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Oral Histories

The oral history interviews presented here are selected from a series of interviews with former ILGers, conducted by Fordham University historian Daniel Soyer in 2008 and 2009.

Walter Mankoff - ILGWU Heritage Project

  • Interviewer: Daniel Soyer
  • Date: June 3, 2009
  • Recordings: 1 part; 2:29:59

Biographical Information

Walter Mankoff was born May 24, 1930. His mother was a garment worker and member of the ILGWU. His father worked at a number of jobs before joining the butchers' union. Mankoff attended Music and Art High School and City College, before earning an MBA at Baruch College. He intended to pursue a career in personnel, but was referred to the ILGWU for a temporary clerical job in the welfare department compiling data on members for the purposes of computing pensions. In 1952, he joined the research department as a full-time research assistant. After a stint in the army, he rejoined the department in 1955 as senior research assistant, rising to assistant director in 1966 and associate director in the early 1980s. He retired in 1996. Mankoff was also an officer of the Penn South housing cooperative and a member of Community Board 5.

Abstract

After discussing his early life and path to the union, Mankoff talks about the early days of union-run pension plans and his role as a clerical worker in compiling pension-related data for the ILGWU. He goes into depth concerning the work of the research department starting in 1952, when the department was headed by Lazar Tepper. As a department of professionally educated staff members, the research department handled a wide variety of tasks, including representing members at hearings, preparing legislation, administering the union's archives, etc. Its main task, especially as time went on, was to monitor and analyze trends in the garment industry. Imports became a more and more of a central focus for the department, and Mankoff discusses the methods used to track and regulate imports. He describes cooperation with other unions and with employers on this issue. He describes his interaction with David Dubinsky and Hannah Haskell, Dubinsky's secretary. He mentions the FOUR incident and touches on the union's efforts to deal with changing demographics in the industry. Mankoff talks about his involvement with the Penn South Housing Cooperative and as a member of Community Board 5.

Project Description

The ILGWU Heritage Project documents the history of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union by collecting oral histories from retired union officers and staff. It is funded by a grant from the 21st Century ILGWU Heritage Fund (Jay Mazur, president; Muzaffar Chishti, director) to Fordham University.

Part 1, 2:29:59

Transcript

[0:00:00]

Soyer:

OK. This is Daniel Soyer speaking with Walter Mankoff on June 3rd, 2009. So why don't you tell me something about your background? I'm interested in how people got involved in the union in the first place.

Mankoff:

OK. Well, let's see. My parents both came to this country as children. My father was seven, my mother was 14 I think when they got here. They were both blue-collar workers. My mother was a sewing machine operator. In fact her first job was for the Blanck Brothers, who had been the Triangle fire owners. Although this was a couple years later. My father and mother were involved in a number of things. Laundry, they ran a hand laundry in Harlem for a period of time. Men's clothing store. But the final thing, my mother was a sewing machine operator, and a member of both Local 105 and 91 at different times. My father went into a fish market business with his sister and eventually wound up a member of the butchers' union, which was organizing in that field. Neither one was active politically. Neither one was active in union affairs. They were pro-union but I would say concerned over the fact that their own union people didn't seem to be functioning properly. My mother complained that the business agent from Local 91 always went into the office to talk to the employer and never came and talked to the workers. And actually the business agent was changed to one that talked to the workers.

Soyer:

So it sounds like they moved. Especially your father moved back and forth between being in business for himself and working for other people.

Mankoff:

Well, not really. Actually my father died fairly young, he died in 1960, so it goes back a long way. But they moved around. They actually married in San Francisco. My mother was an operator for one of the fancy department stores that made custom blouses and things in San Francisco. I think it was the White House if I remember correctly. My father was a salesman for the Emporium, the department store, in the men's clothing department. Then he got drafted into World War I. When he came out they opened a men's furnishings store in Petaluma, California, which lasted a little while. Then they came east, wound up in the laundry business, because someone else in the family was in it. The Depression killed that one, and then they finally settled into the things they did for the rest of their life. But they moved around a bit. Not having any profession. I don't know that either one ever really formally finished high school. Although they were reasonably literate in English, having come here fairly young. They read and wrote. They were Workmen's Circle members. That they enjoyed. They were not religious. But they were liberal-minded, anticommunist, but liberal-minded. And I grew up in the midst of all of this.

Soyer:

When were you born?

Mankoff:

1930. Depression. I was a Depression baby.

Soyer:

The date?

Mankoff:

The date? May 24th.

Soyer:

May 24th, 1930.

Mankoff:

1930. I grew up. Actually I went to Music and Art High School. I played the violin. But I learned I wasn't going to make a profession out of it. I got into City College in '47. Did a double major in psychology and economics. I was headed I thought for personnel. I wanted to do personnel work. I graduated in June of '51. At that time City College only offered graduate work in two areas if I remember correctly. One was education, which I wasn't interested in. And the other was in business. So I enrolled in the MBA program at City in Baruch School downtown and started going. I needed some part-time work to help support myself. And the employment office at the college said here's something you might want to do. The ILGWU needs someone to do some part-time clerical work. And I went and got a job. And it turned out -- this was early in the years of pension funds.

[05:00]

The union's first pension fund was probably negotiated around '43. They were starting to get -- that was in the coat and suit industry. Then they finally got it in dress. And in the early '50s they were starting to move into other miscellaneous trades and out of town areas and so on. And they needed somebody to tabulate the age and length of service of the members at that time of Local 25, the blouse local, which was in a very dingy location across the street from Gimbels on 32nd Street above a restaurant. I remember it had a horrible odor in it all the time. And I went part-time and went through the membership records and extracted information on members' ages and length of membership, which would help determine what the pension costs would be. Dubinsky believed in being his own actuary so to speak. This was before pension funds were very popular actually. And Dubinsky's arithmetic was essentially well, if a worker retires and has about 12 years of remaining life possibility and they're getting $50 a month, you multiply it out and you know how much money you need to have in the bank so to speak, in the fund for each member that retires. So we were doing this rather simplistic calculation to satisfy Dubinsky's needs.

Soyer:

Do you really mean literally that Dubinsky had done the figuring for this?

Mankoff:

Yes, yeah, he did it. In fact if you read his biography, the one he did with Abe Raskin, he talks about it. He talks about how he figured it out in terms of negotiating for pension funds and so on. At the time ILG had very narrow small departments outside of -- in other words the locals and the joint boards had fairly sizable staffs doing what they had to do. But the international headquarters staff was relatively tiny. Dubinsky functioned with little more in the early days than his secretary Hannah Haskel who did just about everything including signing his checks, so when he signed the check himself the bank wouldn't take it, they said it wasn't the right signature, but I'm saying there was a very small staff. The whole health, welfare and pension department had four people in it at that time. Adolph Held was the director of the department but he was more involved in I think Jewish affairs than he was in the health department. And there was a bookkeeper, an accountant and a secretary in the office. And I was a part-timer working for the health and welfare department. Not the research department at the time. At some point along the line, maybe early 1952, there was a hiatus in the work that we were doing. And they said instead of firing you, why don't you go work in the research department for a while until we're ready to go and do the next local. So I went up to the research department. I was there about six months I think and we never got to do any more pension counting. And research department had an opening. I applied for it. I got it. This was about June of '52 I think. And remained with the research department ever since until I retired.

Soyer:

Backtrack just a little bit. So you talked about your parents being members of Workmen's Circle and progressive but anticommunist. How about you? Did you have any political activities when you were in high school and college?

Mankoff:

No. I am very non-political in the sense -- you can use my name for things, but I don't ring doorbells and I don't make phone calls and I don't walk around with petitions and so on. I'm politically interested. But I shun what I would call political activism. I'll write a check to somebody but that's about it. I once was a member, I made a mistake and got myself appointed or elected a member of the Manhattan County Democratic Committee. And the first meeting, I remember was up at the Beacon Theatre. This has nothing to do with the union. Was up at the Beacon Theatre. And at midnight they were still debating whether they needed a roll call vote or not to elect a temporary chairman for the evening. And I said thank you, goodbye. I never went back to politics after that.

Soyer:

When was that? The county committees don't meet very often.

Mankoff:

No, it was a rare thing.

[10:00]

And they started at 8:00, by midnight they were still debating whether they needed a roll call vote for the temporary chair. It was plain silliness. So next time I didn't run for it and so on. But no, I've been involved in political activity, or indirectly, let me put it this way. Office election, that kind of political activity I don't bother with. I have been very active with the community board, which Board 4 covers everything from 14th Street to Columbus Circle on the West Side of Manhattan. It's a very busy area.

Soyer:

Yeah, I want to get back to that maybe towards the end.

Mankoff:

I'm just saying but I've been the chair of the community board. You are involved in politics in a way once you're in that role but it's not either running for office or supporting somebody running for office and doing that kind of activity. But yeah, I was a very frequent visitor to a lot of different places where I testified and did things like that but we can talk about that later if you want. But other than that I have no great interest in politics other than following them.

Soyer:

So you never expected to be in the labor movement or --

Mankoff:

I had no idea. I had no idea that the labor movement employed professionals and technical people as I learned once I started working for ILGWU. To me labor union meant workers who were promoted into leadership positions. Dubinsky for example who had no training so to speak, no academic training to speak of. I didn't see myself in that role. I wasn't interested in it particularly. But I fit very nicely I think once I got into the act. I found myself very comfortable in the role I was playing. And just being able to help people, which the research department did a lot of. Research department is a misnomer probably. Most of what we did was probably not really research but helping members and working with members and doing things for members in one way or another. And I found that to be very very satisfying. I remember that --

Soyer:

What kind of things did you do for them?

Mankoff:

Well, now are we getting into the work of the department in part?

Soyer:

Well, another question. I don't know what order you want to answer things in. But I'm wondering how you applied your training or were there things in your undergraduate economics training or your MBA training which directly was applied in your work in the union.

Mankoff:

Well yes. You had to be able to do statistical work. We had to analyze economic conditions. I may cover this a little more when we talk about the work of the department. But basically I was using my economics training. I used my accounting training in terms of analyzing financial statements. I used my statistical training in terms of doing calculations and so on. I actually was doing actuarial calculations for a while in the early days before the laws required that every fund have an actuary report and sign off on it every year. I was doing actuarial calculations. So this training came in handy. There were links for example. The chair of the New York chapter of the American Statistical Association was the chief actuary for Metropolitan Life, Mort Spiegelman. He provided information on actuarial work at that time. The training course in actuarial science for pensions was a handwritten document -- hand-typed document. That's how new the field was. Wasn't even printed yet. He gave me a copy. We made a copy in the office. And we used it and so on. So I used my professional training. Everybody in the research department had professional training in economics or related social science fields. And we used it continually I would say in one way or another.

