How poor, mostly Jewish immigrants organized 20,000 and fought for workers’ rights
These women came ready to fight
In turn-of-the-century New York City, a third of the working class was employed in the textile industry. More than half of the nation’s clothes were made in a small wedge of Manhattan known as the Garment District, and the people who made them were mostly Jewish immigrant women. They worked in multistory sweatshops that were as crowded, unsanitary, and unsafe as the rickety tenements they went home to.
In 1909, these women went on strike, demanding higher pay, better working conditions, and union recognition. They won some of their demands, but they lost an important one: ending the policy of locking workers inside factories. If they’d succeeded, great tragedy might have been averted.
Working conditions in the garment industry had been atrocious from the start. As early as the 1850s, women who sewed clothes by hand in the Garment District were widely known to be abused by employers, their fingers worked to the bone for starvation wages. Sympathetic middle- and upper-class women provided charity to poor seamstresses and advocated on their behalf, insisting that society could not abide “the wretchedness of needlewomen.” But the textile workers themselves had no unions or collective institutions, so they remained at the whim of employers.
That is, until a new crop of women arrived from a place with a tradition of working-class militancy. In the early 1900s, pogroms swept Eastern Europe, causing a wave of Jewish immigration to New York City. Many of the new arrivals were very young. By the end of the first decade, about half of the workers in the garment industry were under 20 years old. They were teenagers, and they were poor, but they had one advantage: they were organized, in large part because they came from places like Poland, Russia, and Lithuania, where their families had been members of the Labor Bund, a secular Jewish socialist party with heavy union representation. So these women workers knew a thing or two about standing up to bosses, bargaining collectively, and playing on a businessman’s biggest fear: lost revenue.
One of these women was Clara Lemlich, an immigrant whose family had fled anti-Semitic violence in the small Ukrainian village where she was born. She’d arrived in New York City a few years earlier and had quickly secured not only employment but membership in the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU). It wasn’t long before she was frequenting picket lines and, though only 23, was voted into a leadership role in the union. At a labor movement convention in November of 1909, several unionists spoke with concern about the conditions of women textile workers, a few of whom were already engaged in a small strike. Lemlich, herself one of those workers, decided to do something about it. She stood up and declared in Yiddish:
I have listened to all the speakers, and I have no further patience for talk. I am a working girl, one of those striking against intolerable conditions. I am tired of listening to speakers who talk in generalities. What we are here for is to decide whether or not to strike. I make a motion that we go out in a general strike.
The crowd roared with excitement, and the strike was on.
At the time, the labor movement had made significant gains in Europe, where it took on decidedly socialist tones that made their way to the U.S. Employers, meanwhile, hadn’t yet learned many of the tactics that they use today to keep unrest at bay. There were no labor relations consultants or human resources departments. Labor organizers had other structural advantages, too — for instance, people who worked for a given company were also likely to live in the same neighborhood, often in the same building. Despite the demoralizing and exhausting working conditions, these other factors created a sense of solidarity and identity among workers and made it easier to get people on board.
Still, hardly anyone could be prepared for what came next. The social and economic conditions were pitch-perfect: the Lower East Side of Manhattan was home to a mass of workers who were both conscious of their exploitation and politicized against it, not just angry but unified and increasingly aware of their own power. The organizers of the strike that Clara Lemlich had called for expected about 5,000 people to walk off the job, which would’ve been extraordinary in its own right. What they got instead was 18,000 striking workers on the very first day. By the second day it was even more, leading to the name by which it’s known: the Uprising of the 20,000.
The American Federation of Labor (AFL) quickly threw its support behind the strike. Eighty percent of the strikers were women, which caught the attention of the suffragist movement, too. With 20,000 workers causing more lost revenue with every passing second, and powerful labor unions and wealthier women’s activists in their corner, the strikers started out in a very good position relative to their employers. More and more factories ground to a halt, and within a couple of weeks the strike had spread all the way to Pennsylvania.
The solidarity of women across class lines was inspiring to witness. Though many of the workers spoke only Yiddish and the wealthy suffragists did not, the latter faithfully and effectively organized strike support demonstrations in both New York and Pennsylvania. But though inspiring, a coalition of groups with different material interests was bound to be tenuous, and employers knew just how to break it apart.
In late December, the textile bosses sent a communication to the strikers informing them that they would meet only some of their demands. The AFL pushed the ILGWU to accept the offer, but the striking rank-and-file wanted to call the bosses’ bluff. They still believed they had the upper hand — and besides, some of the unmet demands were crucial, such as safety ordinances inside the factories. The women feared that if the demands went unmet, their lives would remain in danger.
“Send it back, we will not consider it!” yelled the striking women in Yiddish as the AFL argued their case for compromise. As the wealthy suffragists observed the tension from afar, their solidarity with the working women frayed. Believing the strikers too radical and unreasonable, they quietly backed away, removing a critical pillar of support and eroding the power of the women workers on the ground. In February of 1910, with their coalition deteriorated, the working women were forced to concede and accept the bosses’ compromise. Perhaps if the suffragists had stuck with them, they could’ve won more.
Just over a year later, one of the factories that had been on strike — the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory — caught on fire. The employers had locked the doors, as always. The women workers were trapped inside, and 146 of them died.
Shortly after the fire, Rose Schneiderman, a leader of the Uprising of the 20,000 along with Clara Lemlich, was invited to speak to a group of wealthy women sympathizers at the Metropolitan Opera House. She surprised the crowd by speaking sharply to them, betrayal evident in her voice. In a testament to both her disappointment in her erstwhile allies and her faith in the future of the workers’ movement, she said:
I would be a traitor to these poor burned bodies if I came here to talk good fellowship. We have tried you good people of the public and we have found you wanting … I can’t talk fellowship to you who are gathered here. Too much blood has been spilled. I know from my experience it is up to the working people to save themselves.
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