Historic Union Torn Apart in Messy Divorce
By Nathaniel Popper
The offices of union boss Bruce Raynor were, until recently, a physical testament to the Jewish labor movement’s enduring power.
Raynor, president of the historically Jewish garment unions, worked from an executive suite in Manhattan’s garment district, in a storied building that had been purchased with the dues of countless seamstresses and furriers and milliners working on the Lower East Side. While the Jewish members have largely disappeared from the rank and file of the union, Raynor himself is the child of a Long Island Jewish home and the garment district building is littered with reminders of the history.
In late May, though, Raynor was forced to beat a hasty retreat to much more modest offices farther downtown, in a building with low ceilings and drab carpeting and with temporary signs taped onto the walls.
“The fact that we had to leave the headquarters — I didn’t like it,” Raynor told the Forward while sitting in his new office. The walls around him were bare, except for a poster with a picture of Sidney Hillman, the Lithuanian-Jewish émigré who rose up to lead the Amalgamated Clothing Workers.
Raynor’s move was precipitated by an increasingly hostile union battle that has left the fate and assets of America’s most storied Jewish union in question; it also has complicated the future of America’s labor movement as a whole.
Raynor’s garment union, which was known as UNITE, merged in 2004 with the national hotel union, which was known as HERE, to form Unite Here. Raynor took over as president of the joint union, but the merger unraveled, and both sides are now attempting to keep control of the joint assets, including the old headquarters of the garment union and the largest union bank, Amalgamated Bank, which was founded by the old garment unions. Currently, Raynor retains chairmanship of the bank, but he moved out of his office as the controversy intensified.
“I was not going to participate in a B movie about unions,” Raynor said.
The messy divorce of Unite Here is having consequences far beyond the physical realm. It has been blamed for the stalled progress of a union-favored bill moving through Congress, the Employee Free Choice Act. The divorce also led Raynor to gather the remnants of the old garment unions into a new organization called Workers United, which is now a subsidiary of the Services Employees International Union. This move means that for the first time, the garment unions are not sovereign entities — a change that Raynor said was difficult to swallow.
“I love the garment unions — I love the history and I love who we are — and I would have loved to maintain that as a separate union,” Raynor said. “But having said that, the world does change — and for Unite to realize the principles that Sidney Hillman would have cared about, you have to be part of a bigger union in this society.”
It appeared for a time that Raynor also would lose his leadership position and end the long, unbroken line of Jewish men who have headed up the garment unions. When Workers United was created this spring, Edgar Romney, an African-American, was elected president. Many praised Romney’s election for bringing the union’s leadership more in line with its minority-heavy membership. But in the end, after Raynor resigned from Unite Here, Romney stepped aside so that Raynor could become president of Workers United. This has caused some soul searching in the labor movement about the presence of Jewish leaders in unions where there are few Jewish members. Raynor emphasized the ethnic diversity below him in the Workers United hierarchy. He said it was actually people like Romney who are keeping alive the distinct traditions of the Jewish immigrants who historically led these unions.
“These ‘Jewish unions’ were called that because they had a heavily Jewish membership and a heavily Jewish leadership — but it was the values that set them apart, looking out for immigrants,” Raynor said. “Today it’s still an immigrants’ union — it’s just different immigrants now.”
Raynor’s nemesis, John Wilhelm, the new president of Unite Here, is not so sanguine and said that Raynor’s moves — particularly his decision to join SEIU — have put in danger the living legacy of the garment unions.
“Look,” Wilhelm told the Forward, “SEIU is a union of nearly 2 million people; the former Unite is less than 100,000. It will very quickly get dissipated and absorbed into SEIU, and the institutional legacy will be gone — which is sad. This wouldn’t have happened if they had stayed a part of Unite Here.”
Raynor thinks it will go down differently. His new boss at the SEIU, Andy Stern, is the most prominent Jewish labor leader today, and Raynor portrayed Stern as a natural heir to the great Jewish labor leaders of the 1930s, like Hillman.
“I think Andy, who is also Jewish, shares the same values that I do,” Raynor said. “I really see SEIU in many ways as a modern version of the Jewish unions of the 1930s.”
The tradition of those old Jewish unions — bringing in immigrants and helping them step up to the middle class — seems to be the legacy that union activists watching the battle are most concerned about as the fights drag on.
