Murder in the Garment District: The Grip of Organized Crime and the Decline of Labor in the United States

Abstract

In this engaging new book, David Witwer and Catherine Rios carefully examine one of the most significant, but heretofore largely overlooked, reasons for the decline of organized labor in the United States since the mid-twentieth century. There have been studies on the impact of the Second Red Scare and the Taft-Hartley Act, deindustrialization and outsourcing, and the breaking of the PATCO strike, but no works have addressed as deeply the implications of the 1957 McClellan Committee's exposure of organized crime's ties to the labor movement. The popular narrative, that unions are riddled with connections to mobsters and are corrupt, self-serving institutions functioning only to enrich their leaders, emerged from the work of that committee and had remarkable staying power. This perception was also created, in large part, by conservative labor beat columnists (like Westbrook Pegler and Victor Riesel) and the lobbying of the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) in an effort to weaken the AFL and CIO (especially after the bodies merged in 1955). As Witwer and Rios so skillfully uncover, it was the awakening of public concern over organized crime's influence in the labor movement—sparked by the acid attack on Riesel by mobsters, allegedly to silence him—that supported the Senate investigations into labor racketeering. In his best-selling account of these hearings, chief counsel Robert F. Kennedy established the Manichean view of the committee's work as a battle against corrupt labor leaders, like the infamous James Hoffa of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, who needed to be punished. The penalties came in the form of both the public's declining support for unions, which it now saw as exploitative, and the Landrum-Griffin Act of 1959, which banned organizational picketing and the secondary boycott. Witwer and Rios quote one chamber of commerce lobbyist who explained, “The McClellan hearings gave us the train to ride on; they were the bulldozer clearing the path” (233) for those changes that ultimately crippled unions.In Murder in the Garment District Witwer and Rios open their study with the brutal stabbing of International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union (ILG) organizer Will Lurye in May 1949. Lurye's union comrades believed he was a victim of the relationship between the shop he was trying to organize, Rosebelle Frocks, and the mob, which was providing Rosebelle with protection from union inroads. The ILG staged a funeral procession of sixty-five thousand dressmakers to protest the killing. Charles S. Zimmerman, ILG organizer and leader of Local 22, and David Dubinsky, ILG president, eulogized Lurye as a martyr in the union's struggle against the mobsters “who were brought into the Garment district by unscrupulous businessmen in order to resist the union” (10). But as Witwer and Rios carefully uncover, this narrative—like Kennedy's popular version—was oversimplified. Yes, many employers in the garment district turned to mobsters to evade union contracts. But by the 1940s, some mobsters, like Abe Chait, controlled not just the trucking companies that the garment trade relied on but also some of the shops. In this environment, union organizers were often physically attacked but found no protection from the police, who were, as Witwer and Rios explain, also entangled with organized crime. In this vulnerable position—even as union density increased—organizers engaged in “corrupt accommodations” that rendered the labor movement “vulnerable in ways that its opponents would exploit in the decade that followed” (28).Such was the case with Min Matheson, Zimmerman's progressive union comrade and sister to the fallen Lurye, who tirelessly organized the runaway shops in northeastern Pennsylvania. Witwer and Rios present a clear-eyed interpretation of this reality, drawing on legal scholar W. Michael Reisman's notion of the conflict between “operational codes” and “mythic norms” (54). Zimmerman, Matheson, and even Dubinsky embraced these operational codes because of the reality of the garment industry in midcentury. As Witwer and Rios argue (in a refutation of Sidney Lens), these organizers came to these arrangements not in “an abnegation of the union's role” or as “crass business unionist(s) suffering from a lack of ethical backbone,” but because they worked in “an environment where racketeering could not be eliminated, only curbed,” so they “did the best they could in difficult circumstances” (128). Such dispassionate assessment enables a precise excavation of how the industry functioned. In the case of Matheson, such arrangements meant forging an alliance with Chait in the early 1950s to organize the non-union shops in Pennsylvania. Like other competitive small businesses (including those in Chicago studied by Andrew Wender Cohen), employers in the garment trade often colluded to control competition “by fixing prices or assigning customers,” and organized crime groups saw their opportunity to “coordinate and enforce such arrangements” (54).Witwer and Rios show just how pervasive such arrangements were in this era, laying bare as both inadequate and contrived the popular argument that the labor movement's association with the mob resulted from greedy union bosses’ desire to enrich themselves at the expense of their members. In a riveting twist the authors reveal how this inaccurate narrative also shaped the story the ILG told about Lurye's murder. In their meticulous work peeling back the layers of the Lurye case, examining its relation to the macro history of the garment industry in and around New York City at midcentury, they challenge existing explanations of the relationship between labor and organized crime that have advanced conservative reactions against unions. The legacies of those explanations—found in employers’ “captive audience” presentations on the evils of unions and in the ban on organizational pickets and secondary boycotts—remain significant impediments to workers who seek their own power.