The infamous 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire in New York City launched the union organizing of garment workers onto the national stage. More than 140 shirtwaist workers, most of them girls, died in a fire that could have been avoided if the employer had taken proper safety precautions and had not locked the factory doors, supposedly to prevent theft. The company's owner, who lived in South Norwalk, was put on trial for the deaths but never spent a day in jail.
In New York, the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) was growing in power. Clothing manufacturers started leaving the city in order to find non-union work and to increase their profits. Not surprisingly, they moved to smaller cities like Hartford. Around this time, Connecticut had 4,000 factories but only three government inspectors-- and no effective safety laws.
Rebecca Weiner didn't need to read about the Triangle fire to know that Hartford's garment workers were likely to suffer the same fate. She worked as an alteration tailor at the Sage Allen & Company department store on Main Street, but her real vocation was to organize workers into Local 74 of the ILGWU. Hartford had many of the same economic conditions that New York workers had organized against-- long hours, low pay, no job security and dangerous working conditions.
Thanks to the ILGWU's work in New York, women workers like Rebecca could earn $12 to $14 in weekly union wages. For the same effort, workers wouldn't even earn $6 a week in Hartford. "No working girl can ply her honest trade for less than $6 a week and be safe from the temptation and defilement to which she is exposed in the polluting atmosphere that environs her struggle for decent living," wrote the ILGWU about the Hartford situation. "Twelve hours in any one day are too long for any girl or woman to sit at a sewing machine." Shirtwaist factory owner Max Roth, who operated out of the old Cheney building on Market and Morgan Streets, had been recently arrested for forcing his forty employees to work seven days a week. It was the second time he had been accused of the labor law violation, but he had not been prosecuted at that time "because he stopped when he was ordered to," according to a press account. The ILGWU also targeted unsafe conditions in Hartford. The union's magazine reported that Hartford shops operated many floors above street level without any fire escapes.
When owner Norman F. Allen got wind of Rebecca Weiner's efforts to organize the Sage Allen tailors, he promptly fired her. Rebecca's termination triggered a strike at the store on March 20th by twenty men and women working in the tailoring department. In response, the foremen of the other dry goods stores ordered their employees to work overtime to finish the Sage Allen work. These 200 Italian and Jewish tailors refused, and in retaliation their bosses locked them out of their jobs. The tailors' refusal stopped all work at G. Fox, Brown Thomson and eight other clothing stores. The merchants had to send their work out of town in order to get the job done.
While the horror of Triangle was fresh in the public mind, Rebecca Weiner and the strikers issued a leaflet to explain their actions:
"For the same class of work in New York City the workers there received nearly double the Hartford wage and work fewer hours a day, and yet suits, cloaks, etc. are cheaper in New York than here We do not want the public to be deceived, and we feel that they have the right to know the truth [about] our struggle for living wages and better working conditions"
Norman Allen was able to draw on more than just the other department store owners in his efforts to break the workers' strike. Allen was president of the State Businessmen's Association and a Hartford police commissioner. With his business and legal connections, Allen brought all the forces at his disposal to bear against the union.
When the company tried to import strikebreakers from New York, fifty garment workers met them at the train station. The police quickly arrested five union members for calling the replacement workers "scabs." Other strikers-- young workers like Lena Hirshfield and Laura Pechepperwere also arrested on the picket lines in front the struck stores
During the Union Station altercation, one of the New York replacement workers realized that he had been duped by the offer of a Hartford job. When it became clear that Charley Janacak was going to refuse to cross a picket line, he was hustled away in a cab by a cop and locked in a hotel room overnight. About forty other strikebreakers were initially brought to town were forced to live in the stores.
The strikers were represented in court by State Senator Thomas Spellacy and supported by other local unions. Judge Clark found them all guilty of various charges including intimidation and were fined anywhere from $5 to $25 apiece (more than a month's wages).
Soon after the arrests, Norman Allen succeeded in obtaining a court injunction against the strikers from interfering with hiring of the replacements. He also initiated a suit against both the ILGWU and the Hartford Central Labor Union, charging them with the loss of $10,000 in business and attaching their bank accounts.
In response, Spellacy introduced a petition to the state legislature to remove the judge from the police commission. The Union also approached Hartford Mayor Edward Smith to demand that Norman Allen be taken off the board.
The Union also took the offensive by charging that Allen violated labor laws in his employment of women and children. Just one year before, the legislature had limited their hours of work to fifty-eight (!) a week, except at Christmastime.
By June, the strike ended without achieving its goals. "In this strike evidence of the class-struggle was clearly shown," said the Union. But it was more than just the combination of big business and the legal system that did the workers in. Abraham Janow, the organizer who had been sent to the city to lead the ILGWU local, ended up by starting his own business and neglecting the strike. The union fired him.
Abraham Rosenberg, the ILGWU's international president, wrote in his annual message to the membership that the strike "had served a good purpose in calling attention to the insanitary conditions of the department stores and their hours of labor." Rosenberg reported that "the state legislature was compelled to appoint a committee to investigate these conditions."
Local 74, chartered in June 1910, was inactive just two years later. But by 1917, Hartford garment workers were clamoring once more for union protection. The number of Italian immigrants in the Hartford garment trade had jumped, and they demanded an Italian organizer. Alfredo Laporta, a New York cloak maker, carried on the work of Rebecca Weiner and established Local 68 of the Hartford Ladies Garment Workers Union an office on 99 Canton Street.
