Archive Transcript: Speeches
Morris Sigman's Statement About ILGWU Walkout, 1926
July 1, 1926
Statement by Morris Sigman, President, International Ladies' Garment Worker's Union
The general walkout in the New York cloak and suit industry is a complete success. The 40,000 cloakmakers quit in a body, and the trade is at a standstill.
This strike was inevitable. The jobbers who control most of the trade, and the manufacturers who are half-jobbers have made it unavoidable. The misery of the cloak workers, their inability to make a living in the cloak shops, their intolerably long periods of unemployment, their meagre [sic] earnings, and the general demoralization in the industry fostered by the jobber system of production, have left for the cloakmakers no other avenue of relief but to quit the shops and to strike for their demands.
The cloakmakers and their Union sincerely appreciate the efforts of the Governor's Special Advisory Commission which, for the last two years has made a study of the outstanding evils in the cloak industry. The workers are particularly gratified because the investigation conducted by this Commission has fully borne out every grievance and every complaint made by them with regard to the chaos, the lack of responsibility and the appalling lowering of earnings and employment created by the jobbers in this industry.
The general public by this time knows, what the industry has known for years past, that the jobbers are the real capitalists and employers in this industry. The issue between the workers and these jobbers is that they be made to assume the responsibility of real employers which they actually are. And our experience with this group of employers for the past few years, with the growing misery of the cloakmakers in their submanufacturers' shops, has ripened into the conviction that without a strike, without stopping off production, no real responsibility for work standards and conditions in the shops of their manufacturers can ever be established.
The cloakmakers have suffered long enough. Their strike means that they refuse to accept any longer flimsy and indefinite promises from these jobbers, but that they want them to accept concrete obligations for conditions under which cloaks are manufactured for them in their subsidiary shops. The cloakmakers' demands are moderate and very reasonable. They demand a limitation of the number of contractors to be employed seasonally by the jobbers, that would regularize and stabilize the trade. Cloakmaking does not need thousands of petty, wasteful mushroom growth shops to satisfy its legitimate demands. The good of the industry, the welfare of the workers and the needs of the consumers can be satisfied by half the number of shops now in existence. The cloakmakers want a guarantee of 36 weeks of employment, which is certainly not an exorbitant demand for supporters of families to ask. They want an increase in wages and a forty hour week as measures that would tend to raise their earnings and lengthen the incredibly short work seasons in the shops.
The cloak industry has in the past few years grown tremendously big and prosperous. Toward this growth and prosperity the cloakmakers have contributed a great share, while they themselves remain actually pauperized and are unable to make a living. Their strike today is a movement to make the masters of this industry concede to them work standards that would enable them to earn a more secure and decent living for themselves and their dependents in a more stabilized and better ordered industry. In this endeavor, every right-minded and socially spirited element in the community will, we hope, cooperate with them.