The garment industry gained a foothold in Pennsylvania's hard-coal region as mines were closing. "Runaway" factories, especially from Manhattan, set up shop in mining towns where labor was plentiful and unions scarce. By the 1930s, garment factories employed thousands of wives and daughters of unemployed or underemployed coal miners. Organizing these workers proved difficult for the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU).

This book tells the story of the half-million workers who make the clothes which the American woman wears. The scene is a changing one, shifting from the shops where the clothes are made ot the arena of the public forum and of the national life. The theme is the struggle of an industrial group, once economically weka and neglected, for the recognition of its right and for the humanization of the conditions under whihc it works and lives. It is one of the most poignant and dramatic chapters in the general story of the movement of American Labor for a higher life.

Tyler, an International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU) official since 1934, details the history of the union and how it affected, and was affected by, American society, and explores its pioneering role in political, educational, medical, and industrial social movements. Includes bandw photos, a list of union presidents, and an annotated bibliography. Paper edition (unseen), $21.95. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

The thrilling and true account of racketeering and union corruption in mid-century New York, when unions and the mob were locked in a power struggle that reverberates to this day In 1949, in New York City's crowded Garment District, a union organizer named William Lurye was stabbed to death by a mob assassin. Through the lens of this murder case, prize-winning authors David Witwer and Catherine Rios explore American labor history at its critical turning point, drawing on FBI case files and the private papers of investigative journalists who first broke the story. A narrative that originates in the garment industry of mid-century New York, which produced over 80 percent of the nation's dresses at the time, Murder in the Garment District quickly moves to a national stage, where congressional anti-corruption hearings gripped the nation and forever tainted the reputation of American unions. Replete with elements of a true-crime thriller, Murder in the Garment District includes a riveting cast of characters, from wheeling and dealing union president David Dubinsky to the notorious gangster Abe Chait and the crusading Robert F. Kennedy, whose public duel with Jimmy Hoffa became front-page news. Deeply researched and grounded in the street-level events that put people's lives and livelihoods at stake, Murder in the Garment District is destined to become a classic work of history—one that also explains the current troubled state of unions in America.