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Puerto Rican New Yorkers: The Unions, 1940s-1960s

Santiago Iglesias Educational Society, Eddie Gonzalez Collection, Center for Puerto Rican Studies
Santiago Iglesias Educational Society, Eddie Gonzalez Collection, Center for Puerto Rican Studies

Membership in New York’s unions expanded dramatically during WWII and the post-war economic boom of the 1940s and early 1950s. During the war, aggressive organizing by unions expanded their benefits and culture to hotels, food production, and throughout the vast world of garment, electrical, metal, and paper manufacturing. During these years, most older Puerto Ricans and their US-born children were part of these trends and benefited from rising wage levels. In many industries the post-war migrants also saw benefits as they joined industrial and service worksites that had been recently unionized.

Unions affiliated with the Congress of Industrial Organizations ended up organizing more Puerto Rican workers than trade-based (and often ethnic exclusivist) AFL unions, but in the 1940s and 1950s, Puerto Ricans also entered many AFL unions in specific trades like painting, carpentry, and printing. Unions led by Communist Party members or former Communists helped bring up Puerto Ricans through their leadership ranks more quickly. Between the late 1930s and the late 1950s a generation of Puerto Rican (both island born and second generation) labor leaders and activists trained and rose through the unions.

Unions supported Hispanic leaders in part to strengthen unionism among their growing Spanish-speaking membership but also as a regular part of leadership formation in multi-ethnic (and often multi-lingual) workplaces. The Puerto Rican (and larger Latino) presence had expanded significantly during the mid-1940s but Latinos did not become a majority of the workers in any industries until the early 1950s after tens of thousands of new migrants arrived from Puerto Rico (and many thousands also from Cuba). In the 1940s and early 1950s, emerging Hispanic labor leaders participated in an ethnic, immigrant, unionist world in which they interacted with Italians and Jews rather than with Spanish speakers. In many unions, the incorporation of thousands of new members with limited English skills opened opportunities for second-generation bilingual Puerto Ricans to serve as intermediaries.

Unionization rates for Puerto Ricans before the post-war migrant wave were very high, perhaps higher than for white workers. Estimates of the unionization rate ranged from about 60% in 1950 to even higher estimates in 1955.[1]

When the migration from Puerto Rico expanded after 1943, thousands of Puerto Ricans were already in organized workplaces and many were activists within their unions. By 1943, even before the peak moment of war-related economic expansion there were 66 well-known Puerto Rican and Spanish leaders within the labor movement, most of these low-level union officials with AFL and CIO affiliated unions. they were present in areas that had significant numbers of Spanish speaking workers like the Sugar Refinery Workers, the NMU, Local 302 of Restaurant and Cafeteria Workers and Hotel workers.  Puerto Ricans were spread out in many workplaces but their concentrations in manufacturing and services brought them into the strike wave of 1947 through their increased membership in the D65, IUE, ILGWU, Hotel, Restaurant, 302 food workers.

During the war years, unions developed into sophisticated institutions. They started research departments that tracked the profitability and economic well-being of their employers as many transitioned from small family-owned firms to corporate entities. After the war, they were poised to demand increased wages and benefits for their members, establishing medical, legal, and cultural service centers for their memberships and negotiating employer contributions towards pensions, services as well as increased wages.

Bennu Muniz, AFSCME, Center for Puerto Rican Studies
Bennu Muniz, AFSCME, Center for Puerto Rican Studies

About half of the migrants who arrived at New York workplaces in the late 1940s and early 1950s joined worksites that had unions and industries that already had at least a minor Puerto Rican presence. At the same time, the pattern for many second-generation Puerto Ricans was to enter new areas of work and union life in trade, specialized and white-collar unions in which there were few Puerto Ricans.

By far the largest industries and unions that organized Puerto Ricans were in garment (ILGWU, ACWA, Fur Workers), metal and electrical work (IUE, UE, IBEW, District 65), Hotels and cafeterias (Hotel Workers and Cafeteria Workers) dock work (ILA and others), maritime work (NMU, SIU), Jewelry Workers, Laundry Workers, Building Service Employees Local 32. A plethora of unaffiliated unions also existed (many of them boss or mob controlled) also dotted the union landscape.

The Puerto Rican presence in maritime work, which had already been strong since the 1920s, also expanded during the 1940s and 1950s. As most ships and docks were unionized, unionization rates were very high in these areas of work. In 1947 there were about 20,000 New York-based Puerto Ricans in sea-going maritime work. The National Maritime Union had about 14,000 Puerto Rican members and another 3,000 in the Seafarers International Union, with another 2000 in other maritime unions.[2]

Hotel and Restaurant Trades

Armando Betances, Tamiment/Wagner Archive, IUE Local 485, Wagner #137 Box 3
Armando Betances, Tamiment/Wagner Archive, IUE Local 485, Wagner #137 Box 3

Hotels, restaurants, cafeterias, and clubs were some of the workplaces that recruited large numbers of Puerto Ricans during the late Depression, and the pattern of growth in the war and post-war years was dramatic. Local 6 of the Hotel Workers union and Local 302 of the Cafeteria Workers’ Union expanded greatly their Puerto Rican and other Latino membership and leadership in the postwar years. It also improved wages and conditions, leading an aggressive organizing drive into most midtown hotels and later associating with other unions organizing workers in cafeterias, restaurants, bars and private clubs.  These unions had strong commitments to anti-discrimination work and a militant organizing ethos, opening doors to workers and pressuring employers to push Puerto Ricans into new work categories, moving them from maintenance, silver polishing, and kitchens into new areas like bartending, room service and lobby work. By 1948, Jesus Colon estimated that there were 10,000 Puerto Ricans in the food industry organized by Union Locals 302, 16, 6, and 1.

