Tariffs are a national conversation with shifting edicts coming almost daily from the White House. Pundits, free trade “globalists,” and MAGA nationalists contend full-time on cable television. The debate extends to the labor movement, with United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain supporting Donald Trump’s tariffs in the auto industry while opposing the rest of the MAGA agenda.
My own experience in the men’s clothing industry in the 1970s sheds some light on this issue. In this decade, I was a presser in a large suit shop, active in a broad-based union rank-and-file movement, and a member of the Philadelphia Workers Organizing Committee (PWOC), part of the New Communist Movement.
The garment industry was one of the most protected by tariffs in the nation. The union in men’s clothing, the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (ACWA), joined the employers in lobbying for tariffs and ran its own “Buy American” campaign aimed at consumers. Such collaboration had a long history. By establishing a floor for wages and working conditions, the union had been a source of stability in a labor-intensive industry dominated by small shops and intense competition, a fact that the employers came to appreciate.
Philadelphia was the largest center of the industry after New York, and the Philadelphia Joint Board of the ACWA was the city’s largest union. The woolen goods division consisting of tailor shops, which made suits, dominated the local industry. A much smaller cotton goods sector made work- and sportswear. Workers were stratified by race, sex, and ethnicity, divisions that were carried over in the union’s hybrid structure that included both craft and industrial locals.
My own shop, Joseph Cohen’s, later Botany 500, illustrates this diversity. It was housed in a ten-story factory at the intersection of Broad and Lehigh that was built to make Ford cars. On the top floor were the cutters, highly skilled and well-paid Jewish and…
Auteur: Ron Whitehorn
