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Article Excerpt
This essay was excerpted from Jennie Matyas and the I.L.G.W.U., which was a transcript of a series of interviews with labor leader Jennie Matyas by Corinne L. Gilb in 1957 for the University of California Institute of Industrial Relations Oral History Project in Berkeley.
Jennie Matyas came to America by steerage and spent her childhood in New York's Lower East Side. She left school at 14 to help support her family and became at that tender age one of the most ardent workers in the International Ladies Garment Workers Union and in the Socialist Party. But she could accept neither the philosophy nor the tactics of the Communists who invaded both union and party after the First World War, so she retreated to private life. Then she regained hope in the era of the New Deal, fought the battle of the picket line throughout the 1930s, and became a vice president of the ILGWU in 1941.--HML
ORGANIZING THE CHINESE WORKERS
Matyas: In 1937 the Wagner Act came into being. After the repeal of the N.R.A., for a while things didn't look too good. When the Wagner Act was passed, organization took a new spirit. At this time, the Chinese workers, whom we had tried to organize for years....
Gilb: I remember Rose Pesotta had investigated Chinatown in 1934 and the convention in 1934 had given the officials permission to go ahead and organize. But it wasn't done at that time?
Matyas: We tried. No, Rose Pesotta was in Los Angeles at the time. I was here, but Rose Pesotta had been here before '34 and she tried to organize the workers in Chinatown with no success. It was no reflection on her ability. It was just very difficult to organize the Chinese workers.
I tried for a couple of years or more to do everything in my power to arouse the interest of the Chinese workers for unionization. I couldn't get to first base with it at all. I talked to a number of Chinese intellectuals who spoke English and who were very interested in the welfare of their people. They would have liked to have seen unionization among the Chinese workers in so-called Chinatown. I hate that term, "Chinatown." I don't think they like it either, but they just sort of take it for granted. I know that a Chinese doesn't like to be called a "Chinaman." But we had heard of conditions in so-called Chinatown where people worked all hours for six or seven dollars a week and worked at home.
Gilb: Child labor?
Matyas: I don't know. I learned that the Chinese love their children tremendously and I'm not sure if there was child labor. But they themselves worked all hours of the night and worked at home. While part of the legislation that came in with the NRA forbade home work, still it existed because there was no policing of the matter.
But we couldn't organize them. I remember, Feinberg, the Coast director, and I spoke to a very fine young Chinese intellectual who I think was a graduate of the University of California. He understood the situation very well and wished that the Chinese could come under the protection of unionism, but when we offered him a job and asked him to help organize, he wouldn't do it. We couldn't understand why. We said, "But look, you say you recognize that the workers will go on suffering these dreadful conditions until they do organize and have the benefit of unionism and yet you won't help. Who can? We can't speak to them. Will you explain why you won't?" He said, "Well, you don't know the tradition of Chinese. If ever, ever, ever anything were to go wrong, I wouldn't be forgiven, my children wouldn't be forgiven, my children's children wouldn't be forgiven, by the Chinese."
Gilb: What kind of thing did he expect to go wrong?
Matyas: Well, they believed implicitly in the fact, they used to say so to me many times, they believed they had to be cheap labor to be employed at all. They thought that if they were to put a value on their labor commensurate with the labor of the rest of us, "why would the employers give work to Chinatown; why wouldn't they keep the work for the whites, since the employers were in most instances white."
Gilb: I remember your saying that many uptown factories had contracted this work out to Chinatown.
Matyas: The manufacturers in town contracted their work out to Chinatown.
Gilb: Then their argument was a good one, don't you think?
Matyas: No, their argument was not a good one. It was a good one only in so much as they had no protection. Even the finest of employers wanted the labor as cheaply as they could get it. We tried to point out to this man who understood so well, and to anyone who represented Chinese people who would listen to us, that we would sign a contract with the Chinese workers providing that whatever work was then going to Chinatown would have to continue to go to Chinatown.
Gilb: How were you going to guarantee this?
Matyas: We could guarantee that we wouldn't permit it to come into any other of our union shops. The work had to be done. The employers had these orders and were willing to guarantee that we would not permit any of our other workers to do the work that belonged to the Chinese.
Gilb: It still sounds to me as if that would be difficult to enforce. How would you know what work would ordinarily go to Chinatown?
Matyas: It wouldn't be nearly so difficult as it seems. Certain manufacturers who were giving their work to Chinese contractors had no inside shops ... what we called inside shops. They made their samples in their main factory, and they did the cutting in the main factory, hut they "bundled" the unmade garments and sent them to Chinatown. Now, they would have to open new shops if they were to take the work away from the Chinese workers and have it made by white workers. Their own shops were not equipped with the machinery, even. They'd have to open new shops or they would have to contract it to other shops, and we could prevent any of our people from making that work.
We were willing to go even further. We said that if the contractors and the workers both would agree to come under union protection (they would, of course, in the final instance, have to withhold, to be on strike if necessary in order to get a contract from the manufacturer), we were willing to agree that we would not write any contract with the manufacturer that didn't guarantee that the work would continue to go to the Chinese contractors and so to the Chinese workers.
Gilb: But despite this promise, they weren't reassured?
Matyas: Despite this promise, they didn't believe it. They were absolutely convinced that the only reason the work went to them was because they were cheaper. I tried to point out the fact that if the industry had sufficient work, say for three thousand workers, and one thousand of those workers were Chinese, the work would have to be done and if there were no more than two thousand white workers and there was enough for three thousand workers, what difference would it make to the employer whether the work was done by Chinese or whites, he...
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