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This book examines how Progressive Labor (PL) insurgents challenged the International Ladies' Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) and tried to revolutionize labor in New York City's garment industry during the 1960s. Progressive Labor's role in New York City's economically important but declining garment industry -- the group's first attempt to organize industrial workers on the job -- suggests the problematic nature of PL's attempt to transform itself from a group of radical intellectuals into a mass working-class party. Pitted against powerful opponents, such as the garment firms and the imperious, socially progressive, and historically anticommunist ILGWU, a handful of PLers were able to foment a surprising number of work stoppages, which exposed the egregious problems facing low-paid black and Latino garment workers and their problematic relationship with the ILGWU. Progressive Labor's experience in New York City's garment industry suggests that industry workers were very willing to fight their trade union battles under communist leadership, but were far less willing to commit themselves to Progressive Labor's strategy for communist revolution.
List of contents
Part I Reinventing American Communism: An Overview of Progressive Labor in the 1960s and 1970s, Chapter 1. Antirevisionism in Action: The Origin of the Progressive Labor Party, 1956-1965, Chapter 2. Purifying the Communist Movement and Searching for Utopia: Progressive Labor in Theory, 1965-1982, Chapter 3. Reform, Revolution, and the Search for the Working Class: Progressive Labor in Practice, 1962-1982, P art II New Communists in an Old Anticommunist Union: Progressive Labor and the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union in the 1960s 69 Chapter 4. New Communists Challenge Old Socialists: Trespassing on "Dubinsky's Plantation," 1962-1966, Chapter 5. The Making of a Communist Trucker: The Political Apprenticeship of a Progressive Labor Colonizer in Garment Trucking, 1940-1966, Place: Progressive Labor, Garment Trucking and Local 32 , ILGWU, 1967-1970, Chapter 7. Anatomy of a Communist-Led Wildcat Strike: Progressive Labor, Figure Flattery and Local 32 , ILGWU, 1968, Chapter 8. Anatomy of an Anticommunist Purge: Progressive Labor, Figure Flattery, and Local 32, ILGWU, 1968-1969
About the author
Leigh David Benin
Summary
This text examines how Progressive Labor (PL) insurgents challenged the International Ladies' Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) and tried to revolutionise labour in New York City's garment industry during the 1960s.