Soyer:

Who was the head of the research department when you started?

Mankoff:

When I was started Lazar Teper was the head of the department. He had essentially -- he hadn't really started it but he had started it in terms of its then current phase. He came in in '37 and became the director of the department.

[15:00]

We normally had about eight or nine staff members in the office. The office, we had many different functions, because this was the one academic office in the union. Obviously the accountants had professional training. But whether it's a problem with accountancy or just the way it worked out they never got anything to do that wasn't accounting. But research got everything else that needed an academic background. So our biggest area of work for people much of the time was in the social insurance area. Unemployment insurance, Social Security, disability benefits. Anyone with a problem could come to our office, get advice. You didn't have to be an attorney to handle cases at an administrative level. We represented workers at referee hearings and appeal board hearings, wrote briefs. We did legislative work in social insurance. Sometimes we won cases that involved thousands of dollars for a poor worker. And we had one very firm rule. Absolutely no gift, not even two cents, from a worker, if you handle his case. We had workers in tears. I baked this cake just for you. I bought you a tie just for you. Some of them wanted to give big money. But Dubinsky had a very firm rule no gifts of any kind. And we had an even strict -- I think he permitted a bottle of whiskey at Christmas, something like that, but we didn't even permit that in our office as far as members went, absolutely nothing. But it was extremely satisfying and every member of the office pretty much took turns interviewing and helping workers with their problems. One person usually was on full-time doing the hearing work and writing briefs, and the others part-time took turns interviewing the workers and helping them. It was quite a project. And we were also involved in legislation at state and federal levels. Advisory committees. I wound up chair of the governor's advisory committee on unemployment insurance as a result after many years. But others in the union had been before me. Wilbur Daniels had been before me on the council, and chair. And before that Fred Umhey in the very early days, if you know the name. He was involved in the same thing. So this was one big area for us. The other area of course was what I would call industrial economics for want of a better term in that since the industry had only relatively small companies particularly in the early days before the '60s when the big companies started going public and so on, none of the companies had staffs that were equipped to handle any of these issues. And so the union was the one that compiled -- not compiled it, analyzed the government data on production, earnings, employment and so on. We did a report called "Conditions in the Industry" for every board meeting, which was usually about three times a year, two to three times a year. A detailed economic report. We were the ones who were involved in designing classifications used by the government for imports, for domestic production. We were the ones who consulted with Bureau of Labor Statistics on Consumer Price Index construction. Not just use. So we were involved technically on behalf of the industry in a wide range of activities on behalf of the industry. The men's clothing industry was better organized in a sense in that the companies were larger. Their trade associations were involved in industry matters. The women's wear trade associations were all collective bargaining agents and did very little beyond that. So you almost had to recruit them if you needed an employer for something or employer support for something. Or you had to write it for them to get it. They would sign it. But you had to write it for them. We didn't really have much of an industry participation. The union did all of this kind of thing.

[20:00]

Soyer:

It seems to me that kind of thing in all kinds of areas goes way back in the industry, right? The industry was always so disorganized that it was very early that the union became the most well organized and centralized part of the industry. Often felt the need to organize the industry.

Mankoff:

I don't know, of course I can't say how much of this kind of technical work the union did before it had the professional departments, which I would guess is largely post World War II, although there was probably some of it earlier. But certainly post World War II the union was the dominant factor representing the industry in areas where we had a common interest. Both of us wanted to know how much clothing was being produced, how much was being sold, etc., etc., etc.

Soyer:

How did you figure that out?

Mankoff:

Well, you had tremendous amounts of data being produced by the government. There were monthly and quarterly and annual reports on garment production including things like price ranges, fabrics being used. There was a tremendous amount of material in the earlier days when we had a heavy domestic industry and funds were available for this kind of thing. You had Federal Reserve Board put out reports on department store sales by department. You could look at the women's dress department or the better dress department and see how sales were going. You had employment data, earnings data. There was a lot of data available and in addition there were private data. National Retail Merchants Association had data. There was a lot of data from different sources. We were very close with Census Bureau, BLS, all the government agencies. We maintained a huge library. The theory was that you should never have to be without material on weekends, nights or anything because you had it all in the office. We used to get reports from every state that had a garment industry with employment in the industry, wages in the industry and so on. We had everything that the Census Bureau put out. I think we had every single BLS bulletin that ever had been released. A lot of UN data. Tremendous resources of data. Including a lot that I think was -- you felt prestige in having it but was relatively useless I would say. We had every single AF of L and CIO convention proceedings from 1880 on, which I don't think anybody ever looked at, but it was sitting on the shelf very neatly, that kind of thing. Before and after the archive we served as the union archive. We had the first convention handwritten report and so on in the safe. We had all the executive board minutes, which are now in Cornell. We had them in our office for years until we got rid of some and sent them to Cornell. AFL-CIO Executive Council minutes, because none of the presidents ever wanted to keep them in their office. They always sent them to us to hold. We had huge collections of material. Canada. With the union in Canada we had a duplicate collection of material on Canada in terms of employment and industry and trade and all of the relevant data. We maintained a clipping collection. Every day one of us read the Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Journal of Commerce, which is a trade paper basically. And Women's Wear Daily and Daily News Record, which are the industry trade papers. We used to read five six papers a day, mark articles that we thought should be filed. And we maintained. We had a professional librarian and clerks filing all of this stuff in appropriate folders so if you needed material on subject X you could grab a folder and use it. Our office maintained the union's contract collection. We were supposed to have a copy of every single contract entered into by any affiliate, and a history. I finally turned them all over to Cornell.

[25:00]

Mainly like the association agreements, the major agreements. I turned them all over to Cornell when we closed up shop pretty much. But we used to maintain them. For a period of time we would analyze them. It got too cumbersome. We stopped analyzing. But we used to do a summary of each contract.

Soyer:

What was the summary for? Just for the files?

Mankoff:

Well, for the files. And they were handy because you could file them in different ways. In other words you could have a folder with coat and suit summaries for example. So you might have a dozen different major coat and suit agreements with what the hours were, what the wages were. Not the boilerplate text, but just the key economic provisions in case you needed to do a comparison. We maintained all of this material. And another area where we did a lot of work was I would say convention work. Each convention had a report from the general executive board to the delegates. And research department contributed several sections. Initially it was just one called "Trends and Prospects in the Industry" where we looked at annual data typically rather than month-by-month data as in the conditions reports. And with a history, how wages compared to '39 wages or whatever might be a reasonable comparison date for which you had data. Involved a fair amount of estimation because one thing the government rarely maintained was comparability over time. So if you wanted comparable data you had to estimate and juggle and add and subtract and do a number of things. And we maintained a continual series for quite a while. With a huge range of data that didn't appear in the monthly or semiannual reports. And that got expanded when the big companies started in the '60s. And fortunately for apparel the big companies that expanded into the South were union shops. Like Bobbie Brooks and Jonathan Logan and Maidenform and so on were union shops here in the East or in New York and if they opened 20 plants in the South they all had to be union. But we were now starting to track these big companies. And the union set up a separate department called master agreements department to deal with that. And what you had was a master agreement with the company that had all of the boilerplate if you will. And then individual supplements for individual factories that took into account what they made, where they were located, etc., etc. And we did a separate report on big firms for that department and we used to track SEC reports. We owned stock in every apparel company you could buy stock in. Just one share, so you'd get the annual reports automatically. It would come in. And we used to analyze. Some were purely apparel companies. Some were purely women's. Some were men's and women's. Some had apparel besides other items. There were some weird outfits in this thing. Grace had an apparel component. Radio Shack had bought out a leather outfit called Corral or something at one point. People were playing games. We used to track all of these.

Soyer:

Sara Lee, the bakery?

Mankoff:

Well, yeah, that came later, and that was a big merger. But some of these even smaller companies that had only a little bit in apparel would do it and we were tracking how much apparel they were selling as part of our research and that got added in. Eventually imports, which we always recorded, but there wasn't much information on, didn't matter much, took over more and more and more of our time with passage. So that becomes a whole chapter in itself.

Soyer:

Yeah, I'd like to really focus on --

Mankoff:

Yeah, let me just finish briefly with the other areas of the department. We were responsible for all wage hour administrative matters. The theory generally was don't trust the locals to do things, have it done centrally by research department or a main office department.

[30:00]

Which was probably useful. Many of the locals and people out in the field didn't always know the answers or had wrong information. Just to give a funny incident, on our unemployment insurance area, a worker had gone to Unity House. You know what Unity House is. For the week while collecting unemployment insurance. And had been disqualified. As to being not available for the week. A lot of workers used to go to Unity House, come in for the morning to register and go back to Unity House. There was all kinds of hanky-panky going on. But this brilliant manager in Unity House wrote a letter to the Labor Department saying he doesn't know why they're picking on this one worker, there are dozens of them that come to Unity House regularly and collect unemployment insurance, how come they're treating her unfairly. This was an example of why we preferred to have these inquiries answered by our office rather than by locals. Anyway, but the theory was to have everything go through our office. So we handled all complaints with the Labor Department typically. Business agent or a local shop was violating labor law, minimum wage or whatever it was, they would tell us, we would relay it to the Labor Department. We handled legislation involving minimum wages and labor and wage hour issues. We were the ones who fought homework issues when they had to be fought. And the biggest thing in that area probably was Puerto Rico where until '75 I think it was roughly you had to have individual industry hearings in Puerto Rico and an industry committee set the minimum wage. It wasn't set by statute like the mainland was. You had to have an industry committee evaluate conditions and set the highest possible rate that won't reduce employment, etc., etc.

Soyer:

It's like an industry code from the NRA.

Mankoff:

Yeah. Something of that type. But this was the policy actually in Fair Labor Standards Act in the beginning. It wasn't until later on that they abandoned the industry committees and went to a 75-cent minimum for everybody kind of thing. But in Puerto Rico it remained. And so virtually every year, every two years, we had to organize massive data collection on Puerto Rico industry and so on and go to Puerto Rico. And you'd have five six hearings. Each industry, one after another for about three weeks. And that took a big chunk of time. But that was also wage hour. We were responsible for all emergency controls, like during the Korean War, or any time there was any kind of wage control. Our office was responsible. We filed all of the import adjustment applications. Because our office maintained very close relations with all the government officials. We could call the head of wage hour hear in New York and say Al, what -- we could call Washington and say Joe, because we knew everybody. I don't know that we got special treatment necessarily. It made it easy to get information. They would call us for help, we would call them for help and work together with all of these people. Labor Department used to have to put out the very thick economic report on each Puerto Rico industry as material to be used by the committee members. The Labor Department always gave us a draft copy beforehand so that we could proofread it for them and correct their mistakes.

Soyer:

Did it matter who was in power at the time?

