Sidney Hillman (March 23, 1887 – July 10, 1946) was an American labor leader. He was the head of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America and was a key figure in the founding of the Congress of Industrial Organizations and in marshaling labor's support for President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal coalition of the Democratic Party.
Early life Sidney Hillman was born in Žagarė, Lithuania, then part of the Russian Empire, on March 23, 1887, the son of Lithuanian Jewish parents. Sidney's maternal grandfather was a small-scale merchant; his paternal grandfather was a rabbi known for his piety and lack of concern for material possessions.Steven Fraser, Labor Will Rule: Sidney Hillman and the Rise of American Labor. New York: The Free Press, 1991; pp. 3-4. Hillman's father was himself an impoverished merchant, more concerned with reading and prayer than with his faltering business.
From a young age Sidney had shown great academic promise, mastering the rote memorization upon which the cheder education of the day was based.Fraser, Labor Will Rule, pg. 9. By the age of 13, Hillman had memorized several volumes of the Talmud. The next year he was chosen by the Hillman rabbinical clan to go away to attend yeshiva in Vilijampolė, a small town across the river from the city of Kaunas. It was hoped that Sidney would follow in the Hillman family tradition by becoming a rabbi.
Things did not proceed as planned, however. While in Slobodka, Hillman began to regularly attend the secret meetings of an illegal study circle headed by a local druggist.Fraser, Labor Will Rule, pg. 11. The study circle's members read radical literature and books on political economy, and Hillman was here exposed to the works of Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, John Stuart Mill, and Herbert Spencer in Russian translation.Fraser, Labor Will Rule, pg. 12.
Career
Russia
Early in 1903, Hillman passed from the training grounds of the Marxist study circle to fully fledged membership in the Bund, a revolutionary socialist union of Jewish workers within the Pale in conflict with the Tsarist authorities.Fraser, Labor Will Rule, pg. 13. Hillman became a leading activist in the Bund, leading the first May Day march ever conducted by the organization through the streets of Kovno in 1904.Fraser, Labor Will Rule, pg. 14. Hillman was arrested shortly thereafter for his revolutionary activities and sat in prison for several months, where he learned more about revolutionary social theory from fellow prisoners.
By 1905 Hillman — along with many others in the Bund — had come to identify himself with the Menshevik wing of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP), identifying in particular with the internationalism of Julius Martov.Fraser, Labor Will Rule, pg. 18. Hillman played only a minor local role during the Russian Revolution of 1905, engaging in the distribution of leaflets, raising funds for the revolutionary organization, and informally speaking on the streets to groups of workers.Fraser, Labor Will Rule, pp. 14-15.
Great Britain
In 1906, Tsarist repression in the form of police raids and organized pogroms forced the Russian socialist movement back underground.Fraser, Labor Will Rule, pg. 20. Hillman joined the exodus of revolutionaries from the country in October 1906, traveling under a false passport through Germany to Manchester, England, where he joined his uncle, a prosperous furniture dealer, and two brothers already living there.
Chicago
In the summer of 1907, Hillman emigrated once again, this time setting out for America aboard the White Star liner Cedric, arriving in New York City on August 8.Fraser, Labor Will Rule, pg. 23. Hillman's prospects were poor in New York and he soon set out for Chicago, where a friend and a more favorable job market awaited him.
In Chicago, Hillman worked briefly picking orders in a warehouse for $6 a week. He then found a slightly better-paying job as a clerk in the infants' wear department of Sears, Roebuck & Co. Hillman remained in that position for nearly two years before being fired in the spring of 1909 during a downturn of business.
The unemployed Hillman found work in the garment industry as an apprentice garment cutter for Hart Schaffner & Marx, a prominent manufacturer of men's clothing. It would prove to be Hillman's last job as a worker at the bench.
Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union
Formation
When a spontaneous strike by a handful of women workers there led to a citywide strike of 45,000 garment workers in 1910, Hillman was a rank-and-file leader in the strike. That strike was a bitter one and pitted the strikers against not only their employers and the local authorities, but also their own union, the United Garment Workers, a conservative AFL affiliate. When the UGW accepted an inadequate settlement, the membership rejected the offer and continued the strike, winning some gains at Hart, Schaffner. Hillman became a business agent for the new local.
The leadership of the international union mistrusted the more militant local leadership in Chicago and in other large urban locals, which had strong Socialist loyalties. When it tried to disenfranchise those locals' members at the UGW's 1914 convention, those locals, representing two thirds of the union's membership, bolted to form the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America.
Hillman had taken the position of Chief Clerk within the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union in New York in early 1914. He found that job, in which he tried to maintain the stability imposed on a ferociously competitive industry by the Protocols of Peace, and in which the internal rivalries within the union threatened to flare up into all-out conflict, frustrating. When the insurgents who had walked out of the UGW convention to form the Amalgamated sent him a telegram imploring him to accept the Presidency, followed by another telegram from Bessie Abramowitz (b.1889). She was one of the original leaders of the 1910 strike, an important figure in union politics and his fiancée. Hillman accepted and left the ILG after less than a year.
