Benjamin Gold (1898–1985) was an American labor leader and Communist Party member who was president of the International Fur and Leather Workers Union (IFLWU) from 1937 to 1955.
[1] His father was a jeweler, active in the revolutionary movement and a member of the local Jewish self-defense corps, institutions which existed in many towns as a precaution against pogroms launched by anti-semitic Black Hundreds groups.
[4][8][20][21] In retaliation for Shachtman and Green's attempt to end-run the local leadership, and to increase pressure on the employers, Gold asked the Joint Board to initiate a drive for the 40-hour work week which would involve every union in the city.
[22] On May 22, 1926, a mass rally filled the newly built Madison Square Garden, making it the largest labor meeting held in the city up to that time.
[4][8] Gold denounced labor leaders who did not attend, and declared that winning the 40-hour work week in New York City would lead to a nationwide movement which would gain the limitation throughout the nation.
On July 19, 1926, President Green sent a letter to Gold demanding that the Joint Board turn over all books, papers, ledgers and materials related to the conduct of the strike.
[8] In a secret letter, Hugh Frayne assured IFWU President Shachtman that the International Union was not under investigation, and that the AFL intended only to purge the Joint Board of "radicals" and "communists.
[4][27] Although the AFL successfully pressured Clarence Darrow to not take Gold's case, it was unable to prevent Frank P. Walsh, former chairman of the federal Commission on Industrial Relations and the National War Labor Board, from doing so.
Mass arrests and heavy fines, coupled with long jail terms, would bankrupt the Joint Board and terrify the protesters, AFL officials and staff told the police.
President Shachtman issued a call for the biennial convention of the IFWU to be held in the Executive Council chamber at the AFL Building in Washington, D.C., on July 13, 1927.
The union's constitution required the convention to be held in May, but AFL leaders (including the influential Executive Council member, Matthew Woll) demanded that Shachtman delay the meeting until such time as he could guarantee that a large majority of delegates would be pro-AFL.
[4][8] "As you well know, your International Union is today being financed to a great part by the reorganizing activities going on here in New York City," Woll and two others wrote Shachtman, "and that without this income your organization would be practically bankrupt.
[4][8] Gold delivered an impassioned speech in which he denounced the attacks on the political views of the Joint Board's leadership, argued that the union should be spending its money building solidarity and fighting employers, and pushed for strong internal democratic procedures in the IFWU.
Several IFWU locals outside New York City passed resolutions criticizing the International Union's actions, and worker support for the Joint Council dwindled even further.
[1] The thirty-nine member General Executive Board included African Americans, Russians, Poles, Greeks, women and even a youth delegate.
[8] As chief strategist as well as secretary-treasurer for the Needle Trades Workers Industrial Union (NTWIU), Ben Gold pursued an aggressive and militant policy of collective bargaining.
The formation of the union was inauspicious: Within the year the Great Depression began, leading to thousands of layoffs in the fur industry and strong downward pressure on wages.
[59] More than 3,500 union members struck for shorter working hours and higher wages on June 17, 1931, collective bargaining goals which were considered madness by nearly all labor leaders.
[69] When the Communist Party formed the Trade Union Unity League in late August 1929, Gold affiliated the NTWIU with the umbrella labor group.
While other unions actively discriminated against African Americans and other minorities or ignored the issue of race,[71] Gold encouraged a bottom-up attack on racism.
[4] At the IFWU convention in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, the week of May 19, 1935, delegates voted to establish a Unity Committee whose charge was to seek and win immediate merger with the NTWIU.
[56] In a final attempt to stall merger, on June 19 Green announced that any union which admitted communists as members would have its charter pulled by the AFL Executive Council.
[56] On June 21, Lucchi and the executive board of the merged organization met in Long Island City, Queens, and reinstated Gold as a member in good standing of the IFWU.
[56] Gold was elected to his old position of business manager of the Joint Council on August 10, 1935, defeating a candidate put forth by the AFL by a greater than 2-to-1 majority.
[95] The indictment alleged that Louis "Lepke" Buchalter and Jacob "Gurrah" Shapiro—co-founders of the infamous Murder, Inc. murder-for-hire organization—formed a group of employers known as the "Fur Dressers Factor Corporation" to fix prices and eliminate competition.
An outraged Murray declared, "Any man who goes into a shop ostensibly as the representative of the workers and then devotes his time to furthering the interest of the Communist Party is a goddamn traitor.
[166] Gold declared the affidavit and increasingly anti-communist atmosphere a threat to the survival of the IFLWU,[167] and sought contract language which would lock in employer recognition of the union if its leaders failed to sign the oath.
In Meat Cutters v. NLRB, 352 U.S. 153 (1956), the Supreme Court (relying on a decision released earlier that day, Leedom v. Mine Workers, 352 U.S. 145) held that the National Labor Relations Board had no authority to refuse to provide the protections of the NLRA to unions not in compliance with the Taft-Hartley Act.
[5] At the height of his career as a labor leader, Gold resided in The Bronx, where he ran unsuccessfully for judge in 1928; he received one of the lowest vote-totals in the history of New York state judicial elections.
Sarah Levy, one of the most prominent characters in the novel, meets a slightly fictionalized Ben Gold in her attempt to unionize women garment workers in New York City.