The New Labor Radicalism and New York City's Garment Industry: Progressive Labor Insurgents During the 1960s

by Benin,Leigh David

• ISBN13: 9780815333852
• ISBN10: 0815333854
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1999-11-01
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

This book examines how Progressive Labor (PL) insurgents challenged the International Ladies' Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) and tried to revolutionize labor in New York City's garment industry during the 1960s. Progressive Labor's role in New York City's economically important but declining garment industry -- the group's first attempt to organize industrial workers on the job -- suggests the problematic nature of PL's attempt to transform itself from a group of radical intellectuals into a mass working-class party. Pitted against powerful opponents, such as the garment firms and the imperious, socially progressive, and historically anticommunist ILGWU, a handful of PLers were able to foment a surprising number of work stoppages, which exposed the egregious problems facing low-paid black and Latino garment workers and their problematic relationship with the ILGWU. Progressive Labor's experience in New York City's garment industry suggests that industry workers were very willing to fight their trade union battles under communist leadership, but were far less wil

Table of Contents

Introduction	ix
Acknowledgments	xix
List of Abbreviations	xxi
Part I Reinventing American Communism: An Overview of Progressive Labor in the 1960s and 1970s	1	(68)
Antirevisionism in Action: The Origin of the Progressive Labor Party, 1956--1965	3	(24)
Purifying the Communist Movement and Searching for Utopia: Progressive Labor in Theory, 1965--1982	27	(17)
Reform, Revolution and the Search for the Working Class: Progressive Labor in Practice, 1962--1982	44	(25)
Part II New Communists in an Old Anticommunist Union: Progressive Labor and the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union in the 1960s	69	(119)
New Communists Challenge Old Socialists: Trespassing on ``Dubinsky's Plantation,'' 1962--1966	71	(28)
The Making of a Communist Trucker: The Political Apprenticeship of a Progressive Labor Colonizer in Garment Trucking, 1940--1966	99	(23)
Communist Truckers Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Progressive Labor, Garment Trucking and Local 102, ILGWU, 1967--1970	122	(25)
Anatomy of a Communist-Led Wildcat Strike: Progressive Labor, Figure Flattery and Local 32, ILGWU, 1968	147	(23)
Anatomy of an Anticommunist Purge: Progressive Labor, Figure Flattery, and Local 32, ILGWU, 1968--1969	170	(18)
Conclusion	188	(9)
Notes	197	(102)
Selected Bibliography	299	(20)
Index	319