Dress Strike

Of all dresses sold in the U. S., 70% are made in and about New York City, where 45,000 people, two-thirds of them women, each year manufacture $634,000,000 worth. In midwinter dressmakers are busiest, preparing for the Easter trade. This year they are especially busy because of major style changes in women's wear. Last week, at the busiest time, 35,000 New York dressmakers went on strike.

Demands of International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union: abolition of 1,500 "sweatshops"; 10% wage increase; a 40-hour, five-day week; an impartial commission to settle disputes; unemployment insurance. Well heeled was the Union for this walkout; last summer it sold $250,000 worth of 5% strike bonds.

Employers, dreading idle needles in the boom season, tried to avert the strike, failed for lack of organization. Workers complained chiefly of "sweatshops" where girls worked as much as 60 hours per week for as little as $12.

"Sweatshops" are operated mostly by small unorganized dress manufacturers known to the trade as "contractors" because they contract the disposal of their entire production to wholesale jobbers. These contractors accuse the jobbers of driving such sharp bargains, of "jewing" prices down so low, that only by sweatshop methods can the little manufacturers meet the stiff competition. They profess sympathy with their.striking employes but claim they cannot accede to their wage and time demands until the jobbers agree to cease patronizing and encouraging sweatshop contractors. The jobbers retort that they are bound to seek the best possible prices, sweatshops or no sweatshops, to induce the public to buy.

All last week New York dressmaking was at a standstill, but New York dressmakers were not so. Shortly after they began picketing the garment center there were numerous riots and arrests, and one Jacob Rothenberg, open shop manufacturer, died from a fractured skull, having been knocked down on the street. Friends claimed he had been intentionally attacked. To Albany went representatives of strikers and employers to confer with Governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Lieutenant

Governor Herbert H. Lehman, whose arbitral efforts last year brought order out of almost identical chaos in New York's cloak and suit trade, was asked to do likewise in this dispute.

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