undated letter of resignation, to be used should Dubinsky choose to fire him later. He also acquired the power to appoint key officers throughout the union. As he explained his position at one of the union's conventions: "We have a democratic union – but they know who's boss."
Under his leadership the union, more than three fourths of whose members were women, continued to be led almost exclusively by men.
Rose Pesotta, a longtime ILGWU activist and organizer, complained to Dubinsky that she had the same uncomfortable feeling of being the token woman on the ILGWU's executive board that Dubinsky had complained about when he was the only Jew on the AFL's board. The union did not, however, make any significant efforts to bring women into leadership positions during Dubinsky's tenure.
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 the
Roosevelt and the passage of the
National Industrial Recovery Act, which promised to protect workers' right to organize. As in the case in other industries with a history of organizing, that promise alone was enough to bring thousands of workers who had never been union members in the past to the union; when the union called a strike of dressmakers in New York on
August 16,
1933 more than 70,000 workers joined in it – twice the number that the union had hoped for. It did not hurt, moreover, that the local leader of the NRA was quoted as saying – without any basis in fact – that President Roosevelt had authorized the strike. The union rebounded to more than 200,000 members by 1934, increasing to roughly 300,000 by the end of the Depression.
As one of the few
industrial unions within the AFL, the ILGWU was eager to advance the cause of organizing employees in the steel, automobile and other mass production industries that employed millions of workers, many of them immigrants or children of immigrants, at low wages. The ILGWU was one of the original members of the Committee for Industrial Organization, the group that
John L. Lewis of the
United Mine Workers formed within the AFL in
1935 to organize industrial workers, and provided key financial support and assistance; Rose Pesotta played a key role in early organizing drives in the rubber and steel industries.
Dubinsky was unwilling, on the other hand, to split the AFL into two competing federations and did not follow Lewis and the
Amalgamated Clothing Workers when they formed the
Congress of Industrial Organizations as a rival to, rather than a part of, the AFL. Dubinsky also had personality differences with Lewis, whom he resented as high-handed.
In addition, Dubinsky was alarmed by the presence of Communist Party members on the payroll of the CIO and the fledgling unions it had sponsored. Dubinsky was opposed to any form of collaboration with communists and had offered financial support to
Homer Martin, the controversial president of the
United Auto Workers, who was being advised by
Jay Lovestone, a former leader of the Communist Party turned anti-communist. Lewis, by contrast, was unconcerned with the number of communists working for the CIO; as he told Dubinsky, when asked about the communists on the staff of the
Steel Workers Organizing Committee, "Who gets the bird? The hunter or the dog?"
The ILGWU began reducing its support for the CIO and, after a few years in which it attempted to be allies with both sides, reaffiliated with the AFL in
1940. Dubinsky regained his former positions as a vice president and member of the executive council of the AFL in
1945. He was the most visible supporter within the AFL of demands to clean house by ousting corrupt union leaders; the AFL-CIO ultimately adopted many of his demands when it established codes of conduct for its affiliates in
1957.
Dubinsky and
Sidney Hillman, leader of the
Amalgamated Clothing Workers, helped found the
American Labor Party in 1936. At the time Dubinsky and Hillman were both nominal members of the Socialist Party, although Dubinsky had, by his own admission, allowed his membership to lapse during the factional fighting of the 1920s. The Labor Party served as a halfway house for socialists and other leftists who were willing to vote for liberal Democratic politicians such as Roosevelt or Governor
Herbert Lehman of New York, but who were not prepared to join the
Democratic Party itself.
The new party was subject to many of the same fissures that divided the left in the late
1930s. For a while after the signing of the
Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, CPUSA members within the ALP condemned FDR as a warmonger because of his support for Britain. At one particularly stormy meeting Dubinsky and the other leaders were only able to hold their vote endorsing Roosevelt after moving from room to room and calling the police to arrest those who had disrupted the meeting.
Dubinsky ultimately left the Labor Party in
1944 after a dispute with Hillman over whether labor leaders in New York, such as
Mike Quill, who either were members of the Communist Party or were seen as sympathetic to it, should be given any role in the ALP. When Hillman prevailed, Dubinsky and his allies left to form the
Liberal Party of New York. The ALP went on to endorse
Henry Wallace in the
1948 presidential election, while the ILGWU campaigned energetically for
Harry S. Truman, nearly bringing New York State into his column.
Dubinsky had hopes of launching a national liberal party, headed by
Wendell Willkie, the
Republican candidate for President in
1940 who had soured on the Republican Party after his defeat in the
primaries in
1944. He proposed that Willkie begin by running for Mayor of New York City in
1945; Willkie, however, died before the plan could get off the ground.
Dubinsky and the ILGWU played an active role in the Liberal Party for most of the
1950s and up until his retirement in
1966. The ILGWU ended its support for the party after Dubinsky left office.
The union often saw itself, both before and during Dubinsky's years at the head of the union, as the savior of the industry, eliminating the cutthroat competition over wages that had made it unstable while making workers' lives miserable. Dubinsky took pride in negotiating a contract in 1929 that contained no raises, but allowed the union to cracking down on subcontractors who "chiseled". Dubinsky even claimed to have once turned down an employer's wage offer in negotiations as too costly to the employers, and therefore harmful to employees. Dubinsky summarized his attitude by saying that "workers need capitalism the way a fish needs water."
Policing the industry became much harder, however, as gangsters invaded the garment district. Both the employers and the union had hired gangsters during the strikes of the
1920s. Some of them, such as
Lepke Buchalter remained in the industry as labor racketeers who took over unions for the opportunities for raking off dues and extorting payoffs from employers with the threat of strikes. Some also became garment manufacturers themselves, driving away unions, other than those they controlled, by violence. While Dubinsky himself remained untouched by graft, a number of officers within the union were corrupted.
The industry changed greatly in the years after
World War II; while it had once been concentrated in New York City and other eastern and Midwestern cities, with smaller outposts on the
West Coast, the work done by formerly unionized shops fled to other parts of the US or abroad, where unions were nonexistent and wages far lower. The ILGWU was unable to prevent these runaway shops or to organize workers at the new locations.
The union's membership also changed greatly in the years after
World War II; what once had been a predominantly Jewish and Italian workforce became largely Latino, African-American and Asian. The leadership of the union had less and less in common with its membership and very often had no experience in the trade itself.
In the last decade of Dubinsky's tenure some of these new members began to rebel, protesting their exclusion from positions of power within the union. That rebellion failed: the established leadership had too strong a hold on the official structure of the union, in an industry in which members were scattered across a number of small shops and in which power was concentrated in the upper echelons of the union, rather than in the locals. Without the support of a mass movement that would have given the majority an effective voice, individual insurgents were either marginalized or coopted.
The union entered a long decline after
World War II. Dubinsky's focus on maintaining the stability of the industry and the union's place in it dampened the union's desire to gain significant wage increases for its members. The union gradually lost its ability to keep sweatshop conditions from returning, even in the former center of its strength in New York. While the union had 450,000 members in the years immediately after Dubinsky's retirement, the forces that brought about the decline and eventual disappearance of the ILGWU thirty years later, when it merged with the
Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union to form the union known as
UNITE, were already at work.
Dubinsky received the
Presidential Medal of Freedom on
January 20,
1969.
David Dubinsky: A Life With Labor, by David Dubinsky and A.H. Raskin ISBN 0671224379
The Master of Seventh Avenue: David Dubinsky and the American Labor Movement, by Robert D. Parmet ISBN 0814767117
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David Dubinsky's life*
Dubinsky and the Liberal Party