Spaniards and Puerto Ricans, many of them Communist Party members, had already intersected in the organizing work of hotel and cafeteria workers during since the late 1930s. Local 302 of the Cafeteria Workers Union and the food service industry in general were very important to Puerto Rican workers. Puerto Rican leaders like Jose/Joseph Diaz worked with Spanish CP member Miguel Garriga, who had a long history of leadership in this area.  Garriga became VP for the International office while Diaz represented Local 302 with the larger Union which was which had moved to include restaurant and hotel workers.[3]  By 1949 Joseph was representing Local 302 to the Central Labor Council while Garriga was considering a run for the State Assembly.[4] Jose Diaz was such a prominent labor leader for the Puerto Rican community that that same year he was appointed to the Committee on Puerto Rican affairs by Mayor O’Dwyer.[5] Local 302 would continue to produce other important Puerto Rican labor activists in the 1950s and 1960s including Mike Ortiz while leaders like Betances and Gilberto Gerena Valentin were trained within the Hotel Workers Union.

The Bakery, Confectionary, and Tobacco Workers International Union worked in a similar area, organizing food processing workers, including the industrial-scale baking plants and also a few of the remaining cigar-making shops.[6] The tobacco world had long declined even though small pockets of older Cuban, Puerto Rican and Spanish workers continued working in cigar shops through the early 1950s.  Cigar Unions like the United Cigar Workers locals continued to be active, organizing small shops when a wartime boom led to increased activity in Manhattan cigar making. In 1941 the UCW local 273 successfully organized workers at La Central, Nieves, La Social, La Primadora, and Claramount cigar shops.[7]

Puerto Rican entry into hotel work was seen by the workers themselves as a victory of mobility and resilience. The first Puerto Ricans in these workplaces worked very self-consciously to help open doors to other Puerto Ricans while working hard to extend the benefits of unionization to new hotels in an aggressive organizing drive led by Local 6 during the early 1940s. The union gained 30% increases in the strike wave of 1947, in part to offset inflation. Another major factor was the payment of $1.50/hour for overtime after 40 hours, an important way for workers to earn a higher income.

The generation of island and US-born Puerto Ricans that entered the workplaces between the 1930s and 1950s produced hundreds of activists, leaders and plant-level supporters, many of them tempered by the critical labor battles of the 1930s and 1940s. Manuel (Monty) Montalvo, born in 1904 in PR, started work at the Hotel Victoria as a dishwasher but moved up to become a cook. He then became a business agent for the union during the 1950s and later a full-time staffer for the union in 1961, a trajectory similar to that of Armando Betances.[8]  Like Gerena Valentin, the war years brought many Puerto Ricans to multiple job categories in hotel work and many union positions.  By 1943, the Hotel Unions Council already in 1943 had multiple Spanish speakers in leadership positions, including Angelo Burgos Gonzalez, Tony Lopez, and Louis Barrera.

Gerena Valentín with others at the Hotel Commodore

The Waldorf Astoria, which employed the most Puerto Ricans, was the crown jewel of the Hotel Worker’s Local 6 organizing drive of the late 1940s. After the drive within the hotels, Local 6 moved to organize dining clubs in midtown, where many Puerto Ricans worked for very low wages. In the late 1940s they fought to unionize the Harvard club, demanding a 10% raise for the kitchen help.[9] By the 1950s the Hotel Workers Union had grown so much that its membership meetings seated 6,000.

Gerena Valentin’s rise through the Hotel workers’ union and his dedication to union activism were cultivated by union leader Michael Obermeier and others in the hotel workers’ unions.  Genera Valentin had started, like many other workers, as a room clerk at the Commodore Hotel. The union helped him move within the work hierarchy and develop the political and cultural context for his successful activist training. However, the community and this relationship were not unique to him. Like Betances, Gerena was trained and recruited as an organizer by the Communist Party-affiliated leadership of Hotel Local 6.

Not unlike other workplaces, in the hotel industry, there was only so much the unions could do to control discrimination by employers. Local 6, weakened by anti-communist attacks and the loss of its top leaders, was not able to consistently carry out anti-discrimination work during the late 1940s and early 1950s despite anti-discrimination clauses in its contracts and with continuous resistance from employers and many of its own members. The SCAD began a major investigation of the hotel industry in 1956.[10]  An industry that employed thousands of Puerto Ricans had also created obstacles to their advancement. They found that 21% of the workers were Puerto Rican (4,431). Discrimination in specific job categories continued to be a major issue, especially for Blacks (Puerto Rican, West Indian and African Americans).

The Brotherhood of Electrical Workers

The International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers combined a variety of skilled work categories and work sites drawn from different industries.  Its core components were Division A, the electricians who worked mostly in construction sites, and Division Y which covered a mixture of workers in New York’s massive electrical components industry.  The world of Division A, which was entered through strict apprenticeship and training programs, was a father-son transmission belt so common to the construction trades and skilled trades. Needless to say, its members were nearly completely white through the early 1960s. Division Y was where all the factory workers were organized, and even though many of these jobs were highly skilled and high pay, it was where most of the expansion of IBEW took place during the post-war years and where they ended up recruiting most of their Puerto Rican members. By the mid-1960s Puerto Rican membership in IBEW increased and came to include other divisions as a small but growing number of Puerto Ricans gained access to electrician training in the construction industry.

IBEW President Harry Van Arsdale was committed to changing the practices of racial exclusion within the construction division, probably the only labor leader who had anything to do with skilled construction trades who pushed anti-discrimination work. Van Arsdale was also President of the city’s Powerful Central Labor Council and also, from there, pushed for various reforms, including the fight to organize the mob-controlled unions that operated in factories in which so many Puerto Ricans worked.

