The union grew rapidly in the next few years but began to stagnate as the conservative leadership favored the interests of skilled workers, such as cutters.

At a series of mass meetings, after the leading figures of the American labor movement spoke in general terms about the need for solidarity and preparedness, Clara Lemlich rose to speak about the conditions she and other women worked under and demanded an end to talk and the calling of a strike of the entire industry.

The crowd responded enthusiastically and, after taking a biblical oath in Yiddish, "If I turn traitor to the cause I now pledge, may this hand wither from the arm I now raise," voted for a general strike.

After months of picketing, prominent members of the Jewish community, led by Louis Brandeis, mediated between the ILGWU and the Manufacturer's Association.

The employers won a promise that workers would settle their grievances through arbitration rather than strikes during the term of the Agreement (a common clause in Union contracts today).

For some it radicalized them still further; as Rose Schneiderman said in her speech at the memorial meeting held in the Metropolitan Opera House on April 2, 1911, to an audience largely made up of the well-heeled members of the Women's Trade Union League (WTUL): I would be a traitor to these poor burned bodies if I came here to talk good fellowship.

We know what these things are today; the iron teeth are our necessities, the thumbscrews are the high-powered and swift machinery close to which we must work, and the rack is here in the firetrap structures that will destroy us the minute they catch on fire.

[15] Others in the union drew a different lesson from events: working with local Tammany Hall officials, such as Al Smith and Robert F. Wagner, and progressive reformers, such as Frances Perkins, they pushed for comprehensive safety and workers' compensation laws.

The Communist Party did not intervene in ILGWU politics in any concerted fashion for the first few years of its existence, when it was focused first on its belief that revolution in the advanced capitalist countries was imminent, followed by a period of underground activity.

The party had its greatest success and failure in that effort in the 1920s in the garment trades, where workers had experience with mass strikes and socialist politics were part of the common discourse.

Party members had won elections in some of the most important locals within the ILGWU, particularly in New York City, in the early years of the decade and hoped to expand their influence.

Pinkney spoke alongside Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters president A. Philip Randolph at a 1929 ILGWU meeting in Harlem focused on enrolling black women.

Those unions led the campaign to reject a proposed agreement that Sigman had negotiated with the industry in 1925, bringing more than 30,000 members to a rally at Yankee Stadium to call for a one-day stoppage on August 10, 1925.

The International supported the recommendations of an advisory board appointed by Governor Al Smith that supported the union's demands that wholesale jobbers be financially responsible for the wages owed by their contractors and that workers be guaranteed a set number of hours per year, while allowing employers to reduce their workforces by up to 10% in any given year.

He did not tolerate dissent within the union, and insisted that every employee of the International first submit an undated letter of resignation, to be used should Dubinsky choose to fire him later.

The union recovered after the election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the passage of the National Industrial Recovery Act, which promised to protect workers' right to organize.

It did not hurt that the local leader of the National Recovery Administration was quoted as saying – without any basis in fact – that President Roosevelt had authorized the strike.

At the same time in Los Angeles, Rose Pesotta was organizing women dressmakers, primarily from the Latina community, to create a union and demand better pay and working conditions.

During this drive the ILGWU chased down and organized manufacturers' "runaway shops" and established a strong foothold in the hinterlands of the Midwest and East Coast.

The ALP went on to endorse Henry Wallace in the 1948 presidential election, while the ILGWU campaigned energetically for Harry S. Truman, nearly bringing New York State into his column.

The 1916 attempt had been suggested by future Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis and Morris Hillquit, who invited Taylor Society co-founder R. G. Valentine to set up an experiment to demonstrate the techniques of scientific management.

The ILGWU, for a time, also owned radio stations in New York City (WFDR-FM 104.3, now WAXQ), Los Angeles (KFMV 94.7, now KTWV), and Chattanooga, Tennessee (WVUN 100.7, now WUSY).

[25] Dubinsky was also active in the Jewish Labor Committee, which the ILGWU, along with the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, the Workmen's Circle and other groups, helped establish in 1934 to respond to Hitler's rise to power and to defend the rights of European Jewry.

Some of them, such as Louis "Lepke" Buchalter, remained in the industry as labor racketeers who took over unions for the opportunities for raking off dues and extorting payoffs from employers with the threat of a strike.

The garment industry is an exceptionally mobile one, requiring little capital, using easily carried equipment, and able to relocate its operations with little or no advance warning.

In the meantime, the membership of the union changed from being predominantly Jewish and Italian to drawing on the latest wave of immigrant workers: largely from Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic and China in New York and other east coast cities and from Mexico, Central America, and Asia in Los Angeles and other western and southern centers of the industry.

The union won few gains in workers' wages and benefits in the years after World War II and gradually lost its ability to keep sweatshop conditions from returning, even in the former center of its strength in New York.

In the last decade of Dubinsky's tenure some of these new members began to rebel, protesting their exclusion from positions of power within the union.

The union found itself in 1995 in nearly the same position that it had been in more than ninety years earlier, but without any prospect of the sort of mass upsurge that had produced the general strikes of 1909 and 1910.

[29] The 1975 "Look For the Label" campaign's eponymous advertising jingle, written by Paula Green and Malcolm Dodds, was a popular, enduring anthem.