Hillman knew the risks he was taking. The AFL refused to recognize the new union and the UGW regularly raided it, furnishing strikebreakers and signing contracts with struck employers, in the years to come. He helped the Amalgamated solidify its gains and extend its power in Chicago through a series of strikes in the last half of the 1910s and to extend the union's membership into important garment centers in Baltimore and Rochester, New York, where the union had to overcome divisions within garment workers on ethnic lines and the opposition of the Industrial Workers of the World. Manning ramparts for Hillman in Rochester was Paul Blanshard.
The ACWA also benefited from the relatively pro-union stance of the federal government during World War I, during which the federal Board of Control and Labor Standards for Army Clothing enforced a policy of labor peace in return for union recognition. Hillman was particularly receptive to the opportunities that government intervention in labor relations presented the union; he not only did not have the ingrained distrust of governmental regulation that now marked Samuel Gompers and other leaders of the AFL, but had a firm belief in the sort of industrial democracy in which government helped mediate between labor and management. The government's interest in maintaining production and avoiding disruptive strikes helped the Amalgamated organize non-union outposts such as Rochester and control the cutthroat competition that had prevailed in the industry for decades.
That policy ended in 1919, when employers in nearly every industry with a history of unionism went on the offensive. The ACWA not only survived a four-month lockout in New York City in 1919, but came away in an even stronger position. By 1920, the union had contracts with 85 percent of men's garment manufacturers in the city and had reduced the workweek to 44 hours.
Social unionism and economic rationalization
The ACWA pioneered a version of "social unionism" in the 1920s that offered low-cost cooperative housing and unemployment insurance to union members and founded a bank (Amalgamated Bank) that would serve labor's interests. Hillman had strong ties to many progressive reformers, such as Jane Addams and Clarence Darrow, who had assisted the Amalgamated in its early strikes in Chicago in 1910 and New York in 1913. While other unions, notably the railroad brotherhoods and building trades unions within the AFL also founded banks of their own, the Amalgamated also used its banks to supervise the business operations of those garment businesses that came to it for loans.
Under Hillman's leadership, the union tried to moderate the fierce competition between employers in the industry by imposing industry wide working standards, thereby taking wages and hours out of the competitive calculus. The ACWA tried to regulate the industry in other ways, arranging loans and conducting efficiency studies for financially troubled employers. Hillman also favored "constructive cooperation" with employers, relying on arbitration rather than strikes to resolve disputes during the life of a contract. As Hillman explained his philosophy in 1938:
Certainly, I believe in collaborating with the employers! That is what unions are for. I even believe in helping an employer function more productively. For then, we will have a claim to higher wages, shorter hours, and greater participation in the benefits of running a smooth industrial machine....
Hillman's belief in stability as the basis for progress was linked with a willingness to embrace industrial engineering approaches, such as Taylorism, that sought to rationalize the work processes as well. This put Hillman and the ACW leadership at odds with the strong anarcho-syndicalist tendencies within the union's membership, many of whom believed in direct action as a principle as well as tactic.
Bolshevism
On the other hand, it made Hillman receptive in the early 1920s to the Soviet Union's reconstruction efforts, particularly during its New Economic Policy phase. Hillman led the union into a joint business project with the Soviet Union that brought western technology and principles of industrial management to ten clothing factories in the Soviet Union.
The mechanism for this interaction was the Russian-American Industrial Corporation (RAIC) at 31 Union Square, New York City, launched by Hillman with Max Lowenthal as his attorney. Both Hillman and Lowenthal were also among the original directors of the Amalgamated Bank of New York, as advertised in the Liberator magazine. The ad mentions that the bank is owned and operated by the Amalgamated Clothing Workers. It lists chairman Hyman Blumberg, president R. L. Redheffer, vice president Jacob S. Potofsky, cashier Leroy Peterson, and directors including Sidney Hillman, August Bellanca, Fiorello H. La Guardia, Joseph Schlossberg, and Max Zaritsky.
Hillman's support for the Soviet experiment won him the enthusiastic support of the Communist Party USA in the early 1920s; it also further alienated him from those in the Socialist Party and associated with the Daily Forward under the leadership of Abraham Cahan, with whom Hillman and the Amalgamated already had strained relations. While Hillman's relationship with the Communist Party ultimately broke up in the conflict over whether to support Robert La Follette, Sr.'s candidacy for President on the Progressive Party ticket in 1924, Hillman never faced the sort of volcanic upsurge that nearly tore apart the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union during this period and never undertook the wholesale purges that David Dubinsky and other leaders of the ILGWU used to stay in power. By the end of the decade, after fighting and losing battles in Montreal, Toronto and Rochester, the CP was no longer a significant force in the union.
Fighting organized crime