Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America - The Great Depression and The Founding of The CIO

The Great Depression and The Founding of The CIO

The Great Depression reduced the Amalgamated's membership to one third or less of its former strength. Like many other unions, the ACWA revived with the passage of the National Industrial Recovery Act, whose promise of legal protection for workers' right to organize brought thousands of garment workers back to the ACWA. The AFL finally allowed the ACWA to affiliate in 1933.

Hillman and the ACWA were supporters of the New Deal and Roosevelt from the outset. FDR named Hillman to the Labor Advisory Board of the National Recovery Administration in 1933 and to the National Industrial Recovery Board in 1934. Hillman provided key assistance to Senator Robert F. Wagner in the drafting of the National Labor Relations Act and to Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins in winning enactment of the Fair Labor Standards Act.

Within the AFL, the ACWA was one of the strongest advocates for organizing the mass production industries, such as automobile manufacture and steel, where unions had almost no presence, as well as the textile industry, which was only partially organized. Hillman was one of the original founders in 1935 of the Committee for Industrial Organizing, an effort led by John L. Lewis, and the ACWA followed the Mine Workers and other unions out of the AFL in 1937 to establish the CIO as a separate union confederation.

The ACWA provided major financial support for the Textile Workers Organizing Committee, which sought to establish a new union for textile workers after the disastrous defeat of the United Textile Workers' strike in 1934. The Textile Workers Union of America, with more than 100,000 members, came out of that effort in 1939 as part of Operation Dixie. The ACWA also helped create the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Workers Union of America through the CIO's Department Store Workers Organizing Committee.

Hillman and Lewis eventually had a falling out, with Lewis advocating a more independent tack in dealing with the federal government than Hillman. Lewis, however, gradually distanced himself from the CIO, finally resigning as its head and then withdrawing the United Mine Workers from it in 1942. Hillman remained in it, still the second most visible leader after Philip Murray, Lewis' successor.

Jacob Potofsky, a fellow veteran of the Hart. Schaffner & Marx strike of 1910, succeeded Hillman upon his death in 1946. The Amalgamated continued to grow during the 1950s, but, like other garment unions, faced long-term pressures from the flight of unionized work to non-union manufacturers in the South and abroad.