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.
The Amalgamated found it harder, on the other hand, to make gains in Baltimore, where it was able to sign an agreement with one of the largest manufacturers that, like HSM (Hart Schaffner and Marx) in Chicago, sought labor peace, it found itself at odds with an unusual alliance of UGW locals, the corrupt head of the Baltimore Federation of Labor, and the Industrial Workers of the World, who undermined the Amalgamated's strikes and attacked strikers.
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.
While Hillman had maintained warm relations with the Communist Party during the early 1920s—at a time when his leadership was being challenged both by the Forward on the right and by Lithuanian and Italian syndicalists and Jewish anarchists within the union on the left—those relations cooled in 1924 when the CP withdrew its support for the Farmer-Labor Party created to support La Follette's candidacy for President.
From that point forward Hillman battled the CP activists within his union, but without the massive internecine strife that nearly tore apart the ILGWU in this era.
The struggle was most acute in outlying areas, such as Montreal, Toronto and Rochester, where the CP and its Canadian counterpart were strongly entrenched.
In New York City the fight was often physical, as Hillman brought in Abraham Beckerman, a prominent member of the Socialist Party with close ties to The Forward, to use strongarm tactics on communist opponents within the union.
The garment industry had been riddled for decades with small-time gangsters, who ran protection and loansharking rackets while offering muscle in labor disputes.
First hired to strongarm strikers, some went to work for unions, who used them first for self-defense, then to intimidate strikebreakers and recalcitrant employers.
Among his allies within the ACW were Beckerman and Philip Orlofsky, another officer in Cutters Local 4, who made sweetheart deals with manufacturers that allowed them to subcontract to cut-rate subcontractors out of town, using Buchalter's trucking companies to bring the goods back and forth.
He began by orchestrating public demands on Jimmy Walker, the corrupt Tammany Hall Mayor of New York, to crack down on racketeering in the garment district, Hillman then proceeded to seize control of Local 4, expelling Beckerman and Orlofsky from the union, then taking action against corrupt union officials in Newark, New Jersey.
The union then struck a number of manufacturers to bar the subcontracting of work to non-union or cut rate contractors in Pennsylvania and New Jersey.
In the course of that strike the union picketed a number of trucks run by Buchalter's companies to prevent them from bringing finished goods back to New York.
The Textile Workers Union of America, with more than 100,000 members, came out of that effort in 1939 as part of Operation Dixie.
Lewis, however, gradually distanced himself from the CIO, finally resigning as its head and then withdrawing the United Mine Workers from it in 1942.
The TWOC, which later renamed itself the Textile Workers Union of America, grew to as many as 100,000 members in the 1940s, but made little headway organizing in the South in the decades that followed.