Mankoff:

Didn't matter frankly. We were dealing not with political appointees, we were dealing with civil servants who knew that we wouldn't ever squeal on them. In other words we would make the corrections so they could clean it up before the hearing. And we didn't have to get up in the hearing and say Labor Department you're making a mistake. So they appreciated the fact that we did all of this for them. And we had good relations with all of these people. Everything came through our office pretty much. We were consultants to the Census Bureau regularly, BLS regularly and so on on all of the issues. I had a major hand for example in designing some of the classification systems used for imports.

[35:00]

I worked together with some textile manufacturers. Some of the worst non-union textile manufacturers. We had a common cause. I had Stevens at one side of the table, I'm on the other designing the import code. While the other parts of the union are busy striking them.

Soyer:

Did industry people ever come to you to ask for help or did you mainly go to them when you wanted to enlist them in something?

Mankoff:

A number of joint committees had been set up. For example -- now we're getting into the import area particularly. Imports began to start hitting home in the mid '50s roughly, probably '56, '58 started.

Soyer:

That early.

Mankoff:

Yeah. That was the problem that we were faced with pretty much all along. It started slowly. You could ignore it very easily. How many dollar blouses was there a market for or dollar brassieres and so on? But when it was only one country, Japan, involved, again it was pretty tiny. But eventually when it wound up with 150 or 200 countries shipping garments, even if each one only shipped a small amount -- and that wasn't the case with China at all -- but even if -- you had a huge amount of clothing starting to come in over all the years. And early on in the early '60s, I think around '62, '63, the government negotiated a so-called short term cotton agreement with the foreign country. Japan and the major shippers at that time. It was followed by a long term cotton agreement. And then finally in the early '70s by what became known as the Multi-Fiber Agreement, which covered not only cotton but wool and manmade fibers as well. And covered textiles and apparel. And clearly there was very heavy pressure on the part of the textile industry, which probably had even more political clout than the garment industry had. And they didn't care whether the goods that came in were rolls of fabric or clothing that had been made already. If they were made with foreign-made fabric and foreign-made yarn the textile people were opposed to it. And the government created from the pretty early days a joint industry-union advisory committee. And the advisory committee members would travel with the government diplomatic people, Commerce Department people, to different countries or they would meet regularly in Washington to discuss issues. These were all confidential cleared people. And dealt with confidential material. And when they came to doing things like classifications they turned to the committee. And it was pretty customary to delegate. So I wound up handling a lot of the classification issues, which was an internal thing within the research department because Teper was the cleared advisor at that time from our union. Milton Fried at the Amalgamated was the cleared advisor for the Amalgamated at that time.

Soyer:

Did you ever do any of the traveling? Did you ever go to any of these places?

Mankoff:

I didn't get to go to the foreign countries in terms of the import area because I was never cleared officially for it. I did get to go in '95 to Geneva for an ILO conference on the apparel industry and I represented the United States there and was the spokesperson for the entire labor delegation. My trips were mostly to Washington. I used to take the 7:00 shuttle down and the 2:00 shuttle back. And most of those were technical meetings of one kind or another dealing with various issues. Only one was a little awkward. That was a lunch I had with Maurice Stans shortly before -- while Watergate was going on.

[40:00]

And if you recall he was involved.

Soyer:

Yeah, who was he?

Mankoff:

He was Nixon's commerce secretary. But he was also involved in the Watergate scandal. And Stulberg and I went down to have lunch with Stans in his private dining room back of his office and I'm saying, oh boy, I expect someone's going to ask me what I was doing with Stans. It was a fairly innocuous meeting. But a huge amount of our work was spent fighting imports.

Soyer:

I'm always curious about how the union and other people in the industry started noticing this as a problem. You said it started very slowly. And I'm wondering who noticed it first. Did you in the research office, do you think you noticed it first because you were going over figures? Or do you think people in the shops and so on and business agents even or managers were starting to notice that work was being taken away?

Mankoff:

No, no, the business agents would probably not have noticed it very terribly simply because the first shops that went -- well, two things. One, the early imports were driven significantly by department stores, by retailers, who decided to go into manufacturing things for themselves. You had an outfit like Sears set up a company called Kellwood that produced a lot of clothing and other items for Sears stores. And the department stores started going abroad and buying goods abroad. So you wouldn't be terribly conscious of it necessarily in a union shop. And shops were going in and out of business continually anyway in this industry. I don't think you would be terribly aware of it. Eventually, however, when union shops started to compete by doing their own importing, then I think the union shops became more conscious of what was going on. But we were becoming conscious of it because we tracked all of these items even before there was an import problem. When we wrote the report we'd point what the imports consisted of were either traditional folklore type things, the kind of outfit you might wear in a jujitsu class, or high fashion from France or Italy. But there was very little import that was terribly competitive with the domestic market in the early days. We still tracked it. So we were tracking imports on a regular basis long before it became a major problem. It was simply an item that you reported on routinely. So in the research department we became aware of it very quickly. As the problem started growing more and more detail became available. It started with just maybe a broad heading, cotton apparel, and you wound up with hundreds of items eventually because of agreement provisions and all kinds of complications. And people wanted additional detail. The textile people wanted to know what fabric. Was it corduroy or was it velveteen or was it some other fabric? They wanted to know for their reasons. So everything became subdivided. And then you had separate rules for men's and women's. So you had to separate everything even though they might be made in the same factory or come out of the same part of the industry. We had to keep separate track of men's and women's. You had children's wear and how to define what was the difference. How could you tell when you looked at a garment on the dock whether it was a women's garment or a children's garment? How could you tell whether it was underwear or outerwear? We were regularly consulted by customs. We would go out and make inquiries in the field and find out. And sometimes you couldn't tell the difference. There was a time when women were wearing pajama tops that were shirts in every way, including button-down collars that had a little tab in the back like Ivy League shirts. And this was a pajama top. But there were separate quotas for pajamas and separate quotas for shirts. And it mattered which one it was. And we couldn't tell them officially because our word from the trade was that they're absolutely identical.

Soyer:

Were the labels different? The labels might have been different.

Mankoff:

Well, yeah, but the people who were importing it were always one step ahead in terms of how they constructed things.

[45:00]

For example there were special rules applied to embroidered or ornamented material garments. If you had a little fur trimming. A sweater with a fur collar came in under one rule. Without the fur collar it came in under a different rule. But the collar could get pretty tiny. And suppose it was just a little touch. Well, was it fur or wasn't it fur? Some genius then started importing fabric with an asbestos content, which was completely uncontrolled and had no tariff on it. We used to joke that people designed garments not for fashion but to meet the import rules. They were very tricky. There was something called an entirety for example. In other words if you had a shirt and pants, that might be two garments, but if it had a strap like on overalls it was one garment. We had years and years of this kind of thing with imports. But we did track import data very carefully. Computerization, which -- well, you always had the big heavy computers around for quite a while, but they weren't very useful for most purposes. But the PC started in around '80, give or take a little bit, and we started getting PCs, and you started getting data by computer, which was a lot easier than microfiche and microfilm that we used previously to get data from Washington. And instead of it taking them almost a month to copy numbers by hand and add them up and so on you could now do it overnight, pop the --

Soyer:

Do you think you were among the first to use this kind of technology?

Mankoff:

Well, we and the textile industry people were among early users. We had enough of a market that ILG was able to negotiate with computer companies. First one was Wang I think. Couple of others whose names are no longer known to anybody. To try out a machine or two machines in our office free of charge. And we were always testing. For a while we were always testing machines until we finally went in. Every office had a computer kind of thing. We used to get data. Either they would mail us the floppy disk from Washington or we would download. Later on when things improved we would download the data by computer over the phone lines and so on. It improved continually. But without that we would not have been able to do the kind of work we did. When I did recently a couple years back when I was consulting with the union after retiring, they needed data on Canadian imports. I was buying them on the Internet. You go online with the Canadian government, indicate what data you wanted, two minutes, a minute later you would have a series of tables in your computer, and they would charge it to my MasterCard account. It wasn't cheap. And in a month I'd get reimbursed. But you could download all of this data without ever talking to anybody or anything. You just went online and downloaded. Every month I downloaded, ran the tables in the computer, e-mailed them to the office here in the building and got a check. But times have changed dramatically obviously. We used to also do by the way -- and I didn't touch on it -- organizing help. We used to notify every local of new shop openings to the extent that we became aware of them, either by newspaper clipping -- or in Puerto Rico there was an item called the Dorvillier Newsletter, came out weekly I think it was or semiweekly, biweekly I guess you would call it. They would virtually list the names of people coming off the plane at the airport. Mr. Jones of X company got off the plane today. And we would say better keep an eye out for him and see if he's not opening a new plant.

[50:00]

They would have all this kind of stuff. And you had to apply for tax exemption and so on. So that was a thing. We would notify everybody in the union appropriately of new plants opening.

Soyer:

What newspapers put notice of the new plants? Women's Wear Daily?

Mankoff:

Women's Wear Daily, Daily News Record always had information of this kind. Generally we had a clipping collection. Clipping service. Clipped everything that ever mentioned ILG. But that wouldn't be typically the case. But there were sources that listed new plant openings. Sometimes state agencies, since they were pirating from other areas, would be proudly announcing that they've arranged for company X to come to their community. We got a lot of the manpower programs that the government established to help areas like Appalachia and so on would be for new plants. And we basically managed to get a stoppage on industries like apparel, because the money was being used to promote runaway shops. But we used to monitor that kind of thing. But state agencies would advertise that they'd just arranged for company X to move to their town and so on. You could get a lot of information in different sources.

Soyer:

What about the very small contractors, things like that? How did you keep track of them? I'd imagine that if a shop opened up with ten workers or 20 workers that it would be in a --

Mankoff:

Well, we might necessarily know of that obviously. But there were different things. For example the Labor Department for quite a period of time had something called learner permits. And you could pay a sub-minimum wage to certain garment workers if they were in training. And this usually took place, this was frequently the case with new companies. And you officially got notice regularly in the Federal Register of the applications. You had X number of days to comment. And you could comment if for example there were experienced workers available. You could say don't issue the permit, there are unemployed workers in the area, this employer is simply looking to take advantage of things. And that would give you a listing in many cases of new companies. Sometimes it was old companies as well, but frequently it would be a new company. And you picked up information here and there. Obviously you couldn't be -- a shop with ten workers might not be evident in the New York press or anything like that. The union expanded its own activities I would say gradually. For example in the early days we were the holders if you will of you might say the union shop list. We had a directory from the New York Dress and a directory from New York Cloak. And then we would be in touch typically with every local and say give me a list of all your union shops. And we would periodically -- the big ones would update automatically like cloak and dress. They would send you a change notice periodically. The other locals you had to be in touch with once a year or every six months and say I need an up-to-date list. Who moved and who added and who went out of business and so on? And we had it all. But then the union set up a separate department, welfare funds control, that had a computerized listing of every union shop that they were maintaining. So we no longer had to maintain. And when I left the union they were still turning out the computerized shop list of all the union shops. Things became a lot easier. As professional departments grew we had less work to do. An archive was set up, which meant we didn't have to be the archive anymore. Organizing departments were set up and they were starting to do organizing research.