By the late 1950s IBEW had trained hundreds of Puerto Rican and other Latino low-level plant leaders and business managers. Some of these leaders would go on to become civil rights and labor leaders both within IBEW and in many other organizations inside and outside the Puerto Rican community The Santiago Iglesias Society organized in 1957 by Puerto Ricans within the IBEW was not the first Spanish-speaking organization within a major industrial union, but it was the most successful, autonomous and long-lasting, with a familiar presence in the yearly Puerto Rican parade. By the mid-1960s 20% of IBEW Local 3 IBEW members were Puerto Ricans (about 6000 Puerto Rican members). Local 3 played a critical role in promoting young Puerto Ricans as construction electricians and helping move workers to higher-pay categories within the factories. It also offered courses, services and cultural events to its members.

The Garment Unions

Communist Party leaders calculated that 30,000 Puerto Ricans (mostly women) worked in the garment industry around 1947 but only 10,000 of them were organized by the ILGWU or the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America. Wages varied by experience and skill level, but some workers could make from $50 to $100 a week, the upper end of this range was among the highest manufacturing wages in New York.

The worst working conditions were in the non-union shops and these were the ones that initially received a large influx of (mostly female) migrants from Puerto Rico after 1945. These unorganized and often exploited workers in the “neighborhood sweatshops” where the shops that ILGWU fought to organize in the 1930s and 1940s because they typically (but not always) paid lower than standard wages–an ongoing process as ILGWU organizing expanded from the midtown Manhattan garment district.

ILGWU’s successes in the 1930s continued through the war years and its importance for Puerto Rican workers grew as well.  Hispanic ILGWU membership expanded to 2500 members by 1948.[11]  Spanish speakers, 90% of them Puerto Rican, were so important to the ILGWU that the union published Justicia fully in Spanish by the 1940s.  During the peak years of the migration Puerto Rican women were “streaming downtown” to garment jobs organized by Locals 22 (dresses), Local 23 (skirts), Local 91 (childrenswear), Local 62 (underwear), and Local 25 (blouses).

But ILGWU organizing still faced daunting challenges. Mob influence in the industry and corrupt practices limited the union’s ability to enforce contracts and the pressure on many contractors to reduce costs and pay for mob involvement in extortion and loan sharking meant additional pressure on wages. The locals also had to constantly organize hundreds of new shops that could close and re-open with speed and ease.  ILGWU had to organize tens of thousands of new workers every year just to keep the same level of shop organizing.

By the 1950s ILGWU became an extremely large international union that organized dozens of job descriptions and work sites of dizzying variety. New York’s garment trade was still the global center of the industry despite the expansion of production in other states and abroad. ILGWU had own leadership training programs and collaborated with the central high school for needle trades, where 40% of the students were Puerto Rican by the early 1960s.[12]

Learning the skills of garment work and union life depended greatly on the solidarity of other workers. In an industry that essentially barred African Americans until state legislation made it illegal in 1945, Puerto Rican entry in large numbers into the industry produced some conflicts and competition with older workers from different ethnic groups. Puerto Rican women often were rejected by Italian Americans and yet Puerto Ricans depended on these older workers to teach them and assign workloads or represent them in union issues. Bosses were interested in reducing conflict in the workplace, so they would leave a lot of the mentoring work to the workers with the most seniority, sometimes including the hiring.[13] All the same, the massive entry of first- and second-generation Puerto Rican women into the garment industry helped raise family incomes, as women’s wages became an increasing part of the households in the Puerto Rican community during the 1940s and 1950s and high-skill workers or those in the better-paid lines and specialties could earn among the highest industrial wages of the post-war decades.

Hispanic workers were still a minority of workers in the industry through the late 1950s and the majority were post-war newcomers. The youth and recent arrival of so many Puerto Rican workers were also an obstacle to the improvement of their wages through higher skill and positions, but many eventually moved to earning high wages in desirable positions. The vehement ban on overt forms of discrimination by the union also helped but could not entirely remove the barriers to training either nor the quiet manifestation of ethnic stereotypes. All the same, as reflected in the many oral histories, ILGWU members usually were not only satisfied with the union’s work but also very proud to be members.[14]

ILGWU president Dubinsky ran the International in a hierarchical and paternalistic style which slowly came into crisis by the early 1960s. Puerto Ricans and African Americans complained that the vast majority of ILGWU’s large donations went to Jewish and Israeli projects (including a withdrawn million-dollar donation to a retirement home that would only take Jews). ILGWU moved to invest in mortgage financing for a Rockefeller Foundation housing project in Puerto Rico named after labor leader Santiago Iglesias Pantin, reserving 250 of the 400 modest houses for garment workers on the island.

ILGWU was also accused of practicing restraint in demanding wage increases in the late 1950s and early 1960s because sectors of the industry, especially those that required less skill and paid lower wage scales, were already moving out of New York City. High-skill, high-pay trades and the higher-pay dress lines continued to disproportionately include Jewish and Italian workers. In the early 1960s, this problem became a major controversy involving the high pay, all-white, and male-dominated garment cutters union local 10.

ILGWU represented a slowly declining industry that lost 70,000 jobs during the 1950s.  hardest hit were the dress and shirt makers organized by locals 22 and 25, but a later wave of expansion in the mid-1960s restored some of these jobs. Locals 22 and 25 continued to have the largest concentrations of Puerto Rican workers, but by the 1950s, Puerto Ricans were present in large numbers in many other locals and diverse parts of the industry, including many men in the packing and hand truck areas.

