Mary Bell: Guaranteed Annual Wage Issue at ILG Convention (16 June 1947)/title> <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="../../../../css/doc.css" /> </head> <body text="#000000" bgcolor="#FFFFFF" link="#0000FF" vlink="#0000FF" alink="#FF0000"> <p class="linkback"><a href="../../index.htm" name="top">Mary Bell Archive</a> | <a href="../../../index.htm">Trotskyist Writers Index</a> | <a href="../../../../index.htm">ETOL Main Page</a></p> <hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1" /> <h2>Mary Bell</h2> <h1>Guaranteed Annual Wage Issue<br /> at ILG Convention</h1> <h3>(16 June 1947)</h3> <hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1" /> <p class="info">From <strong>Labor Action</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/laboraction-ny/1947/index.htm#la11_24" target="new">Vol. 11 No. 24</a>, 16 June 1947, pp. 1 & 3.<br /> Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p> <hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1" /> <br /> <p class="fst">The International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union holds its triennial convention in Cleveland, June 16, the first since the wartime convention in Boston in 1944 and the twenty-sixth in its forty-four years of existence.</p> <p><em>The garment worker’s “bundle” – the sheaf of clothing parts handed to him for stitching – is the measure of his daily bread. The shrinking of that work bundle since the war’s end to a point where this spring an estimated sixty per cent of the trade was unemployed, is the anxious concern of every worker. Maximum capacity production in the needle market, a war-born and atypical phenomenon in this industry, began in the spring of 1942 and ended with the termination of the war. The ladies’ wear industry is back to its quarter of a million pre-war seasonal styles, and the stock style that doesn’t change – continued seasonal employment.</em></p> <p>The garment worker’s “bundle” is also a mirror of the national economy and, in particular, of the wellbeing or lack of it on the part of the country’s workers. Because the garment industry is a “soft goods,” or consumers' industry, and because the majority of its consumers are working people, its prosperity depends directly upon the purchasing power and the employment levels of the masses of people. Full employment in Wartime in the needle trades was a result of full employment throughout the economy and the exceptional conditions created by the war.</p> <p>The wages of the workers, whose wives and daughters buy garments, dropped, according to government sources, from $116 billion in 1944 to $109 billion in 1946. Or, the average earnings of the employed worker dipped from $2,240 to $1,987. This loss of consumer purchasing power, plus consumer resistance to high prices and shoddy goods, has resulted in a greater proportion being spent for food and less for apparel – hence the dwindling of the bundle, the work-week and the pay envelope for the garment producers.<br /> </p> <h4>Guaranteed Annual Wage</h4> <p class="fst">The solution to the economic problem of the garment workers is therefore linked in an especially intimate and sensitive way to the problem of the mass of workers. The <em>guaranteed annual minimum wage</em>, proposed in the program of <B>Labor Action</B> and the Workers Party for labor as a whole, is particularly urgent for the workers in this seasonal industry. While the plan has been perennially proposed at garment workers’ conventions, and has even been put into effect in a tiny section of the industry, as late as the last convention held in 1944, resolutions favoring the guaranteed annual wage were merely referred to the General Executive Board and shelved.</p> <p><em>A guaranteed annual wage carries with it the necessity of production planning, access to company data, etc. Here the ILG is in a uniquely favorable position; – in contrast to the UAW, for example, which withdrew the Reuther demand to “Open the Books!” – to make concrete proposals. For it has long followed the procedure of inspecting the bosses’ books, since the price of work-rates is set by the price the manufacturer gets for the product.</em></p> <p>In 1941, when the union leadership considered asking for a guaranteed annual wage, they were confronted with a badly sagging industry. The union took the initiative in proposing to industry that it modernize itself, adopt more efficient methods, take "fashion" leadership away from Paris, etc., and to these ends set up a Management Engineering Department which undertakes many of the functions of management, including time study practices. If the union is capable of assisting in pulling an industry out of the red, surely it is capable of seeing that its members are assured a guaranteed living wage the year around!</p> <p>Given the type of industry, the solution of the working problem is not a simple one. But it is obvious that no ordinary measures can guarantee year-around work and an annual wage. In a nation where t.he government subsidizes various enterprises permanently, the demand for nationalization of industry under workers’ control has application to the garment trade as well. But such a demand is in sharp contrast to the policies of the present government, whose aim is to maintain the capitalist profit structure rather than to guarantee jobs and wages.</p> <p>In the garment industry a partial start has been made in the existing “intervention” of the" union in the welfare of the industry. But here, too, the union’s activity is still far short of the goal of full employment and a guaranteed annual wage.