“These were unions that specifically focused on an immigrant agenda,” said Amy Dean, a Jewish labor activist who got her start in the garment unions and is writing a book on the history of unions. “How sad that would be, if we lost that as a result of all the stuff that’s going on.”
The garment unions that Workers United is descended from were at the peak of their power in the 1930s and’40s. Back then, the men’s and ladies’ garment unions were notable not so much for their size as for the ways in which they were shaped by the socialist politics of the Jewish émigrés who led them. Hillman, of the men’s garment union, and David Dubinsky, of the needle trades union, wanted to provide more than just bargaining power, they wanted to give their members a better life and, as a result, they founded the banks and housing complexes and health centers that were the envy of union members elsewhere. Many are still headquartered in the building that Raynor was forced to leave.
Decades later, Raynor came to the union not from a poor immigrant background, but rather from Cornell University and the anti-war movement.
“Why did I choose to leave Cornell?” Raynor asked while eating a slice of pizza in his new offices, wearing a tie painted with baseballs. “In order to change society. That is the Jewish socialist tradition of our unions. It was appropriate that those same traditions led me to the same place, even though the workers were no longer Jewish.”
Raynor rose to fame by helping to organize workers at the Southern textile giant J.P. Stevens. He then moved up the ranks to become the latest in a chain of Jewish leaders to take the presidency of the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union, which merged in 1995 with the International Ladies Garment Workers Unions to form Unite.
By 2003, when Raynor positioned his organization to merge once again, now with the hotel union, the membership in the garment unions had been in a long tailspin, thanks to the migration of the apparel industry out of the United States. The marriage with the hotel union was seen as a complementary match. While Raynor had a lot of assets but a shrinking membership, Wilhelm’s hotel union had a growing membership base but few assets with which to organize them. Both Raynor and Wilhelm — who rose out of a union organizing campaign at Yale University — came from the progressive side of the labor movement, which believed in immigrant rights and broader social change.
The two leaders said that they quickly developed philosophical disagreements over the best strategy for organizing workers. Raynor said that Wilhelm was not moving fast enough to organize workers, while Wilhelm maintained that Raynor was willing to sacrifice good contracts in order to get more members quickly.
One particular point of disagreement was the strike at the Congress Plaza Hotel in Chicago. That strike, which has now gone on for six years, pits an owner and philanthropist prominent in the Jewish community against workers supported by many socially minded rabbis in Chicago’s Jewish community. Within Unite Here, however, Wilhelm said that Raynor was pushing to cut off support for the striking workers.
“He wanted to walk away from those strikers, which is a concept that I don’t understand,” Wilhelm said.
Raynor said he thought the strike was a poor use of the union’s resources, given that the owners of the Congress did not own any other hotels.
“That company is atrocious, and the union should win, but the real problem is that in 10 years, we’ve only organized one hotel in the city of Chicago,” Raynor said. “They ought to be focused on that.”
The larger dispute broke out into the open late last year, in the months before a union election likely would have led to an ouster of Raynor as president of the joint union. Before that could happen, Raynor led many local unions in voting to secede from Unite Here. Since then, the two sides have exchanged verbal and legal volleys. Both sides have laid a claim to the bank and the headquarters — claims that are making their way through court right now.
One of the primary sticking points in the divorce has been Raynor’s contention that his new organization should be able to begin organizing hotel workers in some cities; this follows from the decision of some current hotel worker members to join the new Workers United. Wilhelm said he is not willing to consider a future in which another union would be competing for hotel worker members. He pinned responsibility for the problem not on Raynor but rather on Stern, and on what Wilhelm described as Stern’s “imperialistic” intention to take over smaller unions.
Raynor defended his new boss and said that Stern has faced opposition because he has looked beyond the labor movement to effect change.
“One of Andy’s passions is political action and using the political arena to take care of workers’ problems,” Raynor said. “He probably spends a majority of his time on national health care. That’s a social issue. It’s not going to get more members into SEIU, it’s going to provide health care for the 50 million people that don’t have it.”
Wilhelm and Raynor are unable to agree on who is to blame for the current mess — and they have missed few opportunities to castigate each other. Still, both men continue to share similarly progressive visions of what their organizations are all about. Wilhelm said: “I grew up as a progressive trade unionist, one of the places you looked to for inspiration was the needle trades unions. I still have tremendous respect for that.”