[55:00]

We used to provide financial information on shops being organized, Dun and Bradstreet reports or other credit reports that we could get. In addition to the publicly owned companies we would get data on the privately owned ones as well. And although technically I suppose we weren't supposed to have them, the agencies involved were very happy to sell them, because the salesmen made good commissions and we were pretty good customers for financial reports. And we had all of those filed in our office. And we used to analyze them. In the early days copying equipment wasn't really available readily. You had to make photostats. It was a messy messy project with wet paper and so on. Eventually they invented something called Thermo-Fax, which was a heat process. It was also difficult to use. But once you got Xerox or the equivalent we stopped analyzing financial reports, we just copied them and put them in the mail. It was much easier. We simply erased all the identification as to where it came from so that it couldn't be traced back to us and made sure there would be no problems with it and that was it. Probably we had a legitimate basis for it because apparently pension funds or health and welfare funds were permitted to order reports so they could check on the creditworthiness of the contributors to those funds. And so we were acting as the credit agencies for the pension fund and health and welfare fund when we did this once they were set up and going. Of course the departments themselves became huge. The health and welfare department and retirement department became one of the big departments in the union from its original four-person structure. And so did some others. We added an investment department and other departments. A union label department. A lot of things that we did originally, because we were the only ones, gradually got shifted.

Soyer:

You mentioned that you did legislative work. So there's another department, right? Isn't there a political department?

Mankoff:

No. When I say legislative work, I don't mean the lobbying, although we did quite a bit of lobbying. We were the ones that wrote the statements. Everything on imports was written by our department. Everything on minimum wages was written by our department. It might be in the president's name. Might be in a vice-president's name. It might be local testimony to be delivered by the manager in Saint Louis. It might even have been something in Canada. But if it was a subject that we were responsible for, manpower policy, unemployment, any social insurance policy, we wrote all the statements. We might have delivered them, depending on the occasion, how much clout we felt was attached to it. Did it deserve the president to personally go and testify or would it be sufficient if I went or the department director went or a vice-president went or somebody else went? Depended on local circumstances. The political department was basically involved with election campaign. Our legislative office in Washington, Evelyn Dubrow, would be concerned with lobbying. And again the legislative submissions. Because frequently they were tailored to what somebody wanted in Washington. It was not unusual for congressman so-and-so or senator so-and-so to say I want to make a speech about minimum wage or imports or something, can you write me something in a hurry, and we'd get a quick request. So-and-so wants to make a speech. Can you give me a speech in an hour? So we learned to write speeches very quickly.

Soyer:

So you would write actual speeches.

Mankoff:

Yeah. Testimony kind of things. Speeches, remarks, yeah. We did major testimony in many many cases. And testified. I testified any number of times at state legislature on labor issues, unemployment issues. I've testified in Washington on minimum wage. I testified on behalf of the Treasury Department workers in Customs Bureau before Geraldine Ferraro when she was the committee chair.

[1:00:00]

I had to go out to Idlewild and testify on behalf of the customs employees that they were entitled to -- they were playing a critical role in the import problem and we did them a favor. We went out there. We did all of this kind of thing regularly. We did all of the convention preparation as I said, including writing a pretty hefty amount of text for the actual report that went to the delegates. We did a table in each report showing membership by trade and by local, very detailed analysis. Until everybody started making sportswear and you could no longer do it very meaningfully. We processed all of the resolutions for the convention. Usually about 400 of them. All fed through research. We made sure they were factually correct, whether we agreed with it or not. Factually correct and in proper style. No whereases. We followed AFL-CIO practice at the time, which was just state the facts. You don't have to say whereas, whereas, whereas. You just say imports are growing, you don't have to say whereas imports are growing. So we had a uniform style. We edited and it all went to the printer in the early days. And then when the PCs became very good and you had word processing programs we typed them all in our office and just sent them out to be copied or duplicated. We would track to see whether any subjects were missing. Particularly -- and we'd either tell somebody or do it ourselves. Write resolutions. Obviously if there was an embarrassing resolution or an awkward one we'd call and say are you sure you really want to have this in or not. But if they wanted it that was their privilege. And we wrote many of the committee reports for the convention. Before I retired a hefty chunk of the book, the proceedings, was my writing. Because you'd get assigned to work with particular committees. So I would have like -- well, either the organizing committee, the labor standards committee, the finance committee, the import committee, the committee on social and labor legislation, you'd have the officers' report committee. I'd get three four five committees that I was supposed to work on where I would write the report for the committee saying we received resolutions boom boom boom boom boom, ten resolutions on this subject. We recommend that this be the policy of the union. And I would prepare a substitute resolution or commentary or we'd say we refer this to the executive board for its review or whatever it was and so on. Then I would check. At the end of the convention I had to make sure that every single resolution by number was acted on. We kept an inventory of every number, made sure every committee -- there was even those that I didn't deal with -- acted on it. And then when the convention was over we used to supply a listing to the president and his chief assistants. The following items have been referred to the executive board. The following items need action by whatever body needed to act. So we kept track of all of these items. And then during the convention we were helpers on -- in the early days there were very few people involved in it. So we did all kinds of things. Even though we had a whole crew eventually that was doing copying and running errands and all kinds of things I always wound up with my old-time job of making sure that for every honored guest that was going to appear we had a badge with their name on it, a briefcase with the correct items in it, and any gifts that we were giving out. So even at the last convention in '95 I was handling briefcases and sweaters and odds and ends of that kind. And that led to one of our funny incidents. At least I thought it was. Maybe it wasn't even funny. In '68 Johnson came to our convention in Atlantic City. Secret Service checked everything very carefully. I walked out on the stage, put a dozen briefcases under the President's podium, and nobody even asked me what I was doing.

[1:05:00]

What can I tell you?

Soyer:

Did some of the large locals have their own research departments? Like 22 when it was very big?

Mankoff:

Not really. Let me put it this way. They didn't really have research departments. Each local I guess had people doing different things for it. Certainly the big locals like dress and coat, the joint boards, and the departments had people who were keeping track of shops and contracts and so on. Small locals might not. Everybody kept track of something but they wouldn't have the same staff. Some locals employed outside people. For example the chap Will Chasen, who wrote for some locals, like the speech to start the negotiating campaign. Will Chasen did it for Local 105 out of his, historically. We did it for ten other affiliates. But people employed whoever they wanted to employ. They were free to do that. Very few had research departments.

Soyer:

Did other unions, international unions have research departments like the ILG?

Mankoff:

In the early days we were fairly unique I would say. Gradually other unions did add research departments. The Amalgamated had a research department that paralleled ours most of the time at least that I was around. I don't know when they started it. But it was around most of the time that I was there. It was somewhat different focus I would say. Again because of the nature of the shops. In Amalgamated in men's wear you had bigger companies, more multiplant situations earlier. And more non-apparel. Amalgamated organized Xerox for example, simply because they were in Rochester and Rochester was a headquarters for men's clothing. And Chicago and Philadelphia were men's clothing centers. Baltimore. So these were industrial areas that went beyond apparel. And they kept much greater track I would say of companies, where they were, were they union, their branches and so on. In women's apparel you had relatively few of these. Wasn't until the '60s that we started getting about a dozen what I would call multi-plant companies. Otherwise you had relatively little of this. There wasn't that kind of need. Very little collective bargaining in women's apparel depended upon financial information on individual companies. Didn't really matter. It was pattern bargaining. You were bargaining first for the entire dress industry and one company. And once that was the pattern it passed on down the line to pretty much all the other dress companies. While the bargaining was difficult and so on it really was not involving the individual characteristics of individual companies. In men's wear there was -- you were dealing with Hart Schaffner Marx, you were dealing with a company that had a history and several plants and maybe sometimes different products and so on. And it goes back much further. So they had that somewhat different orientation. Different unions parceled things out differently. For example while we did all the import work internally the Amalgamated at one point after Milton Fried died and he had been doing imports, it was picked up by Art Gundersheim who was an assistant to the president at Amalgamated. And Art didn't have a department to help him. He contracted out with private consultants to get him the data that we were putting together for our union. So each union did things differently. Other unions, the auto workers did work with unemployment insurance but not in a research department. They had an unemployment insurance department. So things were organized I say differently. There were some research activities in other unions. I don't think any reached the level we did. At least I never met any that were quite equal to what we were doing.

[1:10:00]

But they did have various activities that were involved, and sometimes they were more educational and sometimes they were more economic. But having a crew of economists and statisticians was fairly unique I would say among the majority of unions until maybe more very recently.

Soyer:

Did you ever work together with the Amalgamated research staff on a projects?

Mankoff:

Yeah. We did on imports particularly. We always exchanged information. I would call and say do you know if this shop is union or do you have a contract here and we would share information. But when it got to imports we started filing joint statements. Not testimony so much as an actual economic report, documenting the import problem. And these were pretty hefty half-inch-thick documents which dealt with men's wear, women's wear and even textiles. And at times we would -- someone from the Amalgamated would work in our shop and I spent time in Milton Fried's house working on import problems one holiday weekend when we needed something in an emergency. But we would work together on that. Because you wanted to be in sync with them. Aside from sharing the work, I'll do table one if you do table two. And also you wanted to make sure you got your industry facts correct. And in the early days they were pretty distinct industries. Men's wear didn't mix with women's wear and women's wear didn't mix with men's wear. It changed down the road eventually but in the early days they were fairly distinct. And you really wouldn't want to write about or work on the data for an industry unless you knew all of the idiosyncrasies of that data. We knew it for women's wear and they knew it for men's wear, and we used to work together. They would come up to our shop or we'd go to their shop and work on things together.