ILGWU Local 22 organized the dressmakers and had the largest Spanish-speaking membership.  It was one of the first ILGWU locals that to Puerto Ricans in East Harlem in the early 1930s.  It expanded its Spanish-speaking membership to 9.9% by 1946 by aggressively organizing non-union shops and forcing employers to improve wages and conditions.[i]  During the late 1940s, Puerto Ricans joined in even larger numbers, and by 1953, local 22 membership was 16% Hispanic.[ii]  Within local 22 worksites, Spanish speakers were not disproportionately represented in lower pay categories and were able to slowly gain seniority benefits. Better pay grades were based on seniority and improved between the 1930s and 1950s.[iii]

The multicultural social unionism built by the ILGWU local 22 was also an important aspect of union life for union members. Since the 1930s Local 22 (and the higher incomes and free time gained by the union struggles) provided new avenues for a shared cultural life among tens of thousands of garment workers. By the mid-1940s, Local 22 had developed programs to celebrate the many cultures of its members as well as programs aimed specifically at the Spanish-speaking workers.

ACWA was a smaller but still important union federation of garment and textile workers that also organized laundry and other miscellaneous worksites.  The ACWA umbrella included the NY joint board, the Amalgamated Laundry Workers Joint Board, the New York Shirt, Leisurewear, Robe, Glove and Rainwear Workers Joint Board, the Neckwear Workers Joint Board, the Cutters Local 4, the Wholesale Clothing Clerks Local 158, the Washable and Sportswear Local 169 and the Cleaners and Dyers Local 239.

In 1957, ACWA celebrated reaching 20,000 members, the tripling of wages over 20 years of struggle, and the reduction of the workweek from 60 to 40 hours a week.  Like the ILGWU, the union had helped bring vacation and health benefits to some of the most exploitative industries like laundry work. [iv] The challenge faced by ACWA locals was best described by Glazer and Moyniham who argued that by the 1960s laundry work was a “low-wage industry” dominated by a “Negro and Puerto Rican working force.” They concluded that the “overwhelming portion of both groups constitutes a submerged, exploited, and very possibly permanent proletariat.”[v] By the mid-1950s the ACWA Joint Board had worked to bridge its new “and considerable” Puerto Rican membership with union programs and culture.

Jose Sanchez was an ACWA business agent with the Joint Board from 1947 to 1954. He had started with the Amalgamated Laundry Workers, an ACTWU local. Sanchez was eulogized as a “pillar of strength” when he died in 1954. A former teacher in Puerto Rico, he worked in laundries and began organizing his fellow Puerto Rican workers: “Sanchez did not confine himself to serving a particular group but worked to help the entire Joint Board’s membership.”[vi]

During the 1940s Puerto Ricans had also entered the high skill, high pay fur industry.  Organized by a communist-led union until they were purged, the industry was based on many small shops (in 1949 the vast majority with less than 10 workers) and the wages were the highest of the garment industry. Under Communist leadership the Fur workers union had shifted its affiliation from the AFL to the CIO, like many other New York, left-influenced unions including the ILGWU.  Fur workers were nearly completely unionized by the early 1940s through the reorganized and consolidated International Fur and Leather Workers Union of United States and Canada. The fur workers presented a good case of both the barriers of entry and the benefits of inclusion for Puerto Rican workers. Training apprenticeships and promotion to jobs for new members were managed by the union.  The Fur Workers Union promoted many social and cultural and educational activities for its members.[vii] Second generation labor organizer Eddie Gonzalez explained how Puerto Rican entry worked, as it was the product of a near-conspiratorial double consciousness by Puerto Rican labor leaders and union officials who sought to push (sometimes very quietly) for the hiring of Puerto Ricans in specific plants.  Gonzalez explained how “fur workers union made lots of money….[I]  helped them get a couple of Puerto Ricans in there…there was a different kind of affirmative actions in those days…Abrian la puerta….it wasn’t mandated it was done by some employers who knew there was a buddy system.”[viii]

From UE to IUE

The United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of America (UE) was one of the most aggressively militant industrial unions with many locals in the New York region. Formed in 1937 from smaller unions it became the largest union in electrical manufacturing, Led by Communist Party members it was an important part of the CIO.  Like a few other national unions in the CIO, many of the leaders in the UE had links in the Communist Party.  The UE was especially militant in its antidiscrimination efforts during the war years, especially for black workers.  UE locals were the first to establish fair employment practices committees in each local and proactively investigate the status of minorities in the workplaces they organized.  In this case, UE locals in NY were more militant in their commitment than the National organization. They established employment goals for black workers in the city’s electrical industry, managing to quadruple the number of blacks employed in the plants they organized.[23] The UE was expelled from the CIO in 1949 as part of a larger campaign against left and communist leadership in unions. A rival union, the IUE was formed within the CIO that same year by anti-Communist leaders that broke off from the UE, inheriting or fighting for most of the former UE locals.

During the 1940s and early 1950s UE District Four Locals fought battles with the IBEW and the IUE over control of plant contracts. UE locals had a strong commitment to workplace equality and aggressive organizing of black and Spanish speaking members.

Puerto Ricans had little trouble getting entry level jobs in electrical industries and their presence increased greatly during the 1940s and early 1950s.  Puerto Ricans were dispersed throughout this complex industry and well-represented in skilled positions (not all Puerto Ricans in the electrical industry were recent migrants; many were second-generation Puerto Ricans). Engaging in frequent membership drives in the late 1940s and through the 1950s, the UE/IUE locals already had a strong presence in the industries and shops that would soon be filled with recent Puerto Rican migrants. There was a sprinkling of hundreds of Puerto Rican workers in many plants before the great migration of the late 1940s started.[24]

In Brooklyn this struggle over affiliation played out a few years later, when continued pressure led the UE Local (and its district sisters) to affiliate with the IUE after a district-wide vote in 1956. UE local 475/485, based in downtown Brooklyn, was one of the more important New York locals of the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (also known as UE). It maintained a leftist strategy to not only recruit Puerto Rican and other “Spanish speaking” workers as part of its routine organizing and civil rights work, but to aggressively organize mostly Puerto Rican work sites, many of which were controlled by mob-connected or racket unions. Despite the move to the IUE, the leaders of local 475/485 maintained nearly intact the rank and file oriented, left-inflected social unionism of their founders. The Local continued to operate in the tradition of UE rank and file radicalism.

