Sidney Hillman (March_23, 1887 - July_10, 1946) was an American labor leader. Head of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, he was a key figure in the founding of the Congress of Industrial Organizations and in marshalling labor's support for Roosevelt and the Democratic Party.

Early years and the founding of the Amalgamated

Born in Zagare in Lithuania, Hillman left home to attend rabbinical school at age 14, but soon left school and became a member of the General Jewish Labor Union, a Jewish and socialist labor union within the Pale which the Czarist authorities tried to repress. After being arrested twice for political activity and spending several months in prison, Hillman fled the country in the wake of the suppression of the 1905 Revolution, moving first to Manchester, England, and then in 1907 to Chicago.

Hillman found work there as an employee of Hart, Schaffner & Marx, a prominent manufacturer of men's clothing. When a spontaneous strike by a handful of women workers there led to a citywide strike of 45,000 garment workers in 1910, Hillman was a rank-and-file leader in the strike,

That strike was a bitter one and pitted the strikers against not only their employers and the local authorities, but also their own union, the United Garment Workers , a conservative AFL affiliate. When the UGW accepted an inadequate settlement, the membership rejected the offer and continued the strike, winning some gains at Hart, Schaffner. Hillman became a business agent for the new local and married Bessie Abramowitz, one of the original leaders of the strike and an important figure in union politics thereafter.

The leadership of the international union mistrusted the more militant local leadership in Chicago and in other large urban locals, which had strong Socialist loyalties. When it tried to disenfranchise those locals' members at the UGW's 1914 convention, those locals, representing two thirds of the union's membership, bolted to form the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America. The AFL refused to recognize the new union and the UGW regularly raided it, furnishing strikebreakers and signing contracts with struck employers, in the years to come.

Leading the Amalgamated

The Amalgamated solidified its gains and extended its power in Chicago through a series of strikes in the last half of the 1910s. The ACWA also benefited from the relatively pro-union stance of the federal government during World War I, during which the federal Board of Control and Labor Standards for Army Clothing enforced a policy of labor peace in return for union recognition.

That policy ended in 1919, when employers in nearly every industry with a history of unionism went on the offensive. The ACWA not only survived a four month lockout in New York City in 1919, but came away in an even stronger position. By 1920, the union had contracts with 85 percent of men's garment manufacturers and had reduced the workweek to 44 hours.

Under Hillman's leadership, the union tried to moderate the fierce competition between employers in the industry by imposing industry wide working standards, thereby taking wages and hours out of the competitive calculus. The ACWA tried to regulate the industry in other ways, arranging loans and conducting efficiency studies for financially troubled employers. Hillman also favored "constructive cooperation" with employers, relying on arbitration rather than strikes to resolve disputes during the life of a contract. As Hillman explained his philosophy in 1938:

Certainly, I believe in collaborating with the employers! That is what unions are for. I even believe in helping an employer function more productively. For then, we will have a claim to higher wages, shorter hours, and greater participation in the benefits of running a smooth industrial machine....

The ACWA also pioneered a version of "social unionism" that offered low-cost cooperative housing and unemployment insurance to union members and founded a bank that would serve labor's interests. Hillman had strong ties to many progressive reformers, such as Jane Addams and Clarence Darrow.

Hillman was, on the other hand, opposed to revolutionary unionism and to the Communist Party USA. He battled the CP activists within his union throughout the 1920s, but never faced the volcanic upsurge that the leaders of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union did during this period and never undertook the wholesale purges that David Dubinsky and other leaders of the ILGWU used to stay in power.

The Great Depression and the founding of the CIO

The Great Depression reduced the Amalgamated's membership to one third or less of its former strength. Like many other unions, the ACWA revived with the passage of the National Industrial Recovery Act, whose promise of legal protection for workers' right to organize brought thousands of garment workers back to the ACWA. The AFL finally allowed the ACWA to affiliate in 1933.