Soyer:

Imports obviously is the big story I think for several decades, because it determined the fate of the --

Mankoff:

Oh yeah it was a 40-year thing until I guess for all intents and purposes there is no domestic apparel industry or virtually none left. But it was gradual. And spreading and spreading and spreading. And it hit home very hard in many ways. I used to spend a lot of time in Unity House in the old days. And on the road up there, or right off the road a short distance, was a Cluett Peabody outlet store. And I would stop once or twice a year going to Unity House and grab a half a dozen shirts and so on, knowing that I'm getting union-made garments. And one day I stopped and grabbed a handful of shirts as usual. I said wait a minute, it says made in China. Arrow shirt made in China? I carefully went through the batch. Picked out all the US-made ones and put back all the Chinese-made ones. They were identical shirts. That was the sign or one of the signs that the American industry was going into importing heavily. The ILG -- I don't know whether the Amalgamated did because we weren't that close on that. In ILG they started permitting imports but putting a tax on it. Penalty, whatever you want to call it. But it kept growing and growing and growing. One Christmas -- the locals would send out a small Christmas gift to the staff, because we always worked with locals, so we were always on the list. I get an imported shirt from one of my locals. I call up. I say Joe, I know it isn't nice to do this, but how could you send me an imported shirt for Christmas. He said it's OK, it comes from a union warehouse. Well, you couldn't buy American-made goods anymore literally at that time. Quality goods were all being imported.

Soyer:

Do you think that the union could have done anything to stem this or could have done anything more effectively that it tried to do?

Mankoff:

Probably not. I think all of us realized that accepting what was known as the de minimis approach, that is it was too small to worry about, let's let it go and be nice guys kind of thing, or let a little bit in but not a lot in, we could have been firmer, not saying we won't let anything in.

[1:15:00]

But I doubt that it would have made that much difference. The import policy of the country was being controlled heavily by diplomacy and foreign affairs and not even by business relationships. We wanted bases all over the globe. And unless you maintained friendly relations with all of these countries and gave in to all of the pressures in favor of supporting these countries you would have major headaches at home clearly with Congress and so on. So even though the textile industry was quite important for example in the South -- apparel industry didn't carry that kind of clout, but the textile industry carried Republican clout. It couldn't get a bill through Congress and signed in all of these years, even though we tried repeatedly. There was hardly a session of Congress that didn't have some kind of import legislation pending, never could get it passed. And I'm convinced that it's -- and I think everybody else is -- that it was pretty much the overall need of the country. And then you started getting into trying to export goods and get into the barriers, customs, tariff and otherwise, that other countries had imposed. And there are a lot of products for which since there was no early import, the duties were not that great. Cars. In the '30s when you put tariffs in place, we weren't importing any cars. You didn't have to worry about it. Textiles were being imported and so was wool. Fibers were being imported. And they had fairly high tariffs. So here you had a world that was looking to cut tariffs. We had successive tariff cutting rounds. The Kennedy round and so on. And what did they have to give? Tariffs on clothing and textiles. That was the thing they were giving up here. You eventually wound up with your World Trade Organization. All the countries ruling that restrictions are not permissible. I'm not sure that the union, given its clout, didn't really have that much clout on a national basis. It had a lot of clout in New York, a couple of other markets. But didn't really have that much clout throughout the South and throughout the West and Midwest. Could have done much, even if it had changed its position.

Soyer:

The Multi-Fiber Agreement was a quota system, right? Different countries could import certain amounts? The importing was probably all mostly done by the United States.

Mankoff:

No, the quota system was essentially US imports from other countries. There were relatively few quotas in place of a similar nature with other countries. Some had some restrictions but nothing as formal as this United States Multi-Fiber Arrangement with the various countries. It started with the big four, Japan, Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan. And eventually started including -- it included China, anything, Egypt and so on. But then you started with free trade agreements, whether it was NAFTA, whether it was special agreement with Israel. We had an agreement with Israel which permitted all kinds of hanky-panky as long as the goods somehow passed through Israel. Did virtually nothing there. They suddenly became Israeli goods subject to the free trade agreement without any duty and without any quotas and so on. There was a tremendous amount of cheating going on. All of a sudden Bahrain had a garment industry and Saudi Arabia had a garment industry and you wondered where are all these factories turning out all of these garments. It turns out that they were never there in the first place. It was all Chinese goods being reshipped, mislabeled, either through Macao or Hong Kong or someplace.

Soyer:

How did you find that out? How did you determine that?

Mankoff:

Well, people went to the country, there was no such -- there were no factories in Bahrain. You could tell pretty much a lot of this stuff. We didn't have to find out. The government traced a lot of it. But a lot of it came in and it wasn't until they ended the quotas that all of a sudden these countries stopped shipping.

[1:20:00]

It was no longer necessary to hide and cheat. China could ship directly without the quota. So all of a sudden they all became Chinese imports. It was a very complicated scheme.

Soyer:

I'm curious about the archives function. You want to take a break?

Mankoff:

No, I'm fine, no problem.

Soyer:

The archives function of the department. Did the union have a very strong historical consciousness apart from utilitarian aspects of following trends in the industry and so on? Did you find that the union had a historical consciousness of its own role in society? And did they use the older documents for any sort of --

Mankoff:

I would say the union lived in the past to quite a substantial degree. One, it turned out that history repeats itself. And so the arguments whether it was 1900 or 1910 or 1920 or 1930 were valid in 1980 and 1950 and 1960 and were used. The histories that were written obviously dwelt heavily on the ancient history if you will of the union. But even for example Leon Stein's book, "Out of the Sweatshop" I guess is the right name, had all kinds of historical material. The movie "With These Hands" which was done in '50 goes back to the early days of the union and what it meant. Murals all over the place were historical in nature.

Soyer:

There we go.

Mankoff:

Well, yeah. This was an example. The union label program put out a book of old materials. The history of the union was quite important. Also people were around a long time. Dubinsky was president from '32 to '66, 34 years. He was always referring to something out of his past. If you're only in office for five years or ten years you can't do that. It's easy when you've been the one. Someone like Fannia Cohn who was a vice president of the union I think in 1924 was still around in the '60s or '70s when she was working in the education department ordering books wholesale. One of the problems the union had I think was that people lasted too long. It led to one of the irritations on the part of juniors, that they could never succeed, because the managers or the top guy never left. In some cases it happens very fortunately. Take someone like John Sweeney. His first job was as one of my assistants. He was in the research department of the ILG, his first labor job. And after a few years he went to SEIU. And everybody above him died out in no time. Well, Lane Kirkland went to Washington and the others above him died or something. And in a couple of years he was the manager of the local. And on his way. Not that he wasn't capable. He was greatly capable. But he was lucky. In Chicago our assistant manager hung on and hung on and hung on waiting for the manager Morris Bialis to retire. The assistant died before Morris retired because Morris never retired. This was a frustration in many areas where people were waiting for someone to retire so they could move up the ladder and they never retired. People were always dealing with the past.

Soyer:

Do you think it was also a problem vis-a-vis the members? Because the membership was changing quite a bit. Its whole demographic makeup by the '60s was very different from what it was in the '30s but if you had all these same officers and top staff who were left over from the '30s and earlier.

Mankoff:

Well, there were serious problems trying to maintain I would say a balanced staff.

[1:25:00]

I don't mean staff but top level. You always wanted to have at least a woman or two on the executive board. You wanted to have a Latino or a black on the board. And we didn't have that many around. There may have been some -- there were always allegations of discrimination. Whether that was true or not I'm not really in a position to judge, but the point was that we had to go out of the way sometimes, it looked like we were going out of the way to appoint people or elect people to maintain a balance. Obviously women had more problems functioning on it from a time and travel basis in terms of being -- than men did in some ways. But I would say we had to push the issue occasionally just to make sure we had a representation. Our representatives in Canada until fairly recently were not Canadian. The manager in Puerto Rico was rarely Puerto Rican although there was a Puerto Rican vice president on the executive board, Ernesto Camacho. But the manager was a New Yorker.

Soyer:

On the research staff did you have Spanish-speaking people or Spanish-reading people to do the work on Puerto Rico and so on?

Mankoff:

We usually tried to have one person in the office who could speak some Spanish. It wasn't really necessary in terms of dealing with Puerto Rico but we did have a growing number of Hispanic members. But members came to us only basically for unemployment or social insurance purposes. The general office was deliberately located out of the Garment Center so that members would not come there. While the locals were all in the Garment Center, fairly close to it, the main office was at 54th and Broadway, the old Ford Motor Company headquarters. And I would say may have been picked because it was a good building and so on but I would think that it was partially picked because it's out of the Garment Center.

Soyer:

Well, why was that? Why didn't they want members coming to the --

Mankoff:

Well, the members were supposed to go to their locals, not come to the main headquarters. I'm not saying it was done deliberately. I don't know that it was done deliberately. But the point was there was very little reason for members to come to our building except for some very specialized services.

Soyer:

But you said they used to come also to your office for help with all the unemployment things.

Mankoff:

But I think I'm not sure. We bought the building in the '40s long before I got there. And I don't know what was the original plan for who would come and when they would come. It may be that we started getting members coming after they bought the building. But even so when they came for help they were not coming on union business. They were coming on personal business. If they wanted to complain about the shop or the business agent or something or a grievance they never came to our building for that, they would always go to their local. People coming to our building had very narrow needs, either a social insurance problem, they might have been coming to the death benefit department, but those would be very narrow needs and not general visits. The point was that the locals themselves where the members were certainly welcome would be in the area. Because if the members wandered in and said I want to see Dubinsky kind of thing it becomes awkward kind of thing. What are you going to say? I'm not going to talk to members, goodbye? This way if you're out of the district it's a little bit easier.

Soyer:

How about Chinese researchers, both locally because so many of the workers were Chinese-speaking after a certain point, and because of the imports coming from China?

Mankoff:

There was no reason for anyone to be Chinese with the import issue. So far as membership goes, for whatever the reasons, only one local was really involved with Chinese membership, and that was Local 23-25, and they had Chinese-speaking staff to deal with the employers and/or the workers.

[1:30:00]

We didn't need any -- while I had a Chinese worker in my shop, he had nothing to do with any of these issues. He was just simply a file clerk that we happened to hire. Had nothing to do with him being Chinese. He was just a very nice gentleman that we hired as a file clerk. But 23-25 had May Chen for example who is now manager. Was hired in the early days because she was Chinese and could talk to the Chinese workers and so on. There was a difference in that as the ethnicity of the union changed over the years the Hispanic workers that came in and the black workers that came in or Latino workers that came in were working for employers for the most part that were Jewish or Italian. The Chinese workers for the most part were working for employers that were Chinese. So you had a very different kind of relationship and situation. Both could be exploited but there were differences because of that. We had many more problems with the Chinese shops than we had with the other shops. A lot of hanky-panky even in union shops with workers wanting to be off the books and so on. And actually the union got company to set up a Chinese contracting factory that was going to be run properly. They couldn't get workers to work in it. What can I tell you? They had a hard time getting workers to work under proper conditions reporting proper hours and so on. Homework was rampant in these shops. Overtime without time-and-a-half was rampant. And you had a lot of illegal aliens I would guess working in these shops. And under all kinds of pressures and so on.