The leaders of the Local understood that the future of the labor movement hinged on its ability to organize an increasingly “minority” labor force:  “[the] fight for rights of minorities is key to unity…we can expect employers to intensify their efforts to split our unity—to set Puerto Rican against Negro and white against Negro. Our civil rights committee will have a full-time job, educating our members to understand the boss’ technique as well as working on a broad scale for an end to segregation and discrimination wherever we can.” The Local’s militant orientation toward racial justice and equality, the early incorporation and organization of Puerto Rican and other Latino workers and its continued leftist approach to social and political problems created a niche that became particularly successful in protecting at least partially the living standard semi-skilled industrial workers laboring in factories throughout the City.  As early as 1952 (merely five years after the dramatic expansion of Puerto Rican migration) the Local committed itself at its yearly convention to heightening its work on “Puerto Rican rights”.  This decision became the basis for extensive work that would culminate less than ten years later in an intense organizing drive for low wage manufacturing shops and the consolidation of a Puerto Rican leadership within the Local. As a result of these efforts the Local nurtured a  group of Black (of both Caribbean and US origin) and Puerto Rican organizers and business agents. In 1954 the Local organized a conference on the rights of Puerto Ricans and other Spanish speaking workers for all the IUE locals in the district.

Puerto Rican Executive board members, among the first in the labor to have this level of leadership in New York, received full support from the Local for their participation in the Hispanic (“Spanish”) day parade during the late 1950s. This included a delegation with decorated cars, the sale of buttons and fundraising for the event.  In 1958 Joe Salguero called for union support for the Hispanic parade in terms that fluidly link culture, national origin, civil rights struggles and working class solidarity noting the  “…importance of a big turn out from Local 485 members regardless of nationality and color in order to express our unity with our Spanish speaking brothers and sisters.”[25]  The most important sign of the Local’s commitment to empowering its growing black and Latino membership was the nurturing of Puerto Rican leaders in the 1950s culminating in the election of Jose (Joe) Salguero as Local president by the early 1960s. Angel Roman, another Puerto Rican union leader nurtured by the leadership of the Local moved to a job with the national office of the IUE.  Roman, born in Quebradillas in 1923, worked as a licensed assistant pharmacist before he migrated to the US in 1952. He worked in a Local 485 shop. [26]

District 65’s Incorporation of Puerto Ricans Workers

District 65 of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union followed a distinct trajectory of growth and commitment to minorities and organizing diverse work sites. District 65, and its long-time president David Livingston, worked to organize factories that other unions neglected.  Their commitment to racial justice led them to disaffiliate from their “International” office for their lack of commitment to combating discrimination.  Puerto Rican workers intersected with District 65 organizing efforts frequently and it was one of the first unions to develop a Hispanic section during the 1940s. By 1945 the membership of District 65 was roughly 15% Puerto Rican, spread out around the Union’s 500 organized factories and other workplaces.

Puerto Rican workers joined District 65 in growing numbers after efforts like the sit-down strike in a Brooklyn factory in 1947, part of the city-wide strike wave of that year.[i] At Zy Lite Optical which employed many Hispanic women (in 1942 its payroll was 25% Hispanic) District 65 organized a strike in early 1947.  The strike lasted a few days and the new agreement brought them a raise of $4 per week (about 13% for the lowest paid workers) and additional holiday pay. At the Zip Bag factory 15% of the workers were Latinas employed in all the wage scales and making between $30 and $57/week. In January 1947 many Puerto Rican women joined their 70 coworkers at the picket lines. During the strike some of the workers took over the work site, among them Juanita Gonzalez. Another big 1947 struggle for District 65 was at the Industrial Container Corp. The 110 Workers staged a sit-down occupation of the plant in October to protest firings at the plant but had already been fighting for wage increases and a new union.  Many of these workers were Puerto Ricans. The action was aimed at AFL Local 56, favored by the bosses, but workers wanted District 65, which they successfully brought to represent them.[ii]

In 1949 Puerto Rican members of District 65 wrote demanding an investigation by Congress of the airplane crash that killed many migrants from the island, including some of their relatives.[iii]

Many Puerto Ricans remembered District 65 and its anti-discrimination work. Juan Vazquez, who began work in a leather factory in 1947, remembered how the discrimination, which was not clearly visible, was stopped when they brought Local 65 in 1940.[iv] Ramon Acosta remembered how their first union at a packing company “no daba resultado…no hacia nada por nosotros.” Then workers organized and: “nos unimos toditos y la cambiamos para la 65.”[v] Even unionists with the Teamsters, like Julio Espeta, remembered the value of District 65 to Puerto Rican workers before the Civil Rights laws of the 1960s.[vi]

District 65 shared many important characteristics with IUE Local 475/485.  Its origins in the CIO and its eclectic and militant approach to organizing workers helped it expand its Puerto Rican and “Spanish-speaking” membership during the 1940s and 1950s.  Like most unionists in immigrant-heavy New York, District 65 leaders noted the national origin and religious diversity of its membership and sought to diversify the leadership “to reflect the composition of the workers” as early as 1943. Well before other unions, the original mostly Jewish leadership of the Union also came to include 28 “gentiles” who were Negro, Spanish (Puerto Ricans), Irish and Italian.

