Education: Not Bread Alone

One of the most successful U. S. labor unions, International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union (275,000 members), is a little world in itself. It has its historic dates (the great strikes of 1909 and 1910, the Triangle fire of 1911), its heroes (Hero No. 1: late President Benjamin Schlesinger). It has a big health centre where it takes care of members’ ills, clubs where it takes care of their children. It also has its own educational system, whose 21st anniversary the union will celebrate this week.

I. L. G. W. U. pioneered workers’ education in the U. S. The union was founded in 1900 among garment workers in Manhattan, most of them immigrants. It taught them English and unionism. It soon found that its members, some of them cultured refugees from the old country, had unusual zeal for learning. In 1917 the young union started an education department, got famed Historian Charles A. Beard as consultant, opened a night-time Workers’ “University” in Manhattan’s Washington Irving High School, to teach labor doctrine and American history. Today I. L. G. W. U.’s education department spends $200,000 a year, has some 22,000 members enrolled in more than 600 study groups in 58 cities, 25 States, three Canadian provinces. At its anniversary celebration in Washington Irving High School this week will be bigwig speakers, a union chorus of 100 voices, a union orchestra of 90 mandolins. Playing to capacity audiences on its Labor Stage, a theatre near Times Square, is its best-known product, the musical revue Pins and Needles.

The education department’s chairman is Julius Hochman, a union vice president and general manager of the N. Y. Dressmakers’ Joint Board. Stocky Julius Hochman, shaggy browed and square faced, looks like C. I. O. Leader John L. Lewis, and is himself a product of workers’ education. Born in Russia 45 years ago, he went to work at eleven for his father, a tailor. He arrived in Manhattan’s garment district at 14, promptly enrolled in night school, later was graduated from Brookwood Labor College. Today he is a lover of painting and chamber music. He helped design Labor Stage, after the Moscow Art Theatre.

Chairman Hochman believes that labor unions owe to their members education and fun as well as higher wages, that “man does not live by bread alone.” Mr. Hochman and the union’s able educational director, British-born Mark Starr, think that a worker is not fully educated in high school or college. Purpose of their workers’ education program: to remove “prejudices” acquired in public schools, fill gaps, give workers “realistic” attitudes toward labor, teach them how a union works.

I. L. G. W. U. believes that a union officer can afford to have a foreign accent but an organizer cannot. Most popular courses, however, are the history of I. L. G. W. U. and the U. S. labor movement, labor problems & the news, public speaking, parliamentary law. Recently the union made a rule that no one may be elected a paid officer unless he has finished a training course.

Besides teaching members how to be good unionists and how to think about economic problems, I. L. G. W. U.’s education department gives them lectures on sex and marriage, shows them how to paint, takes them sightseeing, brings them together for dancing, singing. The department has distributed over 200,000 pamphlets, produced songs, radio programs, phonograph records, films. It runs a vacation resort, Unity House, in Pennsylvania’s Pocono Mountains, where for as little as $19 a week union members may go to swim, sail, dance, play tennis, hear concerts.

In New York City’s metropolitan area are 20 union baseball teams. Twenty-one men’s and 20 women’s basketball teams compete for the Dubinsky Cup (offered by President David Dubinsky), the Hochman Trophy. In Fall River, Mass., a union local has a rifle team, teaches men and women workers to shoot straight. In Philadelphia is a union riding club. “Once,” says the union, “it might have been said that horseback riding was too good for the common people, but the I. L. G. W. U. feels that nothing is too good for workers.”