Soyer:

You were also talking about the difficulty that the longevity of some of the top people created. I'm wondering if it also impacted on your career. In terms of your personal experience we got up to the point where you started working entering the actuarial numbers into the system there. So what was the trajectory of your role and your titles?

Mankoff:

OK. Once I started out as a research assistant, no longer a temporary worker, I had to learn the social insurance. And that meant a couple of months in a very intensive study so that I could interview workers and help them, write briefs if need be, and so on. Learning industry data. I was working pretty early on on estimating and assembling data for conventions. For example I came here in '52 and we had a '53 convention for which I was already assembling economic data or doing a variety of things. And in '53 I got drafted. I spent two years in the Army and again came back after I got out of the Army. Just had increasing responsibilities all along. I was training the librarians, took over supervision of the library. And I was training the librarians. I became assistant -- when I came back from the Army I became a senior research assistant. I became assistant director I think about '66. I always had major responsibilities for let me call it the domestic part of the operation. Because I was not the adviser on the import thing as it was growing, although I was running most of the numbers, or my staff were running numbers. But we did bulletins routinely and so on. My responsibilities grew and grew and grew. Every convention I got an extra committee to work with.

[1:35:00]

Till by the time I temporarily retired in 1980 and Herman Starobin took over as research director. Shortly after that I became the associate director.

Soyer:

Do you remember what year you became associate director?

Mankoff:

Not off the top of my head. But I would say the mid '80s roughly probably or fairly early '80s after Herman took over. And remained there until the merger. And I retired a year after the merger in '96.

Soyer:

I'm interested in the ways you interacted with some of the leaders. You worked under Dubinsky, Stulberg, Chaikin, Mazur and actually Sheinkman.

Mankoff:

Sheinkman I didn't work under. I said we were merged only a year. I knew Sheinkman because he was general counsel. I knew him as general counsel. He was counsel to the Amalgamated before he became secretary treasurer. He was their top lawyer. People came out of different fields because in the earlier days of the union when immigrants couldn't advance and do what they might have done they could become union leaders. The Dubinskys or the Potofskys or the Hillmans even maybe and so on. Later on that changed and you needed more professionally trained people to take over offices and so on. So Chaikin was an attorney. Jay Mazur worked his way up through the union but again was educational director and so on. You had people like Gus Tyler who didn't reach the top but became assistant president but with academic background. But you had accountants. Our manager in Philadelphia Irwin Solomon who became secretary-treasurer was a union accountant. Sam Byer who became manager of the New York Dress was its accountant before he became assistant manager and manager. In other cases you had attorneys. Ed Kramer in Eastern Region was an attorney and some of the others. They're people who came from different backgrounds and that was shifting over the years as things took place. In terms of their own background, interacting with them, Dubinsky was interesting, because his mind was always functioning. And as I say since he had very little staff you were always interacting with him rather than with a staff person. Some of the incidents were interesting. I can get into this. I was here fairly -- usually his secretary would call and try to get the highest ranking person in the office if Dubinsky wanted something. And if people were out I would frequently get the call. And one day she said Dubinsky wants to see you. So I ran down. He was one floor below. And he was thinking already of merging our pension funds. We had that time 20 some odd separate pension funds, one for each local, one for each industry, one for each region. We had about 20 odd different pension funds going. And Dubinsky said he wanted to see what the total would look like. So could I add up all the reserves or a few other numbers that he wanted added up for all the funds to see what the total looks like? Very simple job. I think I did it myself or I had someone do it for me. And I set it up. And I left the tables for Dubinsky. And Dubinsky had a habit of calling early in the morning. He always wanted to make sure you were there early. Because sure enough before 9:00 he would call. And I get this call. Come down immediately, Dubinsky needs you, DD needs you. I walk in to DD. He said I was up all night checking the numbers you gave me and you left out a local. I knew I hadn't left out a local. I thought quickly. I reminded myself Local 23 had just merged with 25 and we had them listed as a combined local now instead of two separate locals. So I took a guess. I said DD, you counted 23-25 as one local or two. And he looked at me with a very disappointed look.

[1:40:00]

He said this time you got away with it but wait till next time. But his mind was very inquisitive. He was always doing things and thinking of things and asking for things. Eventually particularly I guess when Hannah retired which was in early '60s I guess it became more important for him to have staff. His replacement secretary was certainly a nice lady but not a Hannah Haskel. And I think you then had the rise of staff people. Gus Tyler, Wilbur Daniels and so on. Working for him and with him. And so the questions would more likely come, the interaction was much more between him and them than him and outside departments. And you might get inquiries via one of the other people and so on. Stulberg was relatively quiet in that regard. You didn't get much interaction from him. He was not well part of the time I would guess.

Soyer:

He's probably the top example of someone who was waiting and waiting and waiting for someone to get out of the way, no?

Mankoff:

Possibly, possibly. He was secretary-treasurer. Eventually a couple years before he became secretary-treasurer. But was one of the ones that was waiting probably. The others, we didn't have a huge amount of requests for let me call it research projects from the fourth floor if you will. That was one of the good things about our department is that we could pretty much decide what we wanted to do and do it. Obviously there were parties to things and so on. But you didn't have them calling and saying I want a project, I want a project, I want this project, I want that project. We could do things on our own as we felt this was the right thing to do. And we had considerable freedom. And I think the director and myself, I know we felt that that was a very privileged kind of thing that we enjoyed having. We would decide what to do, tell them maybe what we're doing, and do it. But you weren't continually being ordered to do something. Now partly that's because of the nature of the industry I think. You don't have a lot of industry shop data. You did with government data for the most part. The few rare occasions when you might have shop data would be fairly unusual. Obviously if you had an arbitration involving a single shop you might have a payroll or some other data. In an NLRB case you might have some relevant data for that company. But on an ongoing basis you by and large didn't deal with these things seem to recall. Shop records were in very poor condition for the most part. Not until computerization became fairly available even to a small company did you get fairly decent records. If I recall correctly must have been around the time of the Powell hearings. We went out and got some payroll data for individual shops. Many of the industry workers were pieceworkers. And a pieceworker might have either a collection of tickets that she turned in whenever she felt like it or a little spiral notebook about this big that you could put in the pocket in which they wrote down 20 style 29 so-and-so at ten cents each. And at the end of the week they would maybe have a piece of carbon paper in there, they would tear out half the pages and make up a payroll slip. And hours were very poorly kept. And so we had a batch of payrolls that we had collected on shop to show that there was no discrimination. And we had to ask the business agents to handwrite in the hours and some genius wrote 35 or 40 on every line even though it was very obvious that people had worked different hours. You couldn't really rely on this kind of data. So there were not that many requests for special research projects. Much later on when the union got more sophisticated it might have hired consultants to get union member opinions or that kind of thing. But we never did anything like that. Occasionally somebody would ask for a contract or a special contract analysis. For example in early '50s we wanted to go to a standard 35-hour week and we did an analysis of all the contracts to show how many shops' workers were covered by 35-hour contracts, how many were on 37 and a half, and how many were on 40 as a basis.

[1:45:00]

And it turned out that there were so many on 35 hours that we could go to a 35-hour week. And we did. That was a survey we did of contracts. But there weren't that many requests from -- bring me this or can you find this. Dubinsky was always asking questions. He called one day and he had a Russian proverb in mind that he wanted the exact quote of. Was something like what's written with a pen can't be removed with an axe. He calls. There's a Russian proverb, I need it. You scratch your head. Where are you going to find Russian proverbs. I said wait a minute. I called the Slavic division at New York Public. The librarian says oh sure, I know it. She gives me the Russian transliteration. About five minutes later I call Dubinsky. I said is this the one you want. How'd you get it so quick? But he was always thinking. The others functioned at a different level. It wasn't so much the quick question kind of thing. They were functioning I think in a more organized fashion with meetings, staff preparation and so on. Chaikin did Mazur did. You no longer had this oddball inquiry. Dubinsky suddenly made up his mind about something. You were part of a bigger program in respects.

Soyer:

Would you say that the union got more bureaucratic as time went on?

Mankoff:

I don't want to use the -- I wouldn't use the term bureaucratic because I think it was more efficient in some respects. The Dubinsky approach was a very personalized one but I don't know that it was necessarily terribly effective. The Chaikin-Mazur approach was to put together several people who might function on a similar problem and deal with it directly. Dubinsky had very little choice because he didn't have many people. And you had to figure out what he might want and why he wanted it. But he kept doing these things. Even when he retired I helped him with his biography. He called one day. He wanted to know which country controlled Lodz when he was born. Or maybe he gave me a year. I don't remember now how he phrased it. And I asked someone to check it out and they came back with an answer. And I called DD and I said DD, this is the answer, but tell me why do you want to know which country controlled Lodz when you were born. He said I wanted to know what country controlled where I was born. I said but you weren't born in Lodz, you were born in Brest-Litovsk. Oh. He used it in his book, it turned out, to show that he was being accused of being non-American or something, because he came from a communist country. He was trying to point out that he came from Germany. It was one of these things. I'm just saying with Dubinsky you always had a question, you always had to figure out in part what was going on, make sure you had the right answer. Actually we did that with everybody. Rule one of the research department was never answer anybody's question until you know what they want. If somebody called and said can you give me the Consumer Price Index for such-and-such a date, I'm sorry I can't, why do you want to know. OK, you're dealing with a contract. Let me read the contract clause and I'll give you a correct answer. Or whatever the issue might be. It was standard practice, never answer questions from locals and people unless you knew that they were asking the right question so you could give them the right answer. You had to do that with Dubinsky also. You had to figure out why he was asking it. Very idiosyncratic. Could be very violent. I was very young in the union and I get a call from Hannah. Get the Philadelphia contract and come down with it. All right. I thought he wanted it delivered. So I hand him the contract. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. You tell me. And I see the vice president from Philadelphia sitting in the office. He says is there a minimum wage clause in his contract. I look. Yeah.

[1:50:00]

Read it to him. Here I'm a young kid practically and I've got this -- Bill Ross is about 60 at that time. Sitting with Dubinsky. And I'm reading him his contract. And Dubinsky said is there an hour clause in the contract. And we went on from clause to clause to clause. I was looking for a table to hide under. But he kept going. This vice president doesn't know what is in his contract. I must tell him. You must read it to him.

