Family Quarrel

It looked like a holiday. In their Sabbath best, 57,000 ladies' dressmakers poured from their cubicle workrooms one day* last week and onto the pavement of twelve mid-Manhattan blocks along and around Seventh Avenue, the throbbing heart of the New York City garment trade that produces 72% of all U.S. dresses. Babbling happily in the accents of Poland, Puerto Rico, Italy and Brooklyn, they marched half a mile up Eighth

Avenue to Madison Square Garden. There, cherubic Union Boss Dave Dubinsky, his arms windmilling from atop a prizefight ring, officially proclaimed the garment industry's first general strike since 1933.

This strike bore no resemblance to earlier ones. Gone were the days, from 1909 to 1933, when dress workers staged ten of the bloodiest strikes in New York history to organize the industry. In the late 19203 and early 1930s strikers and shop owners had fought in the streets with shivs and sawed-off pool cues. Knife-wielding Communists ripped and clubbed workers in a vain attempt to run them into a Red-led splinter group. But in 1932, Dubinsky moved up to the presidency of the parent garment union, the International Ladies' Garment Workers, forced out the Communists, rallied the divided unionists, won concessions from management and steered labor into calm waters.

Ghettos to Gin Rummy. Last week's peaceful strike tied up the industry from Massachusetts to Delaware. In all, 105,000 workers walked out of 2,286 shops. Retailers howled. Although most shops have 80% or 85% of their Easter clothes in stock, many were caught short of supply, and no one will be able to reorder if a popular line sells out.

Dave Dubinsky's powerful (455,000 members, $225 million in shrewdly invested assets) I.L.G.W.U. wanted 315% boost in dressmakers' wages (Manhattan average: $2.10 an hour). It would be the first hike since 1953. Manufacturers, crying recession, offered 5%.

The biggest reason for the strike went much deeper than wages and was much harder to settle. It was, as one weary I.L.G.W.U. official said, that "we have just become too cozy with management." The top rulers in the union and management are old cronies. Together, they had streamed from the Eastern European ghettos to the garment district sweatshops 40 years ago; together, they still play gin rummy by summer and bake on the Miami beaches on vacations in winter. And together they fixed the wage scales. When a maker brought out a new dress, a joint management-union conclave decided what share of the wholesale price would go to the union's pieceworkers for cutting and sewing it.

They were so cozy that they grew soft about enforcing their agreements. Management protested that Old Warhorse Dubinsky had signed substandard contracts, with nonunion shops out of New York to organize them, thus made it tough for Manhattan manufacturers to compete. Dubinsky hotly denied it. His union countercharged that a group of fly-by-night dressmakers were chiseling on union contracts. They farmed work out to nonunion shops in violation of their contract, paid subcontract wages, welshed on union benefit payments, kept several sets of books. To fight back. Dubinsky demanded that union and management stiffen their policing of contract abuses, slap automatic fines on chiselers. Management said that the present loose policing methods are good enough. Furthermore, the union was not always an aggressive policeman. When the I.L.G.W.U. nabbed a chiseler, it sometimes let him off easy for fear that he would fold. On the policing dispute, the contract talks collapsed.

$33 Million in the Chest. The union figured it could hold out a long time. It has a $33 million strike war chest, which, as Columnist Murray Kempton quipped, "is rather like the Chase Manhattan Bank going on strike." But management was hemmed in. Unless settlement came soon, the shops would be unable to start their summer-dress deliveries as planned on April i. and their fall showings would be late. Said Adolph Klein, spokesman for 32 high-priced fashion houses: "We just don't know if there will be a summer line if the strike lasts another week or two."

At week's end New York's Democratic

Mayor Wagner named two mediators who are highly regarded by both sides: former Democratic Senator Herbert Lehman and Harry Uviller, impartial chairman of the dress industry. After their appointment, agreement was promptly reached this week on wages (a package increase of about 12%), leaving only the last details of contract enforcement to be worked out. Said Management Spokesman Nat Boriskin "We in the garment industry are one big happy family. Myself, I'm a happily married man, but even my wife and I have a few words every now and then."

* Coincidentally, on the eve of the gay Jewish festival of Purim, widely celebrated in the garment trade.

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