Found this :
http://onthisdayinfashion.com/?p=737On June 3, 1900, the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union was founded.
If you were a teenage immigrant in New York in the early 1900s, you might have worked in a dress shop. And if you worked in a dress shop, you would have worked nine-hour days, probably crammed into some moldy basement with locked doors and a complete dickhead for a boss who was likely also a mobster. You would make about $3 a week—about $77 in today’s world—but you wouldn’t be able to keep it all. Some of it you’d have to give back to your dickhead boss (who sometimes beat you) to pay for the thread and electricity you used. And if you were a few minutes late to work because you had to go pick up some medicine for your sick mother, you might be docked hours of pay.
These are the kinds of conditions that led to the founding of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) on this day in 1900. It was really a banding-together of a bunch of smaller labor groups that included workers all over the garment industry, from cloaks and kimonos to high-end tailored fashions and table linens. As the movement began to build steam, thousands of workers would pack into assembly halls to hear union leaders’ speeches, which were often in Yiddish and Italian. And you’ve got to hand it to them, they sometimes found themselves tasked with appealing to a room full of giggling 16-year-old girls, “most of them with ribbon in their hair,” as described by the New York Times. “The bosses set themselves up as your fathers,” Rose Schneiderman, vice president of the Women’s Trade Union League, told a crowd at the Cooper Union in 1913, “and punish you by slapping you in the face, just like your father does.”
Has it change much since those days? Different skin, different country, but same treatment!