Soyer:

He was using you to humiliate --

Mankoff:

To beat him up. Anyway but I say at least he was a live wire. Sometimes I agreed with him, sometimes I disagreed with him. He insisted on doing things his way. And that led to some of his problems, including the FOUR thing, I think, which had nothing to do with -- but while technically he was right, they were officers, but the point was I think they never felt like they were officers. They felt like they were employees being told what to do by their bosses. And it was a very unfortunate situation, which hurt a lot of people in the process. I had no problem with it because in the earlier stages we were members of the office employees' union. Unlike the Amalgamated. And I don't know when it happened at the Amalgamated. The Amalgamated had two unions when we merged. They had the office employees for office employees and they had FOUR for let me call them administrative employees or whatever distinction there was. I don't know. It's not necessarily the same FOUR that the ILG was involved in. But the ILG, there was only one union. The accountants belonged to the office employees. The research staff belonged to the office employees. Unless you were a supervisor, which in research was fairly easy to become. Then you weren't part of the union anymore, you were part of management. That's one of the things I did for many years was to be the statistician for the management team negotiating with the union employees of the union. So I switched sides. I was a shop steward for a period when I first got to the union. And I became one of the management team negotiating with the employees of the union.

Soyer:

There was never any problem with the office workers' union, between the ILG and the office workers like there was with FOUR? Why was FOUR so threatening when some of the other staff was unionized anyway?

Mankoff:

Well, again I was not a party to it and I didn't have any lengthy discussions. I'm assuming that they were annoyed at the rather -- what should I say -- confusing maybe is a better word for it -- approach to hiring and paying and so on that the union was engaging in. Dubinsky reacted more to the size of your family than to your qualifications in terms of the building staff I know for example. He said the accountants are all doing private accounts anyway so they don't need much pay. And the lawyers are all doing private cases probably so they don't need much pay. And nobody should earn more than garment workers and so on. Every business agent had a signed resignation in Dubinsky's desk literally so he could use it any time he wanted to. The local managers in many cases were very dictatorial. Invited an educational director to have lunch. Was the anniversary of BLS. We took a table at their luncheon. And I figured who needs a meal, so I invited all the educational directors. Two of them weren't allowed to come by their bosses, the manager, because I hadn't asked his permission for them to have lunch. They called to say my manager won't let me come. You didn't ask him. I'm just saying I think there were a lot of bad relations with some of the people. Some of it may have been -- the claim was that this was simply a tactic on the part of small group of people to gain control. But I don't know whether that was true or not really. It may have been. Certainly some of the people that were leaders of FOUR were I would consider problem cases to some extent.

[1:55:00]

Maybe extreme. But I don't know what their thinking was. But I think in large degree they didn't feel they were policy makers. The argument was an officer is a policy maker. You don't have a union for the board of directors. I think very few of them ever felt that they were policy makers. But they were simply being dictated to and told what to do. So maybe that was why they did it. But we had a very messy affair for several years needless to say.

Soyer:

Was there any possibility of you crossing over from the staff side to the officer side? Is that something you would have been interested in or is that something that was ever --

Mankoff:

No. By the time I moved up the ladder so to speak -- well, none of the administrative supervision of the union was ever involved with FOUR. In other words whether it was chief accountants or supervisors in research, none of the senior administrative employees in the building I think were ever involved with FOUR. And I certainly wasn't in any way. It was purely educational -- people employed by the locals essentially or by maybe one or two people in the building, in the education department may have been. But basically it was people outside of our building, people working for the affiliates around the country, that were involved. And I think I don't recall anyone really to any great degree in the general office that was involved with FOUR. Maybe someone in the education department possibly. But I'm not even sure at this point. It was basically people from out of the general office that were involved.

Soyer:

Apart from that you mentioned --

Mankoff:

Because nobody -- the key -- in Dubinsky's mind, these were all elected officers. And nobody in the general office was ever elected. So that would not have been --

Soyer:

But it sounds like there was a blurry line between staff and elected officers. People moved back and forth, isn't that true?

Mankoff:

Not really, at least not that I can recall. I don't recall any of the business agents or organizers moving back and forth into ordinary staff positions. Remember this is quite a while back. I may be overlooking somebody. But I would say by and large you didn't have people moving back and forth to any large degree.

Soyer:

Was there a -- first of all did you play any role in the merger with Amalgamated? And I know you didn't work for the union for that much longer after that. But was there a noticeable difference in the climate or the culture within the union once they merged?

Mankoff:

There were some differences. As I said, the head of the department was Keir Jorgensen, who came out of the Amalgamated. And his first assistant Desma [Holcomb] was associate director of his department. More of the staff seemed to be their staff than ILG staff in the department. Partly because their department was engaged more heavily in organizing research, and the ILG had set up a separate department for organizing research. Their main focus was on organizing at that point rather than we call it economics and statistics to some extent. So there were some differences in what they were interested in. I was treated with I would say considerable respect. No problem with a respect item. I was given my choice of cubicles. They wanted an open plan rather than private offices for whatever the reason. They had differences in style a little bit. I thought some of it was very minor. Came Christmas, turned out that everybody had to pull a ticket from a hat and told you who you were going to buy a present for. An inexpensive present of some kind, which we never did at ILG.

[2:00:00]

But they did at the Amalgamated. But there were differences in style, differences in what was considered important or not. But not a major problem. It wasn't a real basis for retiring, that I was dissatisfied in any way. After I retired I still came in two days a week for a while, and then got down to one day a week. Three days a week down to two and then to one. I was the one who packed up all the papers and shipped them to Cornell. Took quite a while to empty all the file cabinets and so on. Because we ran out of room. The whole need for a library was very different. Everything was online now. You wanted a history of employment, in the Idaho apparel industry, you just pushed a button on the Internet and you got the history. Same with census data, BLS data. So we no longer needed all of the materials that we were maintaining. And we had very little room for a library in the new -- when we moved back into 1710. We had moved to the Amalgamated for a while while they refurbished the fifth floor for us. There were some differences but not a huge difference. I lost -- for about five years I had been the director of our management engineering department. Mitch Lokiec, who was the director, retired. And since the union was cutting back, I was made the director and became a subdepartment of research. And I inherited two or three engineers whose work I supervised. And to do the time studies I made sure their reports were written in English and were sound policy and so on. Did visit a number of shops ourselves. We were trying to keep shops in business. I inherited again by accident, I was the land use expert for the union fighting zoning changes and other changes that were eliminating manufacturing zones.

Soyer:

How did you keep a balance between in the time-motion studies and so on, the management studies, between keeping the industry in business and keeping the workers protected from exploitation?

Mankoff:

Well, you could be doing -- the engineers did both in effect. They could be setting a piece rate under a contract or they could be helping a manufacturer lay out his factory. That was always a policy going back to the early days when the department was set up in the '40s and Bill Gomberg and so on. The engineering department was viewed by many manufacturers as a friendly department. And we would help set up things and run it more efficiently. And at the same time monitor piece rates if need be and make sure workers were getting a fair piece rate for the work that they were doing. It functioned fairly well over the years I think. I'm not aware of any conflict of interest at any point so to speak where one item conflicted with the other. Most of the time they were separate issues. In other words the plant layout did not occur at a time when we were dealing with piece rates. So might even be a completely different company and so on. There were no problems with that I don't think. That worked fairly well. And when we merged the Amalgamated had an engineer who was head of their engineering department and he took over and I got rid of engineering function. By that time I don't know if we had more than one engineer left anyway. As the union shrank and funds shrank, a lot of things were cut out little by little. In the early days we had lots of -- I say lots of money. We subscribed to everything. We were donors to or members of National Bureau of Economic Research. We had every single book they put out from book one to the final one. We were Conference Board members. Had everything they put out.

[2:05:00]

I could go down the line with all kinds of printed materials and so on that we were getting. Loose-leaf services, legal services. We cut back tremendously on lots of these items as money ran out and so on. Times changed dramatically.

Soyer:

I want to talk a little bit about your activities outside the union. I know you're an officer of Penn South.

Mankoff:

I moved to Penn South in 1971 while I was in Puerto Rico actually going to minimum wage hearings. Both at the same time. I've been there since '71. I became a director in 1980 and a treasurer in '89. I'm still treasurer and director and very active there. I keep joking that I should go back to work and take it easy. But I joined -- I had a number of issues. My land use issues go back to the early '80s. In particular we had problems in SoHo where there were a lot of illegal conversions. Manufacturing spaces being illegally converted to apartments. And we started fighting and so on.

Soyer:

When you say we, that's the union?

Mankoff:

The union, the union. This was the union. Together with the Amalgamated. The Amalgamated was even more effective than the ILG was, although we both -- we had underwear shops and they had men's clothing and uniform shops up and down Broadway in SoHo between around Canal Street, a little below Canal, a little above Canal and so on. SoHo. And some of the side streets. And we had quite a group of people who were on one side looking for legality for the residents. And the landlords had one opinion and the union was -- we managed to put together a program that was fairly satisfactory to try and protect manufacturing. And that was the start of land use, the next big activity. I eventually decided, with union encouragement so to speak, to join the local community board, which I joined about close to 20 years ago. And for example I served as a member of the Fashion Center BID, Business Improvement District, since I knew the district and so on. And eventually became an officer of the community board and chair two years when we were having our biggest fight over the stadium on the West Side. I don't know if you were aware of it or following it. The Jets wanted to build a stadium over the rail yard at 30th Street between 30th and 33rd along the river. And the community was fighting it bitterly and I happened to be chair at that time, so I'm the stadium killer.

Soyer:

It didn't seem to me like there was a huge amount of support for that stadium anywhere really. I don't think anyone was really that --

Mankoff:

Well, the city was very strong for it.

Soyer:

This was Bloomberg, right?

Mankoff:

Yeah. Bloomberg was very strong for it. And his top aide of course was very strong for it. But we did manage to win, and it was a very successful thing. And I'm still member of the board. I've had a number of other things. I was on the state advisory council, governor's advisory council, on unemployment insurance, chair for a while. Finally disbanded it because we weren't getting proper treatment. But I was involved with that. I keep busy with all kinds of things. I'm secretary of my high school alumni association. LaGuardia it's called now. It's in Lincoln Center. I'm busy with that. Still other city activities that I'm busy with.

Soyer:

How does Penn South manage to keep its real cooperative status? I lived on Cadman Plaza.

WALTER MANKOFF

Where? Cadman? Which changed.

Soyer:

Which was really Whitman, there's three different things, Whitman ownership corporation, which changed. First of all that was the best place I ever lived.

Mankoff:

Now you're not there anymore.

Soyer:

Well, I was stuck in a studio apartment with a baby so we had to leave. But I think I was one of the few people who voted against the conversion because it was --

[2:10:00]

Mankoff:

Well, Penn South has I guess a fair number of idealists. But the fact is that because of the area we're in the taxes are so high that we could not afford to go private. Right now we're talking something like $10 million a year in tax difference, which would mean a 50% carrying charge increase. So there was no incentive. We now have a contract with the city which runs until 2022 and we can't go private until then. At that time I don't know, it depends on what the city offers. But the outlying areas had relatively low tax limits, levels. And so going private was not that difficult from a cost point of view. In our case the cost would be tremendous.

