Labor in Retreat: Class and Community Among Men's Clothing Workers of Chicago, 1871-1929 - Book Review

Journal of Social History, Summer, 2003 by Liesl M. Orenic

Labor in Retreat: Class and Community Among Men's Clothing Workers of Chicago, 1871-1929. By Youngsoo Bae (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001. xiii plus 286pp.).

Using men's clothing workers and their union in Chicago, Youngsoo Bae attempts to answer the question, "Why did the labor movement decline so drastically in the 1920s?", a question many labor historians have brought to their own research. Examining union and company papers, census data and oral history collections, Bae provides a detailed synopsis of the changing garment industry and the shift of the ACW from industrial unionism to business unionism in the context of its tremendous success in organizing the industry in Chicago. He posits that the ACW's focus on bread and butter issues helped workers make important economic gains, but this trajectory also weakened the union. Further and perhaps more importantly to Bae, the geographic dissemination of ethnic communities and union members thanks to the wage increases contributed to the decline of the labor movement in the 1920s. Bae's study will be of interest to labor, immigration and urban historians.

Bae begins his discussion on familiar ground with an examination of Chicago's ethnic communities and their conflicted relationship with American materialism. He details the makeup of the men's clothing industry workforce, which included large numbers of Polish, Italian, Jewish and Czech men and women with roots deep in the traditions of the corporate community where social relations were determined by interdependence and personal ties.

Bae also provides analysis of the changing needle trades. According to Bae, as production of men's clothing moved from the small subcontractor sweatshop controlled within the ethnic community to the larger manufacturing facility with its foremen and managers and varied ethnic groups, workers recognized their common interests across ethnic lines and how they could disrupt the subdivided process of clothing manufacture.

A turning point for men's clothing workers was the 1910-1911 strike, which although a failure, showed solidarity across ethnic lines and rank and file defiance of leaders in the United Garment Workers and the Chicago Federation of Labor. The solidarity of the 1910-1911 strike was the seed for future organizing success. The ACW, founded as an alternative to the United Garment Workers in 1914, organized across ethnic and skill lines with great success in Chicago. According to Bae, the success of the ACW stemmed from the union's ability to bring ethnic groups together and ultimately show the employers that it could control both the organized and unorganized men's clothing workers of Chicago.

The ACW which resulted controlled hiring through an employment exchange, collaborated with employers on scientific time studies of work tasks, created unemployment insurance and moved away from the political activism and muscle-flexing of the 1910s. While contractual gains and collaboration with employers helped mediate the seasonal nature of the industry, increase wages and shorten the work-week, rank and file members of the ACW were increasingly quieted within the union.

For Bae, the decline in union participation and mutual aid society membership was the result of workers' shift to economic individualism over corporate community. The wage increases brought about by ACW contracts allowed men s clothing workers to move into new neighborhoods and purchase some of the new consumer items available in the 1920s. Because of the centralized authority and the growing separation of union life and community life, workers were less inclined to attend meetings despite attempts to attract them. The practical gains made by men's clothing workers through the ACW were part and parcel of the decline of the labor movement in the 1920s.

Bae's examination of the ACW in Chicago is an interesting addition to the literature on the garment industry, including works by Steven Fraser, Jo Ann Arsinger, Susan Glenn and Christopher Martin. His detailed study of these workers also provides a case study complementary to Liz Cohen's study of Chicago's working class between 1919 and 1939, although without the specific and rich discussion of cultural change through the consumer products such as radio and movies.

However, the reader is left wondering about important elements to the story of men's clothing workers in Chicago during this period. In his introduction Bae states that three-fifths of all men's clothing workers in Chicago were women. Yet, he pays scant attention to how this might have impacted the shopfloor, organizing, the course of strikes or organizational relations with other unions or the Chicago Federation of Labor. While Jo Ann Arsinger addresses the gender question in her book on the ACW in Baltimore, the reader might wonder if Chicago had a different or similar story to tell.

Bae is particularly interested n the "interrelationship between spatial structures and social relations." (p. 5)1 While he examines neighborhoods and communities in the context of the garment industry in the first and last chapters, this interesting premise is lost in the middle chapters. The last chapter, "The Union in the Cash Nexus," is one of the most engaging because of the attention to the impact of geographic mobility among men's clothing workers. Bae tackles the union's response to declining interest, the changing role of mutual aid societies, a retreat from socialism by men's clothing workers and the logistics of changing ethnic neighborhoods in this rich chapter. An appendix titled, "The Spatial Context of History," argues for this approach. This reader would have preferred to see this discussion and the approach in action throughout the text rather than relegated to an appendix. How and where things happened is part of why they happened. According to Bae, "to properly explore the spatial context, i t is certainly necessary to probe how space helps people form distinct social relations and mobilize themselves." (p. 230) While Bae paints a clear picture of how the ACW captured the men's clothing industry in Chicago and provides a detailed examination of how it shifted to business unionism, a greater integration of this spatial approach would have made a good case study even better.