But both leaders also agree that the battle between them has put the pursuit of those old values into jeopardy.
“This is very destructive,” Raynor said. “It’s destructive to the workers in our union — and to non-union workers. It’s destructive to the labor movement; it makes the labor movement more divided and harder to unite around issues. So this fight needs to end.”
Contact Nathaniel Popper at popper@forward.com
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Please save us from Bruce Raynor comparing himself with a David Dubinsky or a Sidney Hillman. Both of these long gone union leaders had each worked, respectively, as skilled working class tradesmen in the ladies garment and mens clothing industries. Mr. Raynor now serves not as a major union leader but instead as a banker...the CEO of the Amalgamated Bank founded 87 years ago by the nickles and dimes of many thousands of hard working clothing Workers. Perhaps banking is an appropriate career for someone who, unlike these workers or their contemporaries, has never sweated his own brow under the steam-filled abestous pipes of a pressing room or in wielding the treacherous knife of a cutting machine or even in earning his daily keep by way of seven or eight hours of demanding piece work as do many thousands of working men and women whose own sweat now goes to pay his banker's salary. Matt Thomas
Andy Stern is no more Sidney Hillman than Hillman was Jimmy Hoffa. While Stern talks the talk on progressive issues, particularly his stance on Health Care, he is a pie-card Napoleon when it comes to his union, and make no mistake he thinks its his union. He organizes workers by signing sweetheart deals with their employers, signs away the right to strike, decides with employers which workers will be organized and which not. He works assiduously against rank-and-file democracy by incorporating thousands of workers scattered across several states into one local. And this does not even go into his disgraceful assault against SEIU Local 250 and Sal Rosselli. The list is long against this guy.
And I might add, it is more than a little disturbing to read that the needle trade unions were "Jewish unions." They were progressive unions that believed in organizing all workers across religious, ethnic, and racial lines, as the membership of many non-Jewish Italians and Eastern Europeans, and now African-Americans and others can attest.
Andy Stern, who played golf with John Kerry and raised $250,000 for him at a time when my former part-time workers at a Los Angeles County Libray branch was losing their medical benefits, including four who had very serious medical problems, when his SEIU 660 negotiators told our stewards they were basically on their own against a management that did this, is NOT fit to shine the shoes of the old Union leaders like Dubinsky and Hillman.
Before I left my job I personally "threw" an SEIU rep out of our building AFTER she heard chapter and verse from my workers, one of whom almost died on the operating table from a virus that shut down most of his organs, from a young women with colon problems, from another worker who needed meds cancelled for a "chemical imbalance" - and others.
He's a coward and a political hack for his old SDS - and Democratic Party pals. No friend of the little guy at all. Andy Stern cares only for the Obamas, the Clintons, and the Kerrys of this world. NOT for the worker.
The ILGWU was a Jewish trade union in the sense that at the founding meeting at Cooper Union the charter members took the Jewish oath in Yiddish, which I paraphrase as... "May my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth and my good hand shrivel if I ever betray the princples this Union..." The Forward might also ask the opinion of this mess of Larry Cohen of the CWA, another prominenet and influential Jewish trade unionist.
Time to use the F- word: Raynor and Stern are union-busting fascists. They are phony union pie-cards who suck up to the boss and don't give a damn about workers.
Re: The ILGWU meeting at Cooper Union Hall... This was not for the union's founding (in 1900) but a 1909 meeting to decide whether the ILGWU should expand two small strikes to take on the entire Shirtwaist industry of 20,000 workers. For two hours the meeting dragged on with no decision. Suddenly a slight 18 year-old striker, Clara Lemlick, took the floor and recited that same powerful Jewish oath in Yiddish, adding this challenge: "I am a working girl, one of those on strike...I am tired of listening to speakers who speak in general terms. What we are here for is to decide whether we shall or shall not strike. I offer a resolution that a general strike be declared-now." Thus, the timid all male ILGWU leadership was shamed by a young female rank and file member into finally sanctioning the giant strike. The Shirtwaist Strike was won in February, 1910 and soon after, 60,000 more NYC garment workers struck in what was known as "the great uprising." It is important for one to know this history of the once great ILGWU so that we may now more fairly judge the leadership of its successor union.