Soyer:

But you would think even so that there would be especially younger people who would say well paying 50% more carrying charges is worth it if I get ownership of this apartment, which is going to be worth $500,000 or more.

Mankoff:

Well, this would be the issue in 2022. We signed the contract with the city in 1986 for 25 years. At that point it didn't pay to go private in terms of the taxes. And apartments had some value, they were not really anywhere near what they are worth today. We had got an amendment in 2001, fortunately just before 9/11, because I think we would not have gotten it after 9/11, where they switched our tax base towards shelter rent, which in effect has meant a lock on taxes for 20 years, no increase in taxes.

Soyer:

Do you pay some taxes? It's not completely tax --

Mankoff:

Yeah, we pay something like $4 million a year in taxes, the full value would be about $14 million. We pay full tax on our commercial property and a reduced tax, about 15% of the tax, on the other property, on our residential property. It's a huge difference. And in order to get this cut in 2001 we had to extend the contract by ten years. So we're locked in till 2022. I don't know what's going to happen then. We'll see where we go and what's offered and what people's attitudes are. Twice we managed to do it and we'll see what we can do again. There have been a fair number of idealists and so on. We'll see.

Soyer:

It was very tied to the labor movement obviously. The building that I lived in didn't have really any ties to the labor movement or to any of those kinds of things. So there was very little ideological commitment to it.

Mankoff:

Well, we didn't have that much here either. No one had any priority except site tenants The union people knew about it perhaps, but they didn't have any priority in moving in. The only people who had priority were site tenants that were displaced, and they could move back in again with priority. Otherwise it was all first come first serve.

Soyer:

I know a lot of people who have lived there that had strong commitments.

Mankoff:

Well, at that time to move into this area you needed fairly strong convictions I think. It's a run-down area. And now it's very popular. But at that time in the late '50s this was a pretty run-down area. It was designated by the federal government and the state as a redevelopment area that needed redevelopment badly. And people didn't want to move in. We had a hard time renting all the apartments when we opened. A single person could get a three-bedroom apartment if they wanted it, because families with children didn't want to move in. Or not in a huge number. So of course a couple of years later it all changed.

Soyer:

Is there any conflict when you come to the community board and probably because of your background or you were still working for the union you were trying to save industry? There must be a lot of people who want to get industry out of here, right? Make a very nice upscale --

Mankoff:

The community board is relatively pro-labor. There are two boards really you might say on the West Side of Manhattan. Board 5, which has the area like from Fifth Avenue to Eighth Avenue kind of thing.

[2:15:00]

And Board 4, which I'm in, which goes from Eighth Avenue to the river basically. In recent years there were relatively few luxury apartments. The community board people tend to be lower income. A whole slew of people from Penn South on the board and a whole bunch of people from NYCHA housing on the board. And people from Manhattan Plaza, which is also limited income and so on. And these are the active people who tend to be involved. So they are relatively pro-labor. We don't have many manufacturers on the board. I think we should have some frankly but we don't. But the only employers that we tend to get are bar owners or nightlife representatives. We rarely get very many what I call ordinary employers. Or I'd say why don't we have a bank representative We used to have Bill Rappaport, who owned General Vision Services, now Cohen Optical, on the community board. But when he left he was one of the few that was not a restaurant or bar owner. Our board is fairly liberal in its thinking. It's strongly pro-residential but at the same time there are people on the board who support manufacturing and so on. And we really have not had major conflict. The problem is that you cannot really have manufacturing in Manhattan anymore, as much as you may need it. No one is going to build new manufacturing buildings. They can't afford it. The M zones are being used for hotels now. That's the only thing you can build that'll make money is a hotel. So the garment industry is gone for all intents and purposes.

Soyer:

Do the Communists have any influence in Chelsea still? Remember reading just a few -- not too long ago people were -- forget what forum it was. Someone was dismissing the Communists. Someone wrote back saying well but in Chelsea you still have --

Mankoff:

There are still some I would say. They're dying off for the most part. Whether they were -- there's no question that their tactics were used in Penn South and other places. When they get involved with something they latch on and work very hard at it. Others were not that interested. When I needed -- before I moved in I was trying to find out something about Penn South and I went to one of our vice presidents who lived here and was on the board of directors at Penn South. And I asked him. He said, oh, I never go to meetings, I don't know much about it. But the Communists went to every single meeting, very strongly. But that's no longer really an issue I don't think. That's dying out. My own experiences with the Communists were the fact that when John Gates got out of prison he became one of my staff and became our unemployment insurance expert full-time and did a superb job. He knew some Spanish, having been in Spain. And really did an excellent job. Was responsible for pushing for foreign language translations so that instructions and other forms came in Spanish. Did a superb job.

Soyer:

This must have been after '56 though also, right? He must have left the party by that time.

Mankoff:

Well, I forget when he broke with the party. Probably the '50s sometime. And went to Brooklyn College and got referred to us by the Brooklyn College placement office I think it was if I remember correctly. Had been a while working for I think a brother at a factory of some kind. And came to us. Needed personal approval by Dubinsky, who we didn't ordinarily go to consult in hiring somebody. And John turned out to be a superb employee in many ways.

[2:20:00]

Unfortunately retained his rigidity that he had gained as a Communist. It was very hard to change his mind on anything. But he did a superb job and retired. And I was one of the speakers at his memorial service when he passed away. We were in Florida for the '95 convention when it happened. Had a memorial service, and I spoke. It was an interesting chapter in our history. These things do happen. A neighbor of mine in Penn South once said to me my father was a Lovestonite but you wouldn't know what that is. At that time I had Jay Lovestone working in one of my spare rooms in the building. He needed an office after he retired. We had a spare room. So I said Jay you can use the spare room.

Soyer:

How was he as a colleague or person to have around, Jay Lovestone?

Mankoff:

I never really had much to do with him but I knew the history a little bit. But just funny that someone said I wouldn't know what a Lovestonite is. I said yeah.

Soyer:

I know who Lovestone is.

Mankoff:

I know Lovestone. In the old building his office was next door to ours on the fifth floor of the building when we were there. He had his tiny little office as international relations department when he was in New York. Just enough for him and a secretary. And we had engineering across the hall. And we had the big chunk of the floor.

Soyer:

Anything else, any other anecdotes or stories? Is there anything you want to say to sum up?

Mankoff:

Probably that's about it. I can always think I suppose of something weird that happened. Not really. I remember once Dubinsky wanted an analysis of contracts in the South. And they poured in. All these contracts poured in all of a sudden. And Teper started analyzing them for Dubinsky. And he had to leave. He told me he spent the whole night in the office, or on a weekend, the whole weekend in the office analyzing contracts. Because Dubinsky wanted them in a hurry. He left town for something, maybe a foreign trip or I forget what. And a few more contracts came in. Well, I don't know. I go to Dubinsky and I say we got a few more contracts. How soon do you need it? He says oh there's no hurry on it, I got plenty of time, take your time. Teper never asked. He never asked. Dubinsky asked, he rushed to do it. But there were always interesting events I suppose. I remember again the '68 convention. The telephone company in Atlantic City was on strike. And so they couldn't set up phone service for us in the convention hall the way they normally would. We had to rely on whatever was there from the previous convention. Plus we all went and got walkie-talkies so we could talk within the building. And I'm standing there with my walkie-talkie doing internal business and I've got the Secret Service agent with his walkie-talkie next to me. And he says I just spoke to the airport, they just landed, what do you hear. I heard the same thing. He said oh good. And Atlantic City had an elevator that could carry trailer trucks from the ground floor up to the level of the ballroom or the auditorium if they needed to. And they used that to bring Johnson up to the convention. But how do you bring him up on a freight elevator? They decorated the elevator with carpeting, sofas, lamps. It looked just like a living room. They brought him up for the convention. When I picked up the phone later they answered White House. But it was all good fun. Conventions. We used to have -- in the early days there was always a staff dinner after the convention at some local restaurant or place.

[2:25:00]

It started as a fairly small event with the vice presidents serving the staff. The staff was relatively small. And the vice presidents would serve the staff and make a big deal out of it and so on. Except for a couple that didn't want to play the game. Always one of those. But later on it became a big event, more staff, more vice presidents, and it started to become a whole banquet rather than an intimate little party. But started out as fun. There always were -- we had our little events. I remember I once went -- one of the things we used to do was go make speeches at either unions or schools or different places. And I lectured once for the senior class of the foreign service academy. They came to New York. We took them to shops. This was something the union had arranged. Once I had the President's consumer advocate. I forget who. Wasn't Betty Furness anymore, it was a replacement. We go to a shop. This genius asks me do the foreigners get the same wages as the Americans. I said what foreigners, these are all Americans, what do you mean foreigners. Oh.

Soyer:

This was the President's --

Mankoff:

This was the equivalent to a cabinet secretary or under cabinet secretary. Consumer affairs was on the White House staff. I don't think they were cabinet, they weren't cabinet members. But Betty Furness had the job for a while and others did. We had an interesting time. I've been to the White House when Carter was there. They threw a reception for a whole group of union members that were in Washington on a lobbying visit on imports and so on. We all went to the White House. The Air Force Band played "Look for the Union Label" instead of "Hail to the Chief" when the President and Rosalynn came in. We had lots of interesting experiences. I can remember in '80 we canceled the Florida convention on account of ERA approval. Held it at the Sheraton here in New York instead. And Carter came to speak at the convention. My mother said gee, Carter, I'd like to go hear him, can you get me in. You needed a badge to get into the convention hall, especially if the President was going to be talking. And the accountants gave me a badge for my mother. I had my own staff badge. They gave me a guest badge. And I look up. I was on the stage handling things or something. And I look up and there's my mother sitting in the front row with let's see, the president's wife I guess -- I'm trying to remember now. '80. Let's see. I guess it was Rosalind Chaikin. '80. Probably Rosalind Chaikin sitting there in the front row. My mother.

Soyer:

Got a good seat.

Mankoff:

The only badge they could find was orange color. That entitled her to sit in the front row where only three people were allowed to sit, the president's wife. And all the vice presidents' wives in back were all jealous. Including people who knew my mother and wanted to talk -- Hannah Haskel knew my mother, wanted to talk to her. They wouldn't let her get up front to talk to my mother. You get me a good seat? I said yeah, the accountants took good care of you.

Soyer:

Might not have had these experiences if you had gone into personnel. You might not have had these experiences.

Mankoff:

Right. Well, I really welcomed and enjoyed the experience. I'm glad I had the opportunity. It's very rewarding when you can help people in whatever way you're helping them, whether it's arbitration or unemployment insurance case or anything else. It's been very rewarding. I enjoyed it.

Soyer:

I think that's where we'll --

Mankoff:

I think it's about enough for you.

[2:29:59]

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