Bosses and Workers > "A Long Step Forward"
In December 1912, a hundred thousand garment workers went on strike against the 4,000 clothing shops operating in New York City. The strikers were Italians, Jews, Poles, and Lithuanians, “they are employed as cutters, machine operators, tailors who work with the needle, and pressers. They make coats, trousers, vests, whole suits, knee pants and over coats.” Six days out of seven, they worked in sweatshops, or in their own tenement flats, and earned an average of $10 a week.
This was the third major garment strike in less than three years. Realizing that this unrest “threatened to impair the commercial prestige of the city,” the Chamber's members immediately involved themselves, offering to settle the dispute through its Committee on Arbitration. The leaders of the Garment Workers’ Union decided to participate, though they were suspicious of any institution that was “composed of capitalists.”
It was the manufacturers who refused to negotiate.
This intransigence forced even the Times to blame the owners ... a little bit; “the employers cannot escape a certain measure of responsibility for the strike,” its editors conceded. But, the manufacturers' behavior utterly exasperated the members of the Chamber of Commerce, who blamed them entirely for the failure of arbitration. This behavior “passes our comprehension,” the committeemen wrote. “We can see no just reason why any group of employers should fail to recognize the right of work-people to organize in order to present their case to their employers and to the public through their chosen representatives.”
Such liberality on the part of the Chamber of Commerce – at a time when American workers had no legal right to organize in unions – was a concession, in part, to the power and cohesion displayed by the City’s laborers. It also reflected the belief that fair arbitration between employers and their employees could resolve any industrial conflict. And, the fact that few elite merchants involved themselves in small-time garment manufacture might have also played a part in their magnanimity.
Three years later, after a strike of transit workers halted New York’s infrastructure, the Chamber took “a long step forward” toward the goal of social peace by forming a new Industrial Relations and Problems Committee to serve as researcher, counselor, and mediator for future disputes.