</p> <p><em>In the last analysis, the guarantee of security, not merely to garment labor but to all labor, is a political problem. The fate of the garment industry is dependent upon bigger business. And the anarchy and lack of planning throughout capitalist private enterprise which leads to depression – and to a depressed industry, in the case of the needle trades – foredooms any partial planning. Overall planning means government planning, which involves politics – in the highest, most scientific sense of the tetm. Or, the garment workers would have to have government assistance in the event of an industrywide plan, which means political action from the very start. What is obviously needed is a party of labor – an independent labor party to represent the interests of the workers and the people as a whole. The necessity for such a party and such political action is dictated by the times, when every important economic struggle of labor becomes a highly charged political issue, and when government intervention in economic affairs has reached a high point. All one has to do to recognize this fact is to focus his eyes on Washington.</em><br /> </p> <h4>Need For Political Action</h4> <p class="fst">Contrary to younger and less politically sophisticated unions, the leadership and membership of the ILGWU are aware Or at least pay lip service to the idea of an independent labor party. This is due in part to the socialist and radical tradition of the ILG, imparted by its founders. However, that tradition is a pretty dilute solution today; the leaders of the ILG always are ready to settle for less than a genuinely independent labor party.</p> <p><em>In 1936, the ILG was the spearhead in the organization of the American Labor Party in New York City, whose aim; unfortunately, did not go further than to uphold the New Deal and "save New York for President Roosevelt.” When the Communist Party took control of the ALP, the ILG and other anti-Communist unions and liberals bolted and formed the Liberal Party in 1944, which unsuccessfully tried to resuscitate the New Deal by supporting Mead and Lehman.</em></p> <p>David Dubinsky, president of the ILG, is still first vice-chairman of the Liberal Party, and the ILG is actively supporting on a national scale the Americans for Democratic Action, which vociferously denies any ambitions to become a third party, let alone a labor party. Yet Dubinsky recently debated against Matthew Woll on the need for independent political action. It is more than high time to put these oft-repeated declarations into action. Surely the ILGers have had their fill of third-party, liberal-labor, laboristic and all kinds of tail-end groups which support the politicians of private enterprise. A lead from the ILG, representing the major industry in New York City, would spur immeasurably the formation of a national independent labor party.<br /> </p> <h4>For Greater Democracy</h4> <p class="fst">The ILG has been called the “Harvard of the labor movement.” This is a double-edged compliment. It pays tribute to the undoubted progressiveness of the union, its cultural achievements, its lengthy traditions, its great concentration on education, health, medical benefits, insurance, etc. But it is also an unintended but apt commentary on the stolid, elderly, business-like bureaucracy that heads the union. Whilerthe union has grown steadily in recent years, organizing in the West, South and Southwest, until it now numbers more than 375,000, this is scarcely reflected in the conventions or the national leadership.</p> <p><em>At the last convention, most of the delegates and speakers and virtually all of the executive board elected by the convention were the old-timers, men who have been associated with the union from ten to forty years. Officials of the union, union managers, business agents, organizers, Joint Board members, etc., are all delegates. This union should take a leaf from the UAW, most democratic and expressive of the rank and file among the CIO unions, and prohibit officers from serving as delegates. Election of officers as delegates is facilitated by the fact that elections for convention delegates are held at the same time as those for local officers. Local officers hold office for three years, between the triennial conventions, much too long a time between conventions, to reflect the feelings of the membership. Most local unions have membership meetings only once in two months.</em></p> <p>When Rose Pesotta, well known organizer for the ILG, declined nomination to the GEB at the last convention, the GEB was composed solely of males representing a union 85 per cent of whose membership are women, and she revealed that the constitution prohibits more than one woman at a time as a member of the GEB.</p> <p>What the union should have is a far greater measure of rank-and-file control if it is to reflect the wishes and interests of its membership, if it is to mobilize them in the hard days that are now beginning to show themselves.</p> <p class="link"> <br /> <a href="#top">Top of page</a></p> <hr noshade="noshade" size="1" width="100%" /> <p class="linkback"><a href="../../index.htm" target="new">Mary Bell Archive</a> | <a href="../../../index.htm" target="new">Trotskyist Writers’ Index</a> | <a href="../../../../index.htm" target="new">ETOL Main Page</a></p> <p class="updat">Last updated: 20 October 2022</p> </body> </html>