Hillman was a supporter of the New Deal and Roosevelt from the outset. FDR named him to the Labor Advisory Board of the National Recovery Administration in 1933 and to the National Industrial Recovery Board in 1934. Hillman provided key assistance to Senator Robert F. Wagner in the drafting of the National Labor Relations Act and to Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins in winning enactment of the Fair Labor Standards Act.

Within the AFL, Hillman was one of the strongest advocates for organizing the mass production industries, such as automobile manufacture and steel, where unions had almost no presence, as well as the textile industry, which was only partially organized. He was one of the original founders in 1935 of the Committee for Industrial Organizing, an effort led by John L. Lewis, and became the Vice-President of the CIO when it established itself as a separate union confederation in 1937.

Hillman played a role in nearly every major initiative of the CIO in those years, He oversaw, and provided major financial support for, the Textile Workers Organizing Committee, which sought to establish a new union for textile workers after the disastrous defeat of the United Textile Workers' strike in 1934. The Textile Workers Union of America, with more than 100,000 members, came out of that effort in 1939. Hillman also played a decisive role in mediating the internal disputes that nearly tore apart the United Auto Workers in 1938 and helped create the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Workers Union of America through the CIO's Department Store Workers Organizing Committee.

Hillman and Lewis eventually had a falling out, with Lewis advocating a more independent tack in dealing with the fedral government than Hillman. Lewis, however, gradually distanced himself from the CIO, finally resigning as its head and then withdrawing the United Mine Workers from it in 1942. Hillman remained in it, still the second most visible leader after Philip Murray, Lewis' successor.

Political activities

Hillman and Dubinsky founded the American Labor Party in 1936, an ostensibly independent party that served as a halfway house for Socialists and other leftists who wanted to support FDR's reelection but were not prepared to join the Democratic Party, with its alliance with the most reactionary white elites in the South. Dubinsky later split from the Labor Party over personal and political differences with Hillman to found the Liberal Party of New York.

Hillman was a strong opponent of Nazi Germany and a supporter of U.S. aid to England and France. Roosevelt appointed Hillman to the National Defense Advisory Committee in 1940 and named him associate director of the Office of Production Management in 1941; when FDR created the War Production Board in 1942, he appointed Hillman to serve as the head of its labor division.

As in the case in World War I, Hillman used the influence of the federal government to advance both labor's social goals and its immediate organizing needs. Hilllman was not able to persuade the Board to debar labor law violators, but did help introduce arbitration as an alternative to strikes in defense industries. At times, however, Hillman identified so closely with the government that he seemed to have lost sight of his roots in the labor movement; his denunciation of the UAW members who struck North American Aviation in 1941, only to face troops sent by the Roosevelt administration to guard the plant, brought down a great deal of criticism from others within the CIO.

Hillman also believed in the need for unions to mobilize their members politically. He and Lewis founded Labor's Non-Partisan League, which campaigned for Roosevelt in 1936 and again in 1940, even though Lewis himself had endorsed Wendell Willkie that year. Hillman was the first chair of the CIO's Political Action Committee founded in 1942.

His public prominence gave rise to a strong backlash, with heavy undertones of anti-Semitism, when the Hearst papers and other media supportive of the Republican Party began circulating the myth that Roosevelt had told his aides to "clear it with Sidney" when considering whether to replace Henry Wallace as Vice-Presidential candidate in 1944. In fact Hillman had no such authority in FDR's inner circle at that time; the CIO favored Wallace over Harry S. Truman or James Byrnes, the two alternative candidates whom Roosevelt was considering.

Nonetheless, right wing opponents created a nationwide campaign based on the charge that Hillman was the power behind the throne. They also accused him, likewise without factual support, of being an agent for the Communist Party,

Hillman, who had been sick for some time, died in 1946. His successor as head of the ACWA, Jacob Potofsky , took a far less visible role within the CIO, which returned to the AFL in 1955. The Labor Party that Hillman had helped create passed out of existence the same year.[[Category:1946 deaths|Hillman, Sidney]