During the 1950s D65 carried out a major organizing drive for department store workers and miscellaneous factories ignored by other unions.  Because of its militant organizing of workers and its unusual combination of service and industrial worksites, District 65 became very large by the early 1960s with a strong pension fund and membership services that included medical and classes for new members.  Continued organizing drives in the early 1960s kept the union large, with 835 worksites in 1969, despite the frequent closing of shops.

District 65 contracts helped raise the standard of living of all its members and were solidly above the minimum wage and the $1/hour common (in the mid-1950s) in the racket unions or unorganized factories.  At Winthrop Window Manufacturing in Brooklyn, where half the work force was Latino by the early 1960s, workers were making $55 to $66 per week, 30-50% higher than the minimum wage.  Negotiations were not easy, and every factory contract could be a major struggle.  In one contract negotiation in 1961 in which organizer Mario Abreu negotiated with Vantines Inc. (half of its 200 workers were Puerto Ricans), the employer asked for wage concessions, claiming that the industry as a whole had moved to a minimum wage of 1$/hour.

District 65 inherited from one of its mergers with other small unions many of the old cigar shops, the few that survived in New York City after the demise of most hand-made cigar making during the 1930s.  Most of them were very small shops, with an aging mostly Latino workforce earning very low wages.  The union tried to improve the meager wages in these shops with the knowledge that increasing wage demands would likely force owners to close them.  The Miguel Alonso Cigar shop had five Cuban and Puerto Rican workers in 1954, and most of these had been working there since the early 1940s.

Puerto Rican unionists Mario Abreu and Evelina Antonetty were trained by District 65.  Antonnety, a noted community leader who led United Bronx Parents, began her training when she was hired as an organizer by District 65 in 1946, motivated by the increased number of Spanish-speaking workers in their union.[vii]

In the mid-1950s, the union boasted of how it had developed 300 black and 75 Puerto Rican shop stewards and promoted a “credo of equality,” similar in scale and timing to the accomplishments of some of the ILGWU, IBEW, and IUE locals. President Livingston calculated that by the early 1960s 20% of District 65’s shop stewards were Puerto Rican.[viii]   But unlike other industrial unions, District 65 moved early to promote a long list of Puerto Ricans (and other Latinos) to positions as paid organizers.  By the mid-1960s the District had an even more extensive number of Latino organizers and staffers.  Helen Vazquez and Ida Paniagua worked in the press office for the union, while others worked organizing new shops. Carmen Oviedo led the board meeting for the Garment Center 1 membership meeting and about half of the union reps and organizers were Latinos.

After Livingston took District 65 out of its parent union, because of its “lily white” character, it moved to promote mid-level Latino and Black union leaders to positions of greater prominence, including Bill Tate, Julio Mojica, and Rene Mendez.  In the late 1950s, as part of the city-wide campaign against “exploitation,” racket unions, and in support of Puerto Rican workers, the union organized a (named “organizing the unorganized”) for worker recruitment in the Puerto Rican community.  District 65, with the Migration Division, the Congress of Puerto Rican Hometown Associations, the Puerto Rican Parade Committee, United Bronx Organizations and the New York Central Trade and Labor Council planned a street campaign encompassing all of East Harlem involving flyers, sound trucks and local meetings.

During the early 60s, when a new generation of civil rights-oriented organizations were being founded by Puerto Ricans, Livingston and District 65 gave their overwhelming support.  In 1965 Gilberto Gerena Valentin, one of the founders of the National Association for Puerto Rican Civil Rights, and a well-known labor leader, wrote to Livingston to “express warmest thanks…for gracious cooperation in helping us organize founding convention.  Without your assistance it would not have been possible.”

A Puerto Rican Leadership Emerges

Before the start of the large post-war migration from Puerto Rico, earlier migrants and the second generation had built an extensive network of activists and organizers. The struggles led by the Communist Party, Socialist Party, Nationalist Party, American Labor Party, and the larger union movement had nurtured this generation of activists, which extended their influence well beyond the confines of the mature Hispanic communities of the 1940s. These alliances, at its strongest during the fight against fascism in the Spanish Civil war and during the extended Popular Front period had weakened by repressive action and ideological realignments during the late 1940s and early 1950s. Not much was left of the political organizations but the deeper struggle continued within the workers movements.  Hundreds of Puerto Ricans and many of the community’s most prominent leaders gained a political education that linked anti-colonialism to radical movements and populist languages rooted in the city’s multi-ethnic working class. These individuals would come to have a role in the working class struggles of the 1940s, 50s and 60s. These working class leaders did not limit themselves to work-related issues. They helped develop social unionism that fought discrimination and helped workers with their needs outside of the workplace. They also fought for equality and access in their communities and in larger city-wide efforts, often in alliance with African Americans, Jews and other allies. Education, cultural pride, housing, welfare rights, social services, minimum wage, even foreign policy were in this arena.

All of these efforts, including the union-led anti-racket fight had contributed to the emergence of over 400 Spanish speaking union leaders and hundreds of others shaped by leadership in the working class struggles of the preceding twenty years.

 

The presence of leaders in the unions was often centered in the various “Spanish-speaking” committees or clubs. During the 1950s the mid-level cadre of Puerto Rican labor leaders accumulated many lessons and experience within the unions, but also a long list of complaints against the union’s hesitation to support their work as Hispanics, to demand higher positions, and support the militant efforts for Puerto Rican workers.  One of these leaders described their efforts and informal meetings as “semi-clandestine” because of their hesitation to work openly as an ethnic group.

Frank Perez and Mario Abreu were important players in this process, and their careers reflected both the support and training they had received from their unions but also the tremendous obstacles they witnessed in their efforts.  These core Puerto Rican leaders were perceived as radicals by many leaders of the Central Labor Council, partially for asserting a strong ethnic identity that focused on the emerging consciousness of the needs of the growing Puerto Rican proletariat. These men had developed in the immediate post-war years a double consciousness about their role as Puerto Rican working-class activists.  Frank Perez’s complaint represented well how these leaders felt about their work in the 1950s and early 1960s:  “…siempre nos usaban como un objeto, como un instrumento, sin ser parte integral de la estructura y empezamos…clandestinamente…y nos reuníamos en diferentes clubes sociales. A veces hasta en la mismas casas de diferentes personas…”[40]Harry Van Arsdale was aware of this pressure and had handled it differently in the IBEW by encouraging Puerto Rican leaders to organize separately and in explicit support of Puerto Rican goals. His support would eventually lead to the incorporation of the Hispanic Labor Council as a formal advisory body to the CLC in 1969, although many Puerto Rican union activists would have said this move came a decade too late.

Consider the career of Eddie (Edward) Gonzalez. Gonzalez, a US born worker and WWII veteran, worked in shoe factories as a “union plant” organizing Puerto Rican workers in factory after factory for the shoe workers union. He then shifted to ILGWU organizing work and after more than ten years of this sort of work joined the employment office of the Migration Division as a field investigator.  while working for the Migration Division during the mid-1950s he walked a difficult tight rope of supporting working class struggles while appearing neutral and “official.” This dance was familiar to Migration Division leaders including directors Senior and Monserrat).  Gonzalez intersected with many others of his generation, educated working class Puerto Ricans who quietly or not so quietly linked the labor movement with the newly arrived workers.  He networked with people like Fred Velez, also a WWII veteran and UAW Local 259 organizer who got the first Puerto Ricans into the Westchester high-pay auto parts factories.[41]

Paul Sanchez followed a similar path.  Sanchez was part of the second-generation Puerto Rican leaders who came through from the factories, perhaps even as they earned college degrees.  Sanchez was part of the group that networked with Eddie Gonzalez, Armando Betances, Frank Perez, Gerena Valentin and many others. Sanchez would become the first president of Central Labor Council’s Hispanic Labor Committee.  Sanchez also served as Grand Marshal of the Puerto Rican parade in 1963, only one of many examples of the importance of unions and labor leaders to the Puerto Rican community in these years.

George Santiago is another example of this generation’s working class leaders.  Santiago worked making lamps and joined IBEW Local 3. After serving in the Army in Korea, Santiago returned to factory and union work. Santiago joined the Mayor’s Committee Against Exploitation. He also was part of the group of labor leaders that created the National Association of Puerto Rican Civil Rights, the first formal Puerto Rican civil rights organization.[42]

Many leaders came also from the garment unions. Rafaela Balledares migrated as a child in 1929. After completing high school, she studied with a fellowship at a fashion school but never managed to develop a career in fashion design. Instead she worked in the garment factories starting in the late 1930s, often getting fired for complaining about conditions shared by the “cientos de mujeres puertorriquenas que trabajaban de sol a sol con limitados minutos para descansar.” Through the Woman Trade Union League, she was recruited as a union organizer for ILGWU Local 23 (Skirtmakers), training in labor studies. She organized her first ILGWU factory in 1943. At factory gates she did propaganda work for the union and would visit the women at home in the evenings to help them organize the shops.[43]

Balledares represented the ILGWU in many efforts during the 1950s. In the early 1950s she served as ILGWU representative to the Negro Labor Committee, led by Frank Crosswaith and A. Philip Randolph in Harlem. Here she joined some of the City’s most important labor leaders in an effort to help black workers organize. She was also active broadly across many sorts of organizations. She was involved in the organizing of the Fiesta Folklorica de Nueva York, a yearly festival celebrating Puerto Rican culture led by Gerena Valentin.[44]

Balledares was very involved in mobilizing Spanish speakers for the ILGWU-supported Liberal Party, the centrist vehicle for union politics that the ILGWU hierarchy created as a rival to the American Labor Party. Balladares went on to work with Puerto Rican antipoverty and civil rights organizations during the early 1960s while still working at a garment shop and after she retired in 1970 she became the organizer of the Fiestas de la Calle San Sebastian in Old San Juan, encouraged by Ricardo Alegria, Director of the island’s Instituo de Cultura Puertorriquena.[45]

Another important ILGWU leader who worked with Balladares, Frieda Montalvo, helped form The Agrupacion Femenina Latinoamericana, the more politically oriented group created out of the Agujas de Oro Latina garment workers club in ILGWU locals during the 1950s. Montalvo, also a depression-era migrant, was one of the young garment workers she organized through ILGWU Local 22. She became a lifelong political activist and public administrator in City Hall.[46]

Next: the Fight Against Exploitation

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Users may cite with attribution.

[1] Rohrlich, Ruby. The Puerto Ricans: Culture Change and Language Deviance. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1974, 173; Senior, Clarence. “The Puerto Ricans in New York: Progress Note.” International Migration Review 2, no. 2 (Spring 1968): 73.

[2] Communist Party, Puerto Rican Affairs Committee. Handbook on Puerto Rican Work. New York: Communist Party, Puerto Rican Affairs Committee, 1954. Liberacion offered a similar number in 1947: The NMU had 22,000 Hispanic members around 1947. Liberacion 4 January 1947.

[3] Misc., Box 1 Folder 1, Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union, Collection Wagner 148, The Tamiment Library & Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York University.

[4] Executive Council Minutes, Box 189, Folder 7, New York City Central Labor Council Records, Wagner 049, The Tamiment Library & Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York University.

[5] Mayors Papers, Folder 988, 1951-3, Box 85, Folder 987-9, Roll 43, New York City Municipal Archive.

[6] Disperse notes 1940-1949, Tam#?, The Tamiment Library & Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives.

[7} Juan Rovira To Van Horn, 27 Sept 1941, Local 144, Series 2, Reel 18, Cigar Makers International Union Collection, Special Collections, University of Maryland.

[8] Misc,. Box 13, Folder 29, Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union,  Collection Wagner 148, Tamiment Library and Wagner Labor Archive, New York University.

[9] “12 Pickets Seized at Harvard Club,” The New York Times, 31 March 1948.

[10] “Investigan discriminación en industria hotelera NY.” El Diario, 30 Sept 1956.

[11] Senior, Clarence Ollson, and Isales Carmen. The Puerto Ricans of New York City. New York: New York Office, Employment and Migration Bureau, Puerto Rico Dept. of Labor, 1948, 51.

[12] Gray, Lois. “Case Study No. 7: The Puerto Rican Workers in New York.” In Joint International Seminar on Adoption of Rural and Foreign Workers to Industry, Paris: Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development, Manpower and Social Affairs Directorate, 1965.

[13] Stuart, Irving R. “A Study of Factors Associated with Inter-Group Conflict in the Ladies’ Garment Industry in New York City.” (Ph.D. Dissertation), New York University 1951, Table XIX.

[14] Herberg, Will. “The Old-Timers and the Newcomers.” Journal of Social Issues 9, no. 1 (1953): 12-19; Whalen, Carmen Teresa. “”The Day the Dresses Stopped”: Puerto Rican Women, the International Ladies Garment Workers’ Union, and the 1958 Dressmaker’s Strike.” In Memories and Migrations: Mapping Boricua and Chicana Histories, edited by Vicki Ruíz and John R. Chávez, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008.

[15] Stuart, Irving R. “A Study of Factors Associated with Inter-Group Conflict in the Ladies’ Garment Industry in New York City.” (Ph.D. Dissertation), New York University 1951, Table X.

[16] “The Old Timers;” Stuart, “A Study,” Table XI.

[17] Stuart, “A Study,” Table XII.

[18] The Advance, 15 June 1957.

[19] As cited in Carson, Jennifer Lynn. “”It Takes Revolution and Evolution”: New York City’s Women Laundry Workers in the First Half of the Twentieth Century.” Ph.D. Dissertation, 2007, 128, 227.

[20] The Advance, 15 February 1959; 1 July 1958; 15 June 1957.

[21] Leiter, Robert D. “The Fur Workers Union.” ILR Review 3, no. 2 (1950): 163-86.

[22] Interview with Eddie Gonzalez, Oral History Collection, Centro Archive.

[23] Stepan-Norris, Judith, and Maurice Zeitlin. Left Out: Reds and America’s Industrial Unions. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003, 216-17.

[24] International Union of Electrical Workers, Local 485, Box 3, Folder 1; Box 3, Folder 2, Collection 137, Tamiment Library and Wagner Labor Archive, New York University.

[25] Minutes of the Executive Committee, International Union of Electrical Workers, Local 485, 9 April 1958, Box 1 Folder 4, Collection 137, Tamiment Library and Wagner Labor Archive, New York University.

[26] Clifton Cameron to Paul Jennings, International Union of Electrical Workers, Local 485, no date, Box 2 Folder 35, Collection 137, Tamiment Library and Wagner Labor Archive, New York University; Biography of Angel Roman, Box 2, 3, Labor History Project, Centro Archive.

[27] Liberacion, 25 October 1947.

 

[29] Liberacion, 25 October 1947.

[30] Cecil Duran to Vito Marcantonio, June 1949, Vito Marcantonio Papers, Special Collections, New York Public Library.

[31] Puerto Rican Oral History Project, Brooklyn Historical Society.

[32] Puerto Rican Oral History Project, Brooklyn Historical Society.

[33] Puerto Rican Oral History Project, Brooklyn Historical Society.

[34] Ribes Tovar, Federico. Handbook of the Puerto Rican Community. El Libro Puertorriqueño de Nueva York. New York: El Libro Puertorriqueño, 1968, 302.

[35] Gray, Lois. “Case Study No. 7: The Puerto Rican Workers in New York.” In Joint International Seminar on Adoption of Rural and Foreign Workers to Industry. Paris: Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development, Manpower and Social Affairs Directorate, 1965.

 

[40] Interview with Frank Pérez, Oral History Collection, Centro Archive.

[41]  Interview with Eddie Gonzalez, Oral History Collection, Centro Archive

[42] IBEW Local 3, “Those who have come our way,” no date, Box 2, Folder 3, Santiago Iglesias Educational Society Papers-IBEW Local 3 Archive.

[43] Clipping, New York Times, 1965?, Papers of the Communist Party, Series II, Box 231, Tamiment 132 Collection, Tamiment Library and Wagner Labor Archive, New York University.

[44] Gerena Valentín, Gilberto, and Carlos Rodríguez-Fraticelli. Gilberto Gerena Valentín: My Life as a Community Activist, Labor Organizer, and Progressive Politician in New York City. New York: Center for Puerto Rican Studies, 2013; Interview with Gilberto Gerena Valentin, Oral History Collection, Centro.

[45] “El alma de las fiestas,” El Nuevo Dia, 30 September 2011; “Many gains noted by Puerto Ricans.” The New York Times, 2 March 1964.

[46] “She embraced Puerto Rican heritage.” Orlando Sentinel, 20 December 2009; Interview with Eddie Gonzalez, Oral